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Coreference processing of Control constructions and their pronoun-containing counterparts can be studied experimentally using priming or interference paradigms. We replicate findings in a priming study on non-finite Control constructions in Norwegian (Larsen & Johansson, 2020) and contrast them with their finite counterparts using interference effects in a grammatical maze (G-maze) design. We asked participants to read sentences word-by-word and to select the grammatically correct continuation from two options. When the ungrammatical option was a potential antecedent from within the sentence, we predicted interference, i.e., longer reaction times compared to an unrelated baseline. We observed a trend towards significant interference effects when a participant was presented with either of the potential noun phrase (NP) antecedents of PRO in competition with the infinitive marker (test position zero) during the processing of a Control sentence. This indicates reactivation of potential antecedents at the infinitive marker, and a reactivation position (PRO) near or at the infinitive marker. We also observed significant differences between Control constructions and their pronoun counterparts. A significant interference effect was recorded for Subject Pronoun constructions when either potential NP antecedent of the pronoun was presented in competition with the pronoun itself. A similar trend was recorded for Object Pronoun sentences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Onofri [Onofri, A. 2018. 'The Publicity of Thought.' Philosophical Quarterly 68 (272): 521–541.] proposes an individuation criterion for thoughts that purports to satisfy both shareability (the notion that different thinkers, or a single thinker at different times, can and generally do think type-identical thoughts) and Frege's constraint (according to which two thoughts are different if it is possible for a rational subject to endorse one while rejecting the other). I argue that his proposal fails to satisfy Frege's constraint. Then I propose a modification to Onofri's proposal to fix the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal pronouns can potentially be resolved in logical syntax by means of variable binding (VB) or at the discourse-representational level through coreference assignment (CR). Previous research suggests that real-time reference resolution is guided more strongly by discourse-level cues in a non-native language (L2) than in a native language (L1). Here we use the VB/CR distinction to further test this hypothesis. Using eye-movement monitoring during reading and a complementary questionnaire task, we compared L1 German and L1 Russian/L2 German speakers' resolution of object pronouns. While both our participant groups ultimately preferred CR over VB interpretations, only the L2 participants showed evidence of favouring a sentence-external CR antecedent from early on during processing. Our L1 group, by contrast, favoured a VB antecedent during processing. The observed L1/L2 processing differences reveal divergent antecedent search strategies, with L2 but not L1 speakers being primarily guided by discourse-level cues during real-time comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Signos is the property of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The literature on complement clauses and support/light verb constructions provides most of the available information on coreference between arguments of matrix and subordinate syntactic predicates. However, this phenomenon is largely unexplored when it comes to verb phrases consisting of a content verb and a predicative noun in object position, such as declarar paixão (“declare passion”), cumprir a promessa (“fulfill the promise”), responder perguntas (“answer questions”), or resistir à tentação (“resist temptation”). The notions of obligatory and non-obligatory coreference do not fully explain this phenomenon, since non-coreferential usage of these phrases leads to different types of coercion, which are relevant properties to classify these phrases. This paper proposes a pilot study of verb phrases of this kind, extracting them from a Brazilian Portuguese newspaper corpus aiming at their syntactic-semantic classification. This procedure revealed a total of 75 such verb phrases. Based on semantic coercion and distributional properties, four major classes divided into seven subclasses are proposed to cover two-thirds of the data. There is also a fifth class with 17 items in which coreference appears to be a contextual property, i.e., unrelated to lexical semantics, and eight hapax legomena. The results provide a new perspective on this understudied topic, identifying also irregular aspects deserving further studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the Czech language has two forms of infinitive (active and passive) in its morphological paradigm, infinitive constructions can be found where this opposition is not employed and the active vs. passive interpretation depends on the context. This article focuses on active infinitives which convey meanings primarily expressed by passive infinitives. The verbs which govern such infinitives are divided into several classes: (a) potřebovat [to need], zasluhovat [to deserve], (b) verbs of movement, such as poslat [to send], přinést [to bring], odvézt [to take away], (c) žádat [to require], odmítat [to refuse]. The competition between the active forms of the infinitive and the analytic passive forms, coreference between the valency members of the governing verbs and the hidden valency member of the infinitive are analyzed. Quantitative insights into how the phenomenon under study is represented in the Czech National Corpus are provided. The article concludes with a terminological proposal to complete the system of functions in the domain of infinitive constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiword expressions are combinations of words that exhibit pecu-liar semantic properties, such as different degrees of non-compositio-nality, decomposability, transparency and figuration. Long-standing linguistic debates suggest that such semantic idiosyncrasy can con-dition the morpho-syntactic configurations in which a given multi-word expression can occur. Here, we extend this argumentation to a particular semantic and pragmatic phenomenon: nominal coreference. We hypothesise that the internal components of a multiword expres-sion are unlikely to occur in coreference chains. While previous work has identified the rareness of coreference-related phenomena in pres-ence of multiword expressions, this observation has never been quan-tified, to the best of our knowledge. We bridge this gap by performing an automated corpus-based study of the intersections between verbal multiword expressions and nominal coreference in French. The results largely corroborate our hypothesis but also display various tendencies depending on the type of multiword expression and the corpus genre. The analysis of the corpus examples highlights interesting properties of coreference, notably in speech.

