Antecedent (grammar)

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

Japanese sentence structure analyzing system

Abstract: Japanese sentence structure analyzing systems (1, 4 and 5) comprising an adjectival modification clause deciding section (32) for judging the case relationship between an indeterminate-meaning word and a predicate to be modified by the indeterminate-meaning word after the word when a Japanese sentence to be analyzed includes an adjectival modification clause and the meaning of the word to be modified by the adjectival modification clause is indeterminate, adding the meaning restriction information to be defined by the case relationship with the above predicate to the above indeterminate-meaning word in accordance with the above judgment result, and judging the case relationship between the indeterminate-meaning word and the predicate in the adjectival modification clause so that the type of the adjectival modification clause modifying an antecedent can accurately be decided even if the antecedent is an indeterminate-meaning word such as "matter", "thing", or "of".

Logophoric and anaphoric 'otagai' in Japanese: an acceptability study

Abstract: This study revolves around the Japanese reciprocal pronoun otagai ‘each other’. Native Japanese speakers were asked to judge the acceptability of 48 Japanese sentences. The goal was to see if they would treat otagai as a logophor if it resided in the embedded possessor position of the embedded object. A comparison was made between logophoric sentences whose only possible antecedent was in the same embedded clause as otagai, and logophoric sentences whose only possible antecedent lay outside of the embedded clause in the position of the matrix subject. Sentences which had otagai in a syntactically anaphoric position in the embedded clause were added for comparison. They too had the only possible antecedent either inside the embedded clause or outside of the clause in the matrix subject position. The results show that the anaphoric sentences had a low level of acceptability in the cases where long-distance binding was necessary and a high level of acceptability when it was not. A high level of acceptability was found for the logophoric sentences which did not require long-distance binding. In the case of the logophoric sentences which did require long-distance binding, there was an even distribution between low and high levels of acceptability. It was concluded that otagai in the embedded possessor position of an embedded object can indeed take a long-distance antecedent if context allows for it. (Less)

Literal Reconstruction: the Motivation and Characterization

Abstract: Assuming that himself, being an anaphor, must be c-commanded by its antecedent in order to be appropriately licensed,l) we are led to conclude that the moved phrase containing the anaphor behaves as if i t were in the intermediate or the base position with respect to binding. T h s phenomenon is known as reconstruction in the literature. Among the possible approaches to this phenomenon are those that are usually referred to as "reconstruction" approaches. Hence, a terminological confusion may arise between "reconstruction" referring to the phenomenon and that referring to the operation. In this paper, however, the term 'reconstruction' refers to the

Reambiguating: onthenon-monotonicity of disambiguation

Abstract: The relation between lexical ambiguity and disambiguation ismostly approached from an intra-sentential perspective. Thus, when analyzing the ambiguity and disambiguation of a lexical item, one tends to study its variance in interpretation when it is modified by or occurs as an argument of other lexical items. Broadening this perspective, this paper shows that there are important insights into the nature of disambiguation to be gained by studying more closely how ambiguous expressions behave in contexts spanningmore than one sentence. More specifically, we introduce new data involving anaphora resolution with the following two characteristics: (i) a potentially ambiguous antecedent which is disambiguated in its local context, and (ii) anaphora which refer to one of the possible readings of the antecedent which was not selected in the local antecedent context. We argue that these data call for a revision of how we conceive of and formalize the process of disambiguation, introducing the notion of reambiguation, which characterizes the process of reintroducing alternative interpretations which were originally excluded by disambiguation. The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we discuss properties of ambiguity and disambiguation. We also give an informal overview of our approach, including a discussionof the notionof reambiguation. In Section 3, the formal basis of our analysis is presented. In Section 4, we present the analysis and discuss some consequences of our approach for formal discourse semantics in general. Section 5 concludes the paper.

Anaphora Resolution in Croatian by English-Croatian Professional Translators and Translation Trainees

Abstract: This thesis reports on the results of an experimental study investigating the resolution of intra-sentential anaphora and cataphora in Croatian in three native speaker groups English-Croatian professional translators, English-Croatian translation trainees and a control group of non-translators. The aim of the study was to investigate whether the professional translators and translation trainees were influenced by their use of and exposure to English, their L2, resulting in L1 attrition. The participants were administered a picture selection task in which they read sentences containing null and overt subject pronouns referring to an antecedent that came either before (anaphora) or after the pronoun (cataphora). After each sentence they had to choose between three pictures that showed the antecedent as the subject, the object or an extra-linguistic referent. The professional translators and the translation trainees did not select the subject as the overt pronoun antecedent more often than the control group in sentences with anaphor. In sentences with cataphora, the translation trainees selected the subject the least, while the professional translators selected it slightly more often than the controls. No evidence of L1 attrition was found.