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Antecedent (grammar)

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


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The first experiment shows that an elliptical verb phrase is most easily interpreted if its antecedent is in the immediately preceding sentence, which confirms previous findings on the importance of that sentence and shows, even in a task where the retention of surface form is essential, that representation nevertheless rapidly becomes difficult to access.
Abstract: There is much evidence to suggest that there are at least two aspects of the mental encoding of a text — surface form and content. Long-term retention is of memory for content, but a representation of surface form is essential for the on-line interpretation of certain grammatical constructions, such as Verb-Phrase Ellipsis. Two experiments are reported that investigate the availability of surface representations. The first shows that an elliptical verb phrase is most easily interpreted if its antecedent is in the immediately preceding sentence. This result confirms previous findings on the importance of that sentence, and shows, even in a task where the retention of surface form is essential, that representation nevertheless rapidly becomes difficult to access. The second experiment shows that the results of the first cannot be explained in terms of the unnaturalness of the passages with distant antecedents, since distance has an effect even in passages judged to be more natural.

8 citations

01 Jan 1998
TL;DR: The cross-linguistic variation between English, Chinese and Russian lies in that the English reflexive "himself" must be bound locally both in finite and non-finite clauses as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The cross-linguistic variation between English, Chinese and Russian lies in that (i) the English reflexive ‘himself’ must be bound locally both in finite and non-finite clauses, the Chinese reflexive ‘ziji’ can be bound either long-distance or locally both in finite and non-finite clauses, whereas the Russian reflexive ‘sebja’ must be bound locally in finite clauses but can be bound either long-distance or locally in non-finite clauses; (ii) the Chinese reflexive can only take a subject as its antecedent and so does the Russian reflexive, while the English reflexive can take both a subject and an object as its antecedent.

8 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Hiroshi Nagata1
TL;DR: This article showed that the difference obtained between the two probes in the previous study is attributable to the activation of the antecedent by the reflexive, i.e., the difference in recognition time between the indirect object probe and subject probe for either probe position.
Abstract: This study is a control experiment for a previous study (Nagata, 1991) that showed activation of an antecedent by a Japanese reflexive, jibun, in syntactically ambiguous sentences. The reflexive involved in the relevant sentences in the previous study was replaced with a word from other parts of speech in this study. This manipulation was done to delete the sentence constituent that might activate any prior antecedent. 24 female students were given a recognition task on which a probe was given either for an indirect object or for a subject either immediately after a replaced word or at the end of a sentence. No difference in recognition time between the indirect object probe and subject probe for either probe position was found. This result indicates that the difference obtained between the two probes in the previous study is attributable to the activation of the antecedent by the reflexive.

8 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Dec 2017-Synthese
TL;DR: A means for evaluating counterlegals relative to minimally-illegal models and steps toward a theory capable of handling both counterlegal and backtrackers are offered.
Abstract: A counterlegal is a counterfactual conditional containing an antecedent that is inconsistent with some set of laws. A backtracker is a counterfactual that tells us how things would be at a time earlier than that of its antecedent, were the antecedent to obtain. Typically, theories that evaluate counterlegals appropriately don’t evaluate backtrackers properly, and vice versa. Two cases in point: Lewis’ (Nous 13:455–476, 1979a) ordering semantics handles counterlegals well but not backtrackers. Hiddleston’s (Nous 39(4):632–657, 2005) causal-model semantics nicely handles backtrackers but not counterlegals. Taking Hiddleston’s account as a starting point, I offer steps toward a theory capable of handling both counterlegals and backtrackers. The core contribution of this paper is a means for evaluating counterlegals relative to minimally-illegal models.

8 citations

29 May 2008
TL;DR: An in-depth examination of sluiced prepositional phrases reveals sluices for which interpretation is unobtainable by parallelism with an antecedent, and it is proposed sluice are licensed by serving to question an inferred argument of a semantically compatible and salient antecedents.
Abstract: An in-depth examination of sluiced prepositional phrases reveals sluices for which interpretation is unobtainable by parallelism with an antecedent. To accommodate these, I propose sluices are licensed by serving to question an inferred argument of a semantically compatible and salient antecedent. Both a corpus investigation and a grammaticality survey provide corroboration.

8 citations


Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20222
202159
202052
201957
201863
201762