The paper argues for a bisentential, paratactic account of Hanging Topic Left Dislocations wherein the syntactically unconnected hanging topic phrase is the remnant of an elliptical copulative sentence which is linearly juxtaposed to the second, host sentence. This proposal represents a natural extension of Ott's system for Clitic Left Dislocations and predicative non-restrictive nominal appositives. By assuming that the hanging topic is structurally disconnected from the host sentence, the analysis constitutes a radical departure from integrated/monosentential approaches within cartography, which analyze hanging topics as intrasentential, albeit peripheral, constituents in the left spine of the clause. Using data from English and Spanish as well as from other linguistic varieties, the paratactic approach provides a principled account of various issues facing monosentential analyses of hanging topics, including anti-connectivity, coreference with the resumptive/epithetic correlate, comma intonation/pause potential, case, insensitivity to locality constraints, islandhood, and potential presence of interjections between hanging topic and host sentence, amongst others. The account is also successful in capturing orphaned topics, which are not linked to any constituent in the sentence they occur with, alongside 'interrogative' and hyperdetached hanging topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiword expressions are combinations of words that exhibit peculiar semantic properties, such as different degrees of non-compositionality, decomposability, transparency and figuration. Long-standing linguistic debates suggest that such semantic idiosyncrasy can condition the morpho-syntactic configurations in which a given multiword expression can occur. Here, we extend this argumentation to a particular semantic and pragmatic phenomenon: nominal coreference. We hypothesise that the internal components of a multiword expression are unlikely to occur in coreference chains. While previous work has identified the rareness of coreference-related phenomena in presence of multiword expressions, this observation has never been quantified, to the best of our knowledge. We bridge this gap by performing an automated corpus-based study of the intersections between verbal multiword expressions and nominal coreference in French. The results largely corroborate our hypothesis but also display various tendencies depending on the type of multiword expression and the corpus genre. The analysis of the corpus examples highlights interesting properties of coreference, notably in speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue in this study that the apparent optionality of the accusative case marker on 1SG and 2SG reflexives in contemporary Hungarian is not an instance of free variation between an accusative-marked and an unmarked form. As corpus evidence shows, the spellout of accusative morphology correlates with referential uses of the reflexive. The emerging picture is that the use of accusative morphology on these reflexives has been on the decline since the old Hungarian period, and it is a marked option in the synchronic state of the language, where speakers tend to avoid overt case morphology when the reflexives is interpreted as a bound variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Implicit Causality (I-Caus) and Implicit Consequentiality (I-Cons) biases (Peter annoyed Mary because/and so ...) have been argued to be rooted in the argument structure properties of verbs. In particular, the mirror coreference biases displayed by stimulus-experiencer and experiencer-stimulus predicates have been considered strong evidence for this approach. We provide evidence for the Asymmetry Hypothesis, stating that I-Caus and I-Cons are derived from different mechanisms. While we also assume that I-Caus is driven by verb semantics, we contend that I-Cons follows from general discourse-structural principles. Evidence is provided by four production experiments in German investigating the coreference and coherence properties of the aforementioned verb classes in detail. Experiment 1 establishes that the classes mirror each other with respect to coreference biases. Experiments 2 and 3 show, however, that there is no such symmetry with regard to coherence biases. Finally, Experiment 4 provides fine-grained evidence for the underlying strategies for providing contingency specifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses Czech light verb constructions, partly revising principles of their syntactic structure formation formulated within the Functional Generative Description. It argues that obligatoriness of valency complementations should be reflected in these principles. Namely, the role of optional valency complementations of light verbs played in this process has been analyzed. This analysis has shown that in the cases