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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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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the use of right-dislocation in Spanish and Catalan and found that right-dislococation is a marginal phenomenon in Spanish, not only from a quantitative (10 occurrences vs 232 occurrences in the Catalan text), but also from a qualitative point of view.
Abstract: This article investigates the use of right-dislocation in Catalan and Spanish We have measured the productivity of right-dislocation in a corpus of an original Catalan text and its Spanish translation regarding four variables: category, grammatical function, discourse function, and distance with respect to the antecedent The analysis shows that right-dislocation is a marginal phenomenon in Spanish, not only from a quantitative (10 occurrences vs 232 occurrences in the Catalan text), but from a qualitative point of view: right-dislocation in Catalan affects all the categories, grammatical functions, discourse functions, and distances with respect to the antecedent, whereas in Spanish it is restricted to nominals (SD and DEM) and sentences (SC), to subject and object functions, mainly to a the (re)introduction of a topic in the discourse, and to extreme distances (1 and 4) So then, in order to fulfill the tasks covered by right-dislocation in Catalan, Spanish must resort to other mechanisms — the placement of the dislocate in situ, its omission, or left-dislocation—, which suggests that the difference between these languages has to do with the different discourse management of the same collection of syntactic resources

8 citations

01 Jan 2008
TL;DR: A processing approach in which ellipsis is strictly regulated in the grammar but the grammar is embedded in a theory of language processing, which allows the processor to repair antecedents at LF, subject to the usual constraints on syntactic reanalysis of garden path sentences.
Abstract: Grammatical insights about ellipsis structures reveal that intricate syntactic and informational structure constraints govern ellipsis. But there continues to be a fairly large gap between the predictions of grammatical theories of ellipsis and the actual data. I will pursue a processing approach in which ellipsis is strictly regulated in the grammar but the grammar is embedded in a theory of language processing. The first part of the talk will explore information structure constraints on processing preferences in cases of ellipsis with multiple permissable antecedents, examining the role of ‘main assertion’ (Frazier and Clifton, 2005), contrastive focus (conveyed by pitch accent, or by syntactic clefting) and information structure expectations (Carlson, Dickey, Frazier and Clifton, to appear). It will be shown that ellipsis is marginal in cases where information structure and syntactic conditions are at odds, e.g., with elided constituents taking antecedents in conditional sentences. Various effects support a speculation that ellipsis, though clearly constrained syntactically, may take an antecedent that lies ‘just beyond’ LF. For example, under conditions where combining information from the antecedent of a conditional with prior information would allow cancellation of the antecedent ( Assume X. If X, Y...), then the consequent clause acts as if it is the main assertion of the conditional sentence (Clifton and Frazier, in progress). The second part of the talk will sketch an account of ellipsis in which, say, active elided clauses may not take passive antecedents in the grammar, nor may ellipsis (VP ellipsis or Sluicing) violate island conditions. Examples of both structures have been reported in the literature. It will be suggested that they can be explained in a theory which allows the processor to repair antecedents at LF, subject to the usual constraints on syntactic reanalysis of garden path sentences (Frazier, 2007), and allows the discourse processor to substitute a variable for a focused constituent. The account will be contrasted with accounts where the grammar freely permits active-passive mismatches and permits island violations in sluicing.

8 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper evaluated the way interpreters activate the source language and the target language (TL) when they perform the interpreting task, focusing on syntactic ambiguities and found that professionals did not show a clear attachment preference when they read and repeated sentences, while they used the strategy preferred in the TL when they performed interpreting task.
Abstract: This study evaluates the way in which interpreters activate the source language and the target language (TL) when they perform the interpreting task. We focused on syntactic ambiguities. In sentences like Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony, two antecedents (‘servant’ and ‘actress’) are potential correct agents of the clause (who was on the balcony). Previous studies showed that Native English speakers interpret the second antecedent as the agent (actress); Spanish speakers prefer the first antecedent (servant), and Spanish–English bilinguals do not show any preference. In the present study, we observed the interpreters’ syntactic processing when they either read the ambiguous sentences in Spanish to repeat them in Spanish or read the sentences in Spanish to translate them into English. The way ambiguous sentences were processed depended on the task: professionals did not show a clear attachment preference when they read and repeated sentences, while they used the strategy preferred in the TL when they performed the interpreting task. Interpreters managed TL syntactic properties in a flexible manner during the comprehension phase of the interpreting task.

8 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Loose coupling as an antecedent to symbolic management is rarely if ever studied at the individual level of analysis as discussed by the authors, yet individuals are central agents in starting and developing new businesses.
Abstract: Loose coupling as an antecedent to symbolic management is rarely if ever studied at the individual level of analysis. Yet, individuals are central agents in starting and developing new businesses. ...

8 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A cognitive consistency model of the directionality of conditional instructions and advice that use probability expressions to express uncertainty about the antecedent p predicts whether the complex sentence antecedents has a positive or negative directionality, which in turn predicts whether apositive or negative conclusion q will be drawn.
Abstract: This paper investigates a cognitive consistency model of the directionality of conditional instructions and advice that use probability expressions to express uncertainty about the antecedent p. The proposed model combines world knowledge (conveyed by causal direction) with linguistic information (conveyed by polarity and negation), and predicts whether the complex sentence antecedent has a positive or negative directionality, which in turn predicts whether a positive or negative conclusion q will be drawn. The first experiment uses Do q if p conditionals to show that given a consequent q participants complete antecedents p with a probability expression in line with expected sentence directionality. The second experiment uses If p then do q conditionals to show similar effects in a reverse direction. A third experiment uses If p then do q conditionals to show that participants draw conclusions predicted by the cognitive consistency model but not by a decision-theoretic approach to reasoning.

8 citations


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