One peculiarity of referential metonymy is that metonymic subjects and their predicates need not agree as to number. Nor need there be gender agreement between metonymic expressions and anaphoric pronouns. In this respect metonymies differ from metaphors.To account for the apparently erratic syntax in utterances containing referential metonymies, it is first suggested that these involve implici...

Medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) is among those brain regions having the highest baseline metabolic activity at rest and one that exhibits decreases from this baseline across a wide variety of goal-directed behaviors in functional imaging studies. This high metabolic rate and this behavior suggest the existence of an organized mode of default brain function, elements of which may be either atten...

The grammaticalization of nouns meaning ‘man’ or ‘person’ into impersonal pronouns (so-called man-impersonals) has been related to languages with obligatory subject expression, like Germanic and French. Albeit regarded as a null-subject language, European Portuguese (EP) presents similar development: the noun phrases uma pessoa ‘a person’ a ‘the are used in ways that resem...

We report a study of referential choice in discourse production, understood as the choice between various types of referential devices, such as pronouns and full noun phrases. Our goal is to predict referential choice, and to explore to what extent such prediction is possible. Our approach to referential choice includes a cognitively informed theoretical component, corpus analysis, machine lear...

Algorithms for generating referring expressions typically assume that an object in a scenary can be identified through a set of commonly agreed properties. This is a strong assumption, since in reality properties of objects may be perceived differently among people, due to a number of factors including vagueness, knowledge discrepancies, and limited perception capabilities. Taking these discrep...

In this paper, we present a machine learning system for identifying non-referential it. Types of non-referential it are examined to determine relevant linguistic patterns. The patterns are incorporated as features in a machine learning system which performs a binary classification of it as referential or non-referential in a POS-tagged corpus. The selection of relevant, generalized patterns lea...

Despite the alarming increase in the prevalence of depression during adolescence, particularly among female adolescents, the pathophysiology of depression in adolescents remains largely unknown. Event-related potentials (ERPs) provide an ideal approach to investigate cognitive-affective processes associated with depression in adolescents, especially in the context of negative self-referential p...

In German, the subject usually precedes object (SO order), but, under certain discourse conditions, is allowed to precede (OS order). This paper focuses on main clauses in which either or a discourse-given occurs clause-initial position. Two acceptability experiments show that OS sentences with given are generally acceptable, but precise degree of varies both object‘s referential form (demonstr...

There is a sharp increase in depression females mid-adolescence, but we do not understand why. Cognitive theories suggest that people with have negative biases recalling self-referential information. We tested whether recall were more girls early and mid-adolescence associated depressive symptoms. 315 young 263 mid-adolescents (11-12 13-15 years) completed surprise test, assessing of social eva...