where light verbs do not provide a sufficient number of valency complementations for the surface expression of semantic participants of predicative nouns, semantic participants of nouns make use of optional verbal complementations; namely ORIGin, LOCative and BENefactor have been attested in the VALLEX lexicon. In such cases, semantic participants can be expressed on the surface, either as optional verbal complementation or as nominal complementation. The distribution of verbal and nominal complementations have been observed in 1,600 light verb constructions extracted from the Czech National Corpus, with the result that the surface expression of these participants through the optional verbal complementations is strongly preferred (88% of verbal complementations and 12% of nominal ones). The semantic analysis has indicated that the optional verbal complementations are overrepresented as they cover broader semantic contexts than the corresponding nominal ones.

This paper investigates hitherto unnoticed variation in the linguistic coding of spatial anaphora in locative PPs in Hungarian. While Hungarian primarily employs reflexives in these configurations, it is well-known that pronouns are the default strategy in English, and the reflexive anaphor is allowed in locative PPs only in the presence of certain licensing factors. One such factor is the availability of body-oriented readings (Rooryck & Vanden Wyngaerd 2007, 2011), and we argue here that this plays an important role in Hungarian, too. The paper reports the findings of a corpus study and an online questionnaire study and shows that pronouns are not only acceptable in Hungarian spatial anaphora, but either outperform or form a viable alternative to reflexives when the location denoted by the PP is not close to the referent of the antecedent. A secondary effect of structure building is also observable in two configurations of the extended PP. We argue that the employment of a possessive structure in certain PPs, and moving a P-element to a CPPP cap may also contribute to saving pronouns in contexts of spatial anaphora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finding coreferences in corpora is a difficult task for which the identification of singletons is an important issue. Solving this issue would allow for improving the process of corpus annotation and the identification of referential chains. To achieve this, it is important to determine whether or not singletons have linguistic properties of their own. After an overview of the question, the article presents a corpus study. Based on the results of the study, it is possible to “profile” the mentions of a referent remaining in the singleton state. A thousand mentions were studied in different genres and types of texts. The results suggest that the genre/text type and the ontological category of the referent predict the repetition or the absence of repetition of a referent in a text.

The relationship between pronoun production and pronoun interpretation has been proposed to follow Bayesian principles, combining a comprehender’s expectation about which referent will be mentioned next and their estimate of how likely it is that a potential referent will be re-mentioned using a pronoun. The Bayesian Model has received support from studies in several languages (English, Mandarin Chinese, Catalan, German), but tested contexts have been limited to two event participants, whereas natural language discourse often involves contexts with more than two event participants. In this study, we conducted three story continuation experiments to assess how the Bayesian Model performs in more complex contexts. Our results show that even in contexts with three event participants, comprehenders can behave rationally when interpreting pronouns, but that they appear to require sufficient context to build up a coherent representation of the situation to do so. In addition to testing the basic claim of the Bayesian Model (Weak Bayes), we test the central prediction of the Strong form of the hypothesis: that the two components of the model (next-mention expectations and choice of referring expression) are influenced by dissociated sets of factors. In a model comparison, Experiments 2 and 3 confirm the closest fit from the Bayesian Model, which supports Weak Bayes, and none of our experiments find evidence that the predictability of a referent affects pronominalization rates, which corroborates Strong Bayes. Finally, we test whether the rate of pronominalization is sensitive to factors related to ambiguity and argument/adjunct status of referents; we find that participants vary their production of pronouns most strongly based on the grammatical role of the antecedent (subject or not), with a smaller effect from the presence/absence of a gender-matched competitor and no effect from the syntactic position of this competing referent.

