Antecedent (grammar)

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

Ernest W. Adams. Subjunctive and indicative conditionals. Foundations of language, vol. 6 (1970), pp. 89–94.

Abstract: The purpose of this note is to dispute Michael Ayers' claim that "there is no special problem of subjunctive conditionals".' Ayers argues for the following theses: (1) there is no special problem of counterfactual conditionals, (2) the subjunctive conditional should not be confused with the counter factual, (3) the subjunctive conditional does not, as many authors have argued, differ from its indicative counterpart in that the former logically entails either that its antecedent is false, or that the speaker believes it to be false, whereas the latter does not, and (4) there appear to be no special problems in attempting to characterize the conditions of verification and falsification of subjunctive conditionals which are not shared equally by indicative con ditionals. Now, I agree with theses (1)-(3), but I feel that thesis (4) is mis leadingly put, and when it is less misleadingly formulated, it is false. What I wish to argue is that subjunctive and indicative conditionals differ not so much as to their conditions of verification and falsification, as in the degrees to which they are justified or supported by evidence. There are occasions on which subjunctive conditionals are very well justified by evidence, but the corresponding indicatives are quite unjustified. Furthermore, the kind of justification here spoken of is fundamental to a characterization of 'the logic' of these sorts of statements. First I will exhibit three closely related examples of situations in which a subjunctive is justified, but its corresponding indicative is not. Then I will speculate briefly on the significance of these examples. The upshot will be to conclude that subjunctive and indicative conditionals are indeed logically distinct species, and there remains a special problem of analyzing subjunctives even after the indicatives are analyzed. A hypothetical example of the kind I have in mind is the following. Sup pose that on a given occasion three persons, A, B and V, are isolated in a room which is sealed off from the outside. During this time, the third person, V ('the victim'), is murdered by being shot through the heart. The circum stances are such that only A and B could have done the shooting, though both deny it and accuse the other, and no one else witnessed the murder. An in vestigation is therefore instituted. It establishes that A had in fact a very

Comprehending figurative referential descriptions.

Abstract: A common way of referring to people is with figurative language. People can be referred to metaphorically, as in calling a terrible boxer "a creampuff," or metonymically, as in calling a naval admiral "the brass." The present studies investigated the anaphoric inferences that occur during comprehension of figurative referential descriptions. Subjects read short narratives, each ending in either a literal or figurative description of another person. Immediately after the last line of each text, the anaphoric antecedent for the description of another person. Immediately after the last line of each text, the anaphoric antecedent for the description was presented in a probe recognition task. The results of three experiments indicated that metaphoric and metonymic referential descriptions reinstate their antecedents in the course of comprehension. Subjects were faster at reinstating the antecedents for literal referential descriptions than at reinstating metaphoric and metonymic descriptions. Moreover, people understand metaphoric referential descriptions more easily than they do metonymic ones. The implications of these findings for theories of anaphora resolution and figurative language comprehension are discussed.

Levels of representation in the interpretation of anaphoric reference and instrument inference

Abstract: The level of representation accessed when inferences are made during sentence comprehension was examined. The inferences investigated included antecedent assignment for both definite noun phrase anaphors and pronouns and also instrument inferences. In making these inferences, a listener must access the inferred element, whether an antecedent or an instrument, in either a linguistic form representation or a discourse model. The level of representation involved in these inferences was determined by exploiting differences in the lexical decision and naming tasks, which were argued to exhibit differential sensitivity to representational levels. In three experiments, the priming of antecedent and instrument targets in the lexical decision task was compared with priming of the same targets in the naming task. Differences in the patterns of activation across the two tasks indicated that all three types of inferences required accessing elements in a discourse model. Three control experiments ruled out simple context or congruity checking as an explanation for our results. The following conclusions were also supported by these studies: (1) Antecedent assignment occurs immediately after processing an anaphor; (2) antecedent assignment involves inhibition for the inappropriate antecedent rather than facilitation for the appropriate antecedent; (3) although subjects do not make instrument inferences when they hear isolated sentences containing verbs that strongly imply certain instruments, the inferences are made when sentences are preceded by a context that mentions the instrument.

Antecedent Priming at Trace Positions in Japanese Long-Distance Scrambling

Abstract: We report the results from three cross-modal lexical decision experiments investigating antecedent priming effects in Japanese. In the first two experiments we examined antecedent reactivation at the preverbal trace position in long-distance scrambling sentences. We found an interaction between the participants' working memory (WM) span and antecedent priming. For the high span group, the magnitude of antecedent priming at the trace position was significantly larger than at the earlier control position; for the low span group, on the other hand, there was no such difference. In a third experiment, we examined whether similar reactivation effects could be observed for argument expressions that are not base-generated adjacent to the verb. Contrary to scrambled objects, subject noun phrases (NPs) in canonically ordered sentences were not reactivated at the preverbal test position in either of the two participant groups. We argue that the priming effect observed in the high span group supports a trace-based account of long-distance scrambling. The degree of complexity of the experimental sentences was such that they exceeded the memory span of the low span group. We conclude that argument traces access their antecedents irrespective of the position of their subcategorizers.