Antecedent (grammar)

About: Antecedent (grammar) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1392 publications have been published within this topic receiving 41824 citations.

The balance between syntax and discourse in Old English

Abstract: Old English morpho-syntax allows a degree of word order flexibility that is exploited by discourse strategies. Key elements here are: adverbs functioning as discourse partitioners, and a wider range of pronominal elements, extending the number of strategies for anaphoric reference. The syntactic effect is an extended range of subject and object positions, which are exploited for discourse flexibility. In particular, a class of high adverbs, including primarily þa “then” and þonne “then”, define on their left an area in which discourse-(linked) elements occur, including a range of pronouns, but also definite nominal subjects. The latter occur here because the Old English weak demonstrative pronouns that serve to mark definiteness also allow specific anaphoric reference to a discourse antecedent. We also develop a model of quantitative analysis that brings out the relationship between the narrowly circumscribed syntactic system and the relative diffuseness of the discourse referential facts.

Valuing IS/IT Resources as an Antecedent of Ab- sorptive Capacity: An RBV Perspective

Abstract: Introduction Strategic relevance of knowledge has been widely recognized for about two decades (Grant, 1996b; Nonaka, 1991; Sambamurthy, Bharadwaj, & Grover, 2003). The increased interest on knowledge has focused organizations on skills that enable knowledge creation, diffusion and exploitation. One of these skills is absorptive capacity, a "dynamic capability" that allows organizational knowledge creation and utilization (Zahra & George, 2002). It enables organizations to recognize the value of new external knowledge, assimilate it and apply it to commercial ends (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990). Considering absorptive capacity as a "dynamic capability" implies that it is an essentially strategic capability (Teece, Pisano, & Shuen, 1997), and that it is conceived to influence organizational changes and, therefore, to define the firm's future organizational evolution (Zahra & George, 2002). According to Lane, Koka, and Pathak (2002), one of the most salient shortcomings of absorptive capacity literature is the little attention paid to the actual processes underlying its formation, i.e. its antecedents. Additionally, it is interesting to observe that the antecedents identified in literature are distinctly--and in part wrongfully--skewed towards those that enable tacit knowledge creation, whereas explicit knowledge generation is relegated or simply omitted. This tendency, which ignores the symbiotic relations existing among both knowledge types (Nonaka, 1994), has led to exclude from the identified antecedents the set of resources and capabilities associated to IS/IT. These are one of the most widely expanded and utilized sets of technologies in today's business world. Thus, an influential avenue to organizational strategic success might have been ignored so far. Consequently, the objective of this article is to develop the arguments that justify considering IS/IT resources as an antecedent of absorptive capacity and to highlight the links between these resources and the most important antecedents already recognized in literature. This paper contributes to the knowledge of absorptive capacity antecedents by emphasizing the need to refine the focus of search for relevant antecedents. An effective set of antecedents should target to joint, efficient, and balanced development of tacit and explicit knowledge. Besides, we identify an overlooked group of antecedents and underline the reach and value of their contribution to absorptive capacity generation. We then incorporate this set of antecedents in an already accepted model depicting absorptive capacity formation and effects. This paper is organized as follows: in the next paragraph we portray the strategic value of IS/IT resources. Then, we review the literature on absorptive capacity and its antecedents. Next, we analyze the effects of considering IS/IT resources as antecedents of absorptive capacity. Finally, we propose integrating IS/IT resources within the Model of Determinants of Absorptive Capacity. IS/IT Resources from an RBV Perspective During the mid 1980s and based on earlier organizational strategy theories, such as Nelson and Winter's work (1982), the resource-based approach to strategic analysis started to unfold. This perspective suggests analyzing organizational outcomes based on the possession, control or utilization of a specific set of resources (Garcia & Navas, 2004). The resource based view of the firm (RBV) states that enterprise resources and capabilities may be understood as a collection of elements, factors, assets, skills and attributes, possessed or controlled by firms, which enable them to formulate and implement a competitive strategy (Navas & Guerras, 1998). Within this context, many authors have referred to IS/IT resources as an important means to contribute to enterprise objective accomplishment. It has been argued that these resources may influence competitive positioning (Griffiths & Finlay, 2004) and may provide access to competitive advantages (Hirshheim & Sabherwal, 2001). …

Polarity reversals under sluicing

Abstract: This paper presents novel English sluicing data that challenge even the most successful existing theories of the relationship between antecedent and elided content in sluicing constructions. The data supply robust evidence for a previously unobserved phenomenon in which the elided content and antecedent content in a sluicing construction contain opposite polarity. The data challenge current accounts of identity conditions on ellipsis by demonstrating that a greater mismatch between antecedent and elided content is possible than previously thought; specifically, the paper shows that the identity condition for sluicing must be sensitive to pragmatic — i.e. non-truth-conditional — content as well as to semantic content. This observation motivates a proposal in which sluicing is treated as a pragmatics-sensitive phenomenon licensed by local contextual entailment. EARLY ACCESS

Automatic Pronominal Anaphora Resolution in English Texts

Abstract: Anaphora is a common phenomenon in discourses as well as an important research issue in the applications of natural language processing. In this paper, anaphora resolution is achieved by employing WordNet ontology and heuristic rules. The proposed system identifies both intra-sentential and inter-sentential antecedents of anaphors. Information about animacy is obtained by analyzing the hierarchical relations of nouns and verbs in the surrounding context. The identification of animacy entities and pleonastic-it usage in English discourses are employed to promote resolution accuracy. Traditionally, anaphora resolution systems have relied on syntactic, semantic or pragmatic clues to identify the antecedent of an anaphor. Our proposed method makes use of WordNet ontology to identify animate entities as well as essential gender information. In the animacy agreement module, the property is identified by the hypernym relation between entities and their unique beginners defined in WordNet. In addition, the verb of the entity is also an important clue used to reduce the uncertainty. An experiment was conducted using a balanced corpus to resolve the pronominal anaphora phenomenon. The methods proposed in (Lappin and Leass, 94) and (Mitkov, 01) focus on the corpora with only inanimate pronouns such as "it" or "its". Thus the results of intra-sentential and inter-sentential anaphora distribution are different. In an experiment using Brown corpus, we found that the distribution proportion of intra-sentential anaphora is about 60%. Seven heuristic rules are applied in our system; five of them are preference rules, and two are constraint rules. They are derived from syntactic, semantic, pragmatic conventions and from the analysis of training data. A relative measurement indicates that about 30% of the errors can be eliminated by applying heuristic module.