Cataphors precede their antecedents, so they cannot be fully interpreted until those antecedents are encountered. Some researchers propose that cataphors trigger an active search during incremental processing in which the parser predictively posits potential antecedents in upcoming syntactic positions (Kazanina et al., Journal of Memory and Language, 56[3], 384–409, 2007). One characteristic of active search is that it is persistent: If a prediction is disconfirmed in an earlier position, the parser should iteratively search later positions until the predicted element is found. Previous research has assumed, but not established, that antecedent search is persistent. In four experiments in English and Norwegian, we test this hypothesis. Two sentence completion experiments show a strong off-line preference for coreference between a fronted cataphor and the first available argument position (the main subject). When the main subject cannot be the antecedent, participants posit the antecedent in the next closest position: object position. Two self-paced reading studies demonstrate that comprehenders actively expect the antecedent of a fronted cataphor to appear in the main clause subject position, and then successively in object position if the subject does not match the cataphor in gender. Our results therefore support the claim that antecedent search is active and persistent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the results of quantitative-corpus parameterization of reference properties of English detached nonfinite constructions with an explicit subject, carried out from the perspective of the cognitive-quantitative approach to language study. Through the prism of cognitive-constructive grammar, the syntactic patterns under scrutiny are recognized as grammatical constructions, i.e. complex semiotic units, non-compositional cognitively motivated pairings of form and conceptual meaning/function, stored as holistic, conceptually connected, and interacting structures. Corpus-quantitative parameterization of referential properties of the given constructions presupposes the analysis of the linguistic means of expressing coreference between five micro-constructions and a corresponding matrix clause, reflected by the factors "Coreference" (COREF) and "Absence of coreference" (ØCOREF) of the parameter "Reference relations" (REFREL). Quantitative verification of the data involves a three-stage quantitative procedure incorporating 1) a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), 2) a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), and 3) Tukey's multiple comparison test performed with a computer statistical data analysis software R. The obtained results prove that the non-augmented constructions show a stronger semantic integration into a matrix clause, compensating lack of syntactic connection by closer reference relations, manifested by explicitly expressed full or partial coreference. The use of augmentors facilitates the identification of with-, without-, despite- and what_with-augmented constructions as syntactic patterns, thus balancing the absence of coreference and ensuring adequate cognitive processing of constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

De jure coreference in a discourse is typically understood as explicit coreference that speakers are required to recognize in order to count as having correctly understood the discourse. For example, in an utterance of the sentence 'Tom went to the market because he needed soy milk', the two underlined terms are typically coreferential in a way that appreciating their coreference is required to fully understand the utterance. Often, de jure coreference is understood as an equivalence relation, so in particular it is thought of as a transitive relation. However, Pinillos (Philos Stud 154(2):301–324, 2011) provides examples that apparently challenge the transitivity of de jure coreference (in intra-personal cases). In this paper, I argue for two claims. First, while it is (at best) inconclusive whether the relevant terms in Pinillos's examples satisfy his third condition, it is much clearer that they fail to satisfy his first two conditions. Given that Pinillos's conditions capture important characteristics of de jure coreference, his examples do not successfully show the non-transitivity of de jure coreference. Second, I present an alternative account of his examples, one that shows which representation the anaphoric pronoun in an example of the sort that he presents is de jure coreferential with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emergentist approaches to language are burdened with two responsibilities in contemporary cognitive science. On the one hand, they must offer a different and better understanding of the well-known phenomena that appear to support traditional formal approaches to language. On the other hand, they must extend the search for alternative explanations beyond the familiar languages of Europe and East Asia. I pursue this joint endeavor here by outlining an emergentist account for constraints on local anaphora in English and Balinese, with a view to showing that, despite numerous proposals to the contrary, the two languages manifest essentially the same system of coreference and that the system in question is shaped by processing pressures rather than grammatical principles.

