Antecedent (grammar)

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

Antecedents of Crowdfunding Project Success: An Empirical Study

Abstract: Crowdfunding platforms are social media websites that allow people to invest small amounts of money that add up to fund valuable larger projects. These websites are structured around projects with project goals, duration, and registered initiator. We use a dataset from a reward-based crowdfunding platform – Demohour to examine the antecedents of the successful project. The results suggest that project goal, duration, initiator participation and experience, the number of followers, the source of followers, and the number of visitors significantly influence the project success.

A diachronic and synchronic study of the alteration of uniform expressions from those who to those that

Abstract: It is widely acknowledged that 'those that' is used to refer to things. However, 'those that' is also used to refer to people, as is 'those who'. This study reports that this commonly accepted idea is not valid based on synchronic and diachronic analysis. Synchronically, it is not rare to encounter 'those that' being used to refer to people. Diachronically, the usage of 'those that' in reference to people appeared before the establishment of prescriptive grammar. The conclusion of this study elucidates why 'those that' as used to refer to people is due to the operation of 'that' as a relative pronoun. When an antecedent includes either people or things on one hand and people or animals on the other, 'that' is chosen as a relative pronoun. Consequently, 'those that' is a uniform expression used to denote both people and things; furthermore, it is an old and unremarkable expression.

An Experimental Investigation of the Antecedent Preferences of Hebrew Subject Pronouns

Abstract: A magnitude estimation study was conducted in order to investigate the likelihood of different pronominal forms in Hebrew to be resolved to different antecedents. Subjects were presented with sentences such as ”Dana wrote Nina when φ stayed in the U.S.” and were asked to rate the likelihood of a following sentence resolving the anaphor, e.g. ”Dana stayed in the U.S.”. The results showed that null and demonstrative pronouns have a significant preference for subject and object antecedents, respectively, a result in keeping with previous work (by Carminati, 2002; Bosch et al., 2006, among others). The overt pronoun exhibited a significant bias only when used in logophors, where it preferred a subject antecedent over an object one. This stands in contrast to what Carminati (2002) and Sorace and Filiaci (2006) have found in Italian whereby the object antecedent was preferred in these cases. The results are discussed in light of Hebrew’s special pro-drop pattern, alongside the implications of the cross-linguistic variance attested for.

Antecedent accessibility and exceptional covariation: Evidence from Norwegian Donkey Pronouns

Abstract: It is generally assumed that interpreting a co-referential or a syntactically-bound pronoun requires retrieving a representation of its antecedent from memory. Donkey pronouns (e.g., Geach 1962) are pronouns that co-vary in interpretation with non-c-commanding indefinite QPs in apparent violation of structural constraints on QP-pronoun relations (Reinhart 1976). Recent research (Moulton & Han 2018) has hypothesized that the real-time processing of donkey pronouns may not involve retrieval of the co-varying indefinite QP as an antecedent, because non-c-commanding QPs are assumed to be inaccessible to retrieval. We tested this hypothesis with a self-paced reading study that compared the processing of standard co-referential pronouns and donkey pronouns in Norwegian. Contrary to the hypothesis, our results indicate that donkey pronouns retrieve a feature-matching antecedent from memory in a manner analogous to how co-referential pronouns retrieve a referential antecedent. Our findings imply that retrieval of a feature-matching antecedent is a necessary step in the processing of all pronouns, irrespective of their ultimate interpretation. Moreover, retrieval does not uniformly ignore non-referential NPs that fail to c-command a pronoun. We briefly discuss the implications of these findings for psycholinguistic models of anaphora resolution and formal theories of donkey pronouns.

Repair or accommodation? Split antecedent ellipsis and the limits of repair

Abstract: We begin from the assumption that the grammar requires syntactic matching between an elided verb phrase (VP) and its antecedent. When a fully matching antecedent cannot be found, the antecedent will be repaired if there is evidence for the repair, only a few operations are needed, and the repair reverses a natural speech error. This view correctly predicts that acceptability judgements are inversely correlated with the degree of difficulty of the repair (Arregui et al. 2006; Frazier 2013) and lower when a repair is required than when it is not (Kim & Runner 2018; Clifton et al. 2019), for example.Split antecedent ellipsis looks like a proto-typical case of repair since by definition no matching antecedent is available. It will be argued, however, that split antecedent ellipsis does not involve repair. The results of several experiments show that split antecedent ellipsis does not exhibit the hallmarks of repair. Rather it may involve ordinary accommodation. This raises the question of when the processor repairs an input and when it merely accommodates an antecedent of the appropriate type. We suggest that repair to a grammatical form is unavailable for split ellipsis because syntactic representation is only reliably available for the last independent clause.