Antecedent (grammar)

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

Evidence for Preschoolers' Understanding of Causal Direction in Extended Causal Sequences.

Abstract: KUN, ANNA. Evidence for Preschoolers' Understanding of Causal Direction in Extended Causal Sequences. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1978, 49, 218-222. The literature on children's causal reasoning indicates that the belief that causes precede their effects in time develops relatively late, sometime during the concrete operational period. The present study examined this issue using methods less dependent on memory and linguistic skills than earlier studies. The subjects were 80 children evenly distributed over the 4 age levels: 41/2, 6, 7, and 8 years. Children were presented with 10 causal chains, each having the form "A caused B caused C" where the events A, B, and C were portrayed on 3 separate cards. Subjects were asked why event B occurred and had to choose as the answer either the antecedent A or the consequent C event. To correct for response bias, after some of the causal chains, subjects either were asked what followed B or were asked a nonsense question. The results showed that children at all 4 age levels answered the why questions virtually without error, even when response bias was taken into account. A second study ruled out the possibility that the high rate of correct responding was an artifact of the order of mention of events. A third study, extending the procedure to even younger children, revealed a significant tendency already among 3-year-olds to answer why questions with antecedent events. The present investigation demonstrates that, contrary to current claims in the literature, the idea that causes precede their effects in time is believed by children who, judging by their age, are still in the preoperational period.

Complement Anaphora and Interpretation

Abstract: Quantificational sentences D(A)(B) allow for subsequent plural anaphoric reference to three sets associated with them: the maximal set A, the reference set A ∩ B and, sometimes, the complement set A ∩ - B. The latter case, where an anaphor refers to the set-theoretical difference of restrictor and scope, has been studied by both psycholinguists and formal semanticists. The phenomenon is particularly interesting because the conditions under which complement anaphora (as this case of anaphora is called) is acceptable depend on formal properties of the antecedent determiner. This paper concentrates on the interpretation of complement anaphora. First, the possibility of reducing complement anaphora to quasi-generic reference to the maximal set (A) is dismissed. Then, I argue that interpreting complement anaphora involves a conflict of several pragmatic constraints. A preliminary optimality theoretic analysis of the paradigm shows that if a strict principle disallowing empty complement set reference is obeyed, complement anaphora can overrule a general preference for reference to A∩B in order to save consistency. Finally, I argue that this non-emptiness condition ought to be reduced to inferability of the existence of a complement set. The contrast between pronominal complement anaphors and other pronouns that link to quantificational sentences is thus explained in terms of a contrast between pronouns with an inferred antecedent and pronouns that choose a salient antecedent.

The critical role of relationship quality in small- and medium-sized enterprise internationalization

Abstract: Due to limited resources, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) carefully develop and leverage relationships with foreign, independent intermediaries. This article investigates “relationship quality,” a collection of intangible organizational resources in the exporter–intermediary relationship that support the internationalization and foreign performance of SMEs. Four dimensions of relationship quality—communication, cooperation, trust, and commitment—are modeled and linked to intermediary performance. Findings highlight the significance of relationship quality, its dimensions, and how they support intermediary performance. Cooperation and commitment are significant performance antecedents. Trust is a significant antecedent of commitment, and communication drives cooperation, trust, and commitment. The study provides SMEs a way to enhance the quality of relationships with, and to help improve the performance of, their intermediaries in export markets.

Underspecification and Anaphora: Theoretical Issues and Preliminary Evidence

Abstract: Much experimental work in psycholinguistics suggests that fully specified syntactic and semantic interpretations are obtained incrementally. The finding that interpretation takes place incrementally is very robust and underlies our own view of sentence processing as well; however, most of this work tends to test very simple interpretive judgments using materials that have clean-cut interpretations, which makes the earlier-expressed view more questionable when applied to semantic interpretation. This article discusses a class of anaphoric expressions that do not appear to have a clear antecedent, referring to data from both corpus analysis and psycholinguistic experiments. We argue that these cases of anaphora are similar to cases of lexical polysemy and propose an explicit semantic representation for such cases.

Differences Between the Morphology of Gender and Number: Evidence from Establishing Coreferences

Abstract: This work investigates the processing of gender and number features in the selection of a pronoun antecedent in Italian. In Italian there are instances of nouns in which gender and number are treated morphologically on a par, i.e., overtly and regularly marked by a suffix. In these cases, are the two features also treated similarly in processing? The experiments used sentences with two possible antecedents (differing in gender or number) in the main clause and a pronoun in the complement clause. The sentences were visually presented, with a unimodal lexical decision task at the end of the sentence. The results showed a selective reactivation of the antecedent matching the pronoun in either gender or number. The results are discussed in relation to previous Italian experiments, which found that in sentence internal position there is selective reactivation of only the number-matching antecedent. They are taken to support a model of the coreference processor in which gender and number features are used at different processing stages, due to their different syntactic representation.