Emergentist approaches to language are burdened with two responsibilities in contemporary cognitive science. On the one hand, they must offer a different and better understanding of the well-known phenomena that appear to support traditional formal approaches to language. On the other hand, they must extend the search for alternative explanations beyond the familiar languages of Europe and East Asia. I pursue this joint endeavor here by outlining an emergentist account for constraints on local anaphora in English and Balinese, with a view to showing that, despite numerous proposals to the contrary, the two languages manifest essentially the same system of coreference and that the system in question is shaped by processing pressures rather than grammatical principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a linguistic account explaining particular mechanisms underlying the generation of expectations at the discourse level. We further develop a linguistic theory – the Empty Slot Theory – explaining the phenomenon of implicit verb causality. According to our proposal, implicit causality (IC) verbs introduce lexically determined slots for causal content of specific types. If the required information is not derivable from the current or preceding context, IC verbs generate the expectation that these slots will be filled in the upcoming discourse. The cognitive mechanism underlying the bias is grounded in the general processing strategy of avoiding accommodation. Empirical evidence for the proposed theory is provided in three continuation experiments in German with comprehensive semantic annotation of the continuations provided by the participants. The reported experiments consistently show that IC bias can be manipulated in systematic ways. Experiment 1 demonstrates important ontological constraints on causal content crucial for our theory. Experiments 2 and 3 show how IC biases can be manipulated in predictable ways by filling the hypothesized slots in the prompt. Experiment 2 illustrates that stimulus-experiencer (experiencer-object) verbs in contrast to causative agent-patient verbs can be manipulated with respect to coherence and coreference by employing adverbial modification. Filling the lexically determined slot of psychological verbs resulted in predictable changes in coherence relations and types of explanations, resulting in the predicted effects on coreference. Experiment 3 extends the empirical investigations to so-called "agent-evocator" verbs. Again, filling the semantic slot as part of the prompt resulted in predictable shifts in coherence relations and explanation types with transparent effects on coreference. The reported experiments shed further light on the close correspondence between coherence and coreference as a hallmark of natural language discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the notions of semantic and syntactic coreference, in the conceptual, terminological and theoretical sense, have long been known to the linguistic public, we consider it appropriate and worthwhile to point out the ways in which this type of connection between the grammatical units in the sentence is materialized. We especially wanted to draw attention to the inherent mechanisms of language which directly signal that the two forms, not necessarily different, are connected with the same meaning, and related to the same semantic role, for which it is directly responsible - the same propositional function they have. Although it may seem that the difference between semantic and syntactic coreference is not so significant, it has been revealed that in the latter case, the syntactic relations are the main language means of expressing propositional functions and corresponding semantic roles. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to highlight the syntagmatic mechanisms of language, with the help of which the structural, informative and informative hierarchy of the sentence members is carried out. The purpose of such hierarchization is not so much to streamline or rethink the structure of the sentence, but rather to ensure the integration of complex content on the one hand, and settle the situational significance of individual participants on the other hand. [Project of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Grant no. 178004: Standardni srpski jezik - sintaksička, semantička i pragmatička istraživanja]

This paper addresses Czech light verb constructions, partly revising principles of their syntactic structure formation formulated within the Functional Generative Description. It argues that obligatoriness of valency complementations should be reflected in these principles. Namely, the role of optional valency complementations of light verbs played in this process has been analyzed. This analysis has shown that in the cases where light verbs do not provide a sufficient number of valency complementations for the surface expression of semantic participants of predicative nouns, semantic participants of nouns make use of optional verbal complementations; namely ORIGin, LOCative and BENefactor have been attested in the VALLEX lexicon. In such cases, semantic participants can be expressed on the surface, either as optional verbal complementation or as nominal complementation. The distribution of verbal and nominal complementations have been observed in 1,600 light verb constructions extracted from the