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Antecedent (grammar)

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


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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present the case of an aphasic patient who shows a selective impairment in interpreting syntactic structures on a test of sentence comprehension involving object manipulation, where the patient makes errors in assigning the antecedents of phonologically empty NPs called traces (Chomsky, 1982 a,b) in sentences like John seems to Bill to be shaving.
Abstract: We present the case of an aphasic patient who shows a selective impairment in interpreting syntactic structures on a test of sentence comprehension involving object manipulation. KG makes errors in assigning the antecedents of phonologically empty NPs called traces (Chomsky, 1982 a,b) in sentences like John seems to Bill to be shaving. He is significantly better at choosing the correct antecedent of another type of empty NP, namely subject- and object- controlled PRO (John persuaded Bill to shave, John promised Bill to shave). He has no trouble choosing the correct antecedents of overt pronouns and reflexives and shows no difficulty with syntactic structures that do not contain an empty category. His difficulty with trace is apparent in sentences which have a certain degree of complexity. He also misassigns the antecedent of subject-controlled PRO under one condition: when an overt reflexive or pronoun has PRO as its antecedent (John promised Bill to shave himself). The pattern of impairment sugg...

27 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is suggested that the more prominent case violation in Dutch caused the earlier onset of the positivity in the Dutch study, suggesting that pronoun resolution with gender incongruency between the pronoun and the antecedent suffers from semantic as well as syntactic integration problems.
Abstract: It is well known that both semantic and syntactic information play a role in pronoun resolution in sentences. However, it is unclear what the relative contribution of these sources of information is for the establishment of a coreferential relationship between the pronoun and the antecedent in combination with a local structural case constraint on the pronoun (i.e. case assignment of a pronoun under preposition governing). In a prepositional phrase in German and Dutch, it is the preposition that assigns case to the pronoun. Furthermore, in these languages different overtly case-marked pronouns are used to refer to male and female persons. Thus, one can manipulate biological/syntactic gender features separately from case marking features. The major aim of this study was to determine what the influence of gender information in combination with a local structural case constraint is on the processing of a personal pronoun in a sentence. Event-related brain potential (ERP) experiments were performed in German and in Dutch. In a word by word sentence reading study in German and Dutch, gender congruency between the antecedent and the pronoun was manipulated and/or case assignment by the preposition was violated while ERPs of young native speakers were recorded. The German and the Dutch ERP data showed an enlarged negativity broadly distributed starting approximately 350 ms after onset of the pronoun followed by a late positivity for gender violations. For syntactic incongruencies without gender violations only a positivity was present. The Dutch data showed an earlier onset of the positivity in comparison to German. Finding negativities and positivities for conditions with a gender violation indicates that pronoun resolution with gender incongruency between the pronoun and the antecedent suffers from semantic as well as syntactic integration problems. The presence of a positivity for the syntactically incongruent conditions without gender violations suggests that the processing of incorrect case marking without a gender violation gives rise to syntactic but not semantic integration problems. We suggest that the more prominent case violation in Dutch caused the earlier onset of the positivity in the Dutch study. In addition, the pattern of ERP effects shows that both case and gender information are used almost immediately implying that the local structural constraint affects the resolution process with more processing activity than for a pronoun of which only one source of information is violated or incongruent.

27 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The processing of pronouns is primarily driven by antecedent grammatical role rather than position, whereas the processing of repeated names is most strongly affected by position, suggesting that different representations and processing constraints underlie theprocessing of pronouns and names.
Abstract: A controversial issue in anaphoric processing has been whether processing preferences of anaphoric expressions are affected by the antecedent’s grammatical role or surface position. Using eye tracking, Experiment 1 examined the comprehension of pronouns during reading, which revealed shorter reading times in the pronoun region and later regions when the antecedent was the subject than when it was the prepositional object. There was no effect of antecedent position. Experiment 2 showed that the choice between pronouns and repeated names during language production is also primarily affected by the antecedent’s grammatical role. Experiment 3 examined the comprehension of repeated names, showing a clear effect of antecedent position. Reading times in the name region and in later regions were longer when the antecedent was 1st mentioned than 2nd mentioned, whereas the antecedent’s grammatical role only affected regression measures in the name region, showing more processing difficulty with a subject than prepositional-object antecedent. Thus, the processing of pronouns is primarily driven by antecedent grammatical role rather than position, whereas the processing of repeated names is most strongly affected by position, suggesting that different representations and processing constraints underlie the processing of pronouns and names.

27 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Anne E. Cook1
TL;DR: The results are consistent with a three-stage comprehension model in which information is activated, integrated on the basis of its goodness of fit with the contents of working memory, and then validated against information in long-term memory.
Abstract: Previous researchers have demonstrated that readers may engage in shallow, or incomplete, processing when the semantic overlap between current information and previously encountered information is high. The present study investigated whether these effects would occur during processing of unambiguous noun phrase anaphors, for which there was only a single possible antecedent. Participants read passages containing anaphors that were correct, incorrect but highly related, or incorrect and low-related, with respect to previously encountered information. The time required to process the anaphor was a function of the goodness of fit between the anaphor and the antecedent; anaphors that were incorrect but highly related to the antecedent were processed more quickly than those that were incorrect and low-related. This occurred regardless of the distance between the anaphor and the antecedent. However, reading times results from a spillover sentence indicated that readers subsequently validated the anaphor against the information in memory, resulting in continued processing difficulty for both the incorrect-high- and –low-related anaphor conditions. The results are consistent with a three-stage comprehension model in which information is activated, integrated on the basis of its goodness of fit with the contents of working memory, and then validated against information in long-term memory.

26 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The problem of selecting a reflexive's antecedent as a memory retrieval problem is presented and why the comprehension of reflexives is of special interest for theories of the memory architecture of the sentence processor is illustrated.
Abstract: The distribution of reflexive anaphors has long been of central importance in the development of syntactic theory. In a parallel fashion, research on the comprehension of reflexive anaphors is increasingly influential for theories of syntactic comprehension. In this article, I present the problem of selecting a reflexive's antecedent as a memory retrieval problem and illustrate why the comprehension of reflexives is of special interest for theories of the memory architecture of the sentence processor. I review a range of influential findings on reflexive comprehension, focusing on results that concern the speed and grammatical accuracy of antecedent retrieval. An emerging empirical generalization is that reflexives are relatively immune to retrieval interference, a property that sets them apart from superficially similar syntactic dependencies like subject–verb agreement. Existing data, across languages and across methodologies, suggest that comprehenders retrieve a reflexive's antecedent primarily on the basis of its syntactic position.

26 citations


Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20222
202159
202052
201957
201863
201762