Antecedent (grammar)

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

Is the basic conditional probabilistic

Abstract: Nine experiments examined whether individuals treat the meaning of basic conditional assertions as deterministic or probabilistic. In Experiments 1-4, participants were presented with either probabilistic or deterministic relations, which they had to describe with a conditional. These experiments consistently showed that people tend only to use the basic if p then q construction to describe deterministic relations between antecedent and consequent, whereas they use a probabilistically qualified construction, if p then probably q, to describe probabilistic relations-suggesting that the default interpretation of the conditional is deterministic. Experiments 5 and 6 showed that when directly asked, individuals typically report that conditional assertions admit no exceptions (i.e., they are seen as deterministic). Experiments 7-9 showed that individuals judge the truth of conditional assertions in accordance with this deterministic interpretation. Together, these results pose a challenge to probabilistic accounts of the meaning of conditionals and support mental models, formal rules, and suppositional accounts.

Respecting Relations: Memory Access and Antecedent Retrieval in Incremental Sentence Processing.

Abstract: Title of dissertation: RESPECTING RELATIONS: MEMORY ACCESS AND ANTECEDENT RETRIEVAL IN INCREMENTAL SENTENCE PROCESSING Dave W. Kush, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Dissertation directed by: Professor Colin Phillips Department of Linguistics This dissertation uses the processing of anaphoric relations to probe how linguistic information is encoded in and retrieved from memory during real-time sentence comprehension. More specifically, the dissertation attempts to resolve a tension between the demands of a linguistic processor implemented in a general-purpose cognitive architecture and the demands of abstract grammatical constraints that govern language use. The source of the tension is the role that abstract configurational relations (such as c-command, Reinhart 1983) play in constraining computations. Anaphoric dependencies are governed by formal grammatical constraints stated in terms of relations. For example, Binding Principle A (Chomsky 1981) requires that antecedents for local anaphors (like the English reciprocal each other) bear the c-command relation to those anaphors. In incremental sentence processing, antecedents of anaphors must be retrieved from memory. Recent research has motivated a model of processing that exploits a cue-based, associative retrieval process in content-addressable memory (e.g. Lewis, Vasishth & Van Dyke 2006) in which relations such as c-command are difficult to use as cues for retrieval. As such, the c-command constraints of formal grammars are predicted to be poorly implemented by the retrieval mechanism. I examine retrieval’s sensitivity to three constraints on anaphoric dependencies: Principle A (via Hindi local reciprocal licensing), the Scope Constraint on bound-variable pronoun licensing (often stated as a c-command constraint, though see Barker 2012), and Crossover constraints on pronominal binding (Postal 1971, Wasow 1972). The data suggest that retrieval exhibits fidelity to the constraints: structurally inaccessible NPs that match an anaphoric element in morphological features do not interfere with the retrieval of an antecedent in most cases considered. In spite of this alignment, I argue that retrieval’s apparent sensitivity to c-command constraints need not motivate a memory access procedure that makes direct reference to c-command relations. Instead, proxy features and general parsing operations conspire to mimic the extension of a system that respects c-command constraints. These strategies provide a robust approximation of grammatical performance while remaining within the confines of a independentlymotivated general-purpose cognitive architecture. RESPECTING RELATIONS: MEMORY ACCESS AND ANTECEDENT RETRIEVAL IN INCREMENTAL SENTENCE PROCESSING

Resolution of the Antecedent of a Plural Pronoun: Symmetry from Relational Noun Phrases

Abstract: Koh and Clifton (2002) proposed the performance model of the resolution of a plural pronoun with the two stages of construction and selection. They...

The nature of interlanguage: SLA of English reflexives

Abstract: This article examines experimental data of SLA of English reflexives. A carefully designed experiment to tap syntactic constraints of interlanguage grammar and the consideration of the consistency of responses of individual subjects reveal the systematicity of interlanguage grammar much more explicitly than previous studies. Of subjects' behaviour, 95% perfectly matches the sanctions of parameter values suggested in Wexler and Manzini's (1987) Governing Category Parameter and Proper Antecedent Parameter. However, re-examined in the light of the alternative hypotheses in the Binding Theory since Wexler and Manzini (1987), interlanguage grammar may violate the sanctions of Universal Grammar (UG) parameters for the variaton of referential properties of anaphors. Taking into account of this new evidence, the author suggests: 1) SLA is systematic; 2) L2 learners' interpretations of English reflexives are attributed to their linguistic knowledge; and 3) UG is available in SLA, and SLA of the referential propert...

Zero Pronoun Resolution can Improve the Quality of J-E Translation

Abstract: In Japanese, particularly, spoken Japanese, subjective, objective and possessive cases are very often omitted. Such Japanese sentences are often translated by Japanese-English statistical machine translation to the English sentence whose subjective, objective and possessive cases are omitted, and it causes to decrease the quality of translation. We performed experiments of J-E phrase based translation using Japanese sentence, whose omitted pronouns are complemented by human. We introduced 'antecedent F-measure' as a score for measuring quality of the translated English. As a result, we found that it improves the scores of antecedent F-measure while the BLEU scores were almost unchanged. Every effectiveness of the zero pronoun resolution differs depending on the type and case of each zero pronoun.