Czech National Corpus, with the result that the surface expression of these participants through the optional verbal complementations is strongly preferred (88% of verbal complementations and 12% of nominal ones). The semantic analysis has indicated that the optional verbal complementations are overrepresented as they cover broader semantic contexts than the corresponding nominal ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the core chapters 4-6, Iacona (2018) argues against the "Uniqueness Thesis" (UT), stating that "there is a unique notion of logical form that fulfils both the logical role and the semantic role" (39), where the former "concerns the formal explanation of logical properties and logical relations, such as validity or contradiction" (37), and the latter "concerns the formulation of a compositional theory of meaning" (ibid.). He argues for this on the basis of relations of coreference among referential expressions, names and indexicals. From what I take to be a fundamental agreement on most relevant issues, here I will nonetheless press him to clarify the notions of intrinsicness and the logical and semantic role of logical form on which he relies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the field of Czech corpus linguistics and represents one of various current studies analysing text coherence through language interactions. It presents a corpusbased analysis of grammatical coreference and sentence information structure (in terms of contextual boundness) in Czech. It focuses on examining the interaction of these two language phenomena and observes where they meet to participate in text structuring. Specifically, the paper analyses contextually bound and non-bound sentence items and examines whether (and how often) they are involved in relations of grammatical coreference in Czech newspaper articles. The analysis is carried out on the language data of the Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT) containing 3,165 Czech texts. The results of the analysis are helpful in automatic text annotation - the paper presents how (or to what extent) the annotation of grammatical coreference may be used in automatic (pre-)annotation of sentence information structure in Czech. It demonstrates how accurately we may (automatically) assume the value of contextual boundness for the antecedent and anaphor (as the two participants of a grammatical coreference relation). The results of the paper demonstrate that the anaphor of grammatical coreference is automatically predictable - it is a non-contrastive contextually bound sentence item in 99.18% of cases. On the other hand, the value of contextual boundness of the antecedent is not so easy to estimate (according to the PDT, the antecedent is contextually non-bound in 37% of cases, non-contrastive contextually bound in 50% and contrastive contextually bound in 13% of cases).

Abstract Background Coreference resolution is the task of finding strings in text that have the same referent as other strings. Failures of coreference resolution are a common cause of false negatives in information extraction from the scientific literature. In order to better understand the nature of the phenomenon of coreference in biomedical publications and to increase performance on the task, we annotated the Colorado Richly Annotated Full Text (CRAFT) corpus with coreference relations. Results The corpus was manually annotated with coreference relations, including identity and appositives for all coreferring base noun phrases. The OntoNotes annotation guidelines, with minor adaptations, were used. Interannotator agreement ranges from 0.480 (entity-based CEAF) to 0.858 (Class-B3), depending on the metric that is used to assess it. The resulting corpus adds nearly 30,000 annotations to the previous release of the CRAFT corpus. Differences from related projects include a much broader definition of markables, connection to extensive annotation of several domain-relevant semantic classes, and connection to complete syntactic annotation. Tool performance was benchmarked on the data. A publicly available out-of-the-box, general-domain coreference resolution system achieved an F-measure of 0.14 (B3), while a simple domain-adapted rule-based system achieved an F-measure of 0.42. An ensemble of the two reached F of 0.46. Following the IDENTITY chains in the data would add 106,263 additional named entities in the full 97-paper corpus, for an increase of 76% percent in the semantic classes of the eight ontologies that have been annotated in earlier versions of the CRAFT corpus. Conclusions The project produced a large data set for further investigation of coreference and coreference resolution in the scientific literature. The work raised issues in the phenomenon of reference in this domain and genre, and the paper proposes that many mentions that would be considered generic in the general domain are not generic in the biomedical domain due to their referents to specific classes in domain-specific ontologies. The comparison of the performance of a publicly available and well-understood coreference resolution system with a domain-adapted system produced results that are consistent with the notion that the requirements for successful coreference resolution in this genre are quite different from those of the general domain, and also suggest that the baseline performance difference is quite large.

