Antecedent (grammar)

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

On the syntax and semantics of appositive relative clauses

Abstract: In this paper I analyze appositive relative clauses that modify quantified nominals. This new data supports a theory of appositives as a phenomenon at the interface between syntax/semantics and discourse. More precisely, I propose that the appositive relative pronoun is E-type (see Sells 1985a and Demirdache 1991), and that it needs to follow its antecedent. I also propose that appositives are propositions (type t), merged to the DP they modify in narrow syntax, and moved to the matrix CP after Spell-Out and at the discourse level. I claim that merge within discourse is linear order dependent, and that at the discourse level, both PF and LF representations are available to the computational component. The designed system accounts for differences between appositives and restrictives and makes the strong empirical prediction that prenominal relative clauses cannot be true appositives.

They're digging up the road again: The processing cost of Institutional They

Abstract: It is commonplace to use the pronoun they to refer to agents in certain situations without ever providing a referent, as in On the train, they served really bad coffee. Such an example we call "Institutional They", because such defaults typically represent the actions of some agent tied stereotypically to a situation. These cases represent an important subset of unheralded pronouns (Gerrig, 1986), pronouns without any explicit antecedent. While in many situations, the occurrence of referential pronouns without explicit antecedents entails a processing cost, an eye-tracking experiment revealed no reliable detectable costs associated with Institutional They. However, there were for singular pronouns without antecedents in the same situations. We argue that Institutional They cases result from properties of plural pronouns (they and them). These will accept underspecified type-referents, while singular pronouns require specified token-referents. Failure to identify token-referents results in disruption of processing in the case of singulars, but not in the case of the plurals.

Automatic Pronominal Anaphora Resolution in English Texts

Abstract: Anaphora is a common phenomenon in discourses as well as an important research issue in the applications of natural language processing In this paper, anaphora resolution is achieved by employing WordNet ontology and heuristic rules The proposed system identifies both intra-sentential and inter-sentential antecedents of anaphors Information about animacy is obtained by analyzing the hierarchical relations of nouns and verbs in the surrounding context The identification of animacy entities and pleonastic-it usage in English discourses are employed to promote resolution accuracy Traditionally, anaphora resolution systems have relied on syntactic, semantic or pragmatic clues to identify the antecedent of an anaphor Our proposed method makes use of WordNet ontology to identify animate entities as well as essential gender information In the animacy agreement module, the property is identified by the hypernym relation between entities and their unique beginners defined in WordNet In addition, the verb of the entity is also an important clue used to reduce the uncertainty An experiment was conducted using a balanced corpus to resolve the pronominal anaphora phenomenon The methods proposed in (Lappin and Leass, 94) and (Mitkov, 01) focus on the corpora with only inanimate pronouns such as "it" or "its" Thus the results of intra-sentential and inter-sentential anaphora distribution are different In an experiment using Brown corpus, we found that the distribution proportion of intra-sentential anaphora is about 60% Seven heuristic rules are applied in our system; five of them are preference rules, and two are constraint rules They are derived from syntactic, semantic, pragmatic conventions and from the analysis of training data A relative measurement indicates that about 30% of the errors can be eliminated by applying heuristic module

Raising the Dead

Abstract: Traditional zombie movies have no direct antecedent in the written word because of the monsters' essentially visual nature; zombies don't think or speak—they simply act. This unique embodiment of horror recalls Sigmund Freud's concept of the uncanny, which finds itself better suited to filmic representations rather than prose renditions.