Many research articles in experimental sciences present a standardized form known as the IMRAD format, an acronym for “Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion”. Each of these sections has a specific purpose (presenting the framework, describing the methodology, reporting the results and then discussing them), but also specific linguistic features. Our goal is to study coreference chains (all the expressions of a text that refer to the same extra-linguistic entity) in a corpus of French IMRAD articles (5 texts, 32,539 words). We show that different types of chains have specific features and that they cannot be studied without distinction. We first categorize chains by the type of their referent and analyze in particular three of these types: author(s), abstract concepts and groups. We then define types of chains by features such as their prominence, their length in the text, the distance between their elements, etc. This dual typology of coreference chains allows us to describe the main types of chains, but also to give a fine-grained analysis of the textual progression in IMRAD articles, especially how and why some referents are present in several sections while others are limited to one section only.

This paper presents a framework for how the multifaceted nature of “gender” (human and linguistic) interacts with grammatical operations such as coreference dependency formation. It frames the question through the lens of English, in which it focuses on how personal names and referents who identify as nonbinary can provide insight into the conceptual representations of gender. Additional data from a variety of modern languages supports a model of how gender might be cognitively represented such that the observed linguistic patterns are available. I propose a three-tiered model of gender that unites grammatical, cognitive, social, and biological aspects and describes how implications of this model might be tested in future work.

This paper aims to address the relation between language acquisition and working memory development. Six-, seven-, eight- and nine-year-old participants were tested in a normal acquisition process of Brazilian Portuguese, as well as native speakers of PB. The results showed a positive correlation between the number of intervening sentences and the processing time, thus suggesting that a higher load in the working memory affects the anaphoric processing. It has also been verified that there is a chronological progressive maturation of both the working memory and the grammar, which affects the processing of the antecedents. The results of the experiment provided further evidence on the capacity of working memory and its relation to linguistic processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the second release of arrau , a multigenre corpus of anaphoric information created over 10 years to provide data for the next generation of coreference/anaphora resolution systems combining different types of linguistic and world knowledge with advanced discourse modeling supporting rich linguistic annotations. The distinguishing features of arrau include the following: treating all NPs as markables, including non-referring NPs, and annotating their (non-) referentiality status; distinguishing between several categories of non-referentiality and annotating non-anaphoric mentions; thorough annotation of markable boundaries (minimal/maximal spans, discontinuous markables); annotating a variety of mention attributes, ranging from morphosyntactic parameters to semantic category; annotating the genericity status of mentions; annotating a wide range of anaphoric relations, including bridging relations and discourse deixis; and, finally, annotating anaphoric ambiguity. The current version of the dataset contains 350K tokens and is publicly available from LDC. In this paper, we discuss in detail all the distinguishing features of the corpus, so far only partially presented in a number of conference and workshop papers, and we also discuss the development between the first release of arrau in 2008 and this second one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Futhark is the property of Revista Futhark and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Previous cross-modal priming studies showed that lexical decisions to words after a pronoun were facilitated when these words were semantically related to the pronoun's antecedent. These studies suggested that semantic priming effectively measured antecedent retrieval during coreference. We examined whether these effects extended to implicit reading comprehension using the N400 response. The results of three experiments did not yield strong evidence of semantic facilitation due to coreference. Further, the comparison with two additional experiments showed that N400 facilitation effects were reduced in sentences (vs. word pair paradigms) and were modulated by the case morphology of the prime word. We propose that priming effects in cross-modal experiments may have resulted from task-related strategies. More generally, the impact of sentence context and morphological information on priming effects suggests that they may depend on the extent to which the upcoming input is predicted, rather than automatic spreading activation between semantically related words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consider the following sentence: "Mary meditated on the sentence 'Bill is a good friend' and concluded that he was a good friend." It is standardly assumed that in sentences of this sort, containing so‐called "closed" quotations, the expressions occurring between quotation marks are mentioned and do not take their ordinary referents. The quoted NP "Bill" refers, if anything, to the name 'Bill,' not to the individual Bill. At the same time, the pronoun "he," apparently anaphoric on quoted "Bill," refers to the individual Bill. The case seems thus to invalidate the intuitive principle that pronouns anaphoric on referential expressions inherit their reference from their antecedents. The paper formulates the argument, argues that sentences exhibiting the described pattern do not constitute evidence against the intuitive principle, and proposes an alternative account of the anaphoric relation involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]