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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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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper investigated the interpretation of anaphoric noun phrases, and in particular those that could only be linked to their antecedents via knowledge-based inferences and found that adding extra information in the anaphor to the representation of the referent disrupts the process of linking that noun phrase to its antecedent.
Abstract: Two experiments investigated the interpretation of anaphoric noun phrases, and in particular those thatcould only be linked to their antecedents via knowledge-based inferences. The first experiment showed that much of the inferential processing was carried out as the anaphoric noun phrase was read, although there was some indication that inferential processing continued to the end of the clause. The second experiment attempted to establish why anaphoric noun phrases that are more specific than their antecedents cause problems. It showed that the difficulty did not lie in adding the extra information carried by the anaphor to the representation of the referent. Rather, we suggest, putting extra information in the anaphoric noun phrase disrupts the process of linking that noun phrase to its antecedent.

21 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a review of the statistical prominence of usage patterns such as A CRIMINAL is a criminal no matter what THEY wear in spoken English and the presence of such patterns in written English since the gender-neutral language reform movement of the 197os is presented.
Abstract: This article is about the use of plural third-person pronouns with grammatically singular, indefinite, generic antecedents in the prose of current U.S. newspapers. After a review of studies of the statistical prominence of usage patterns such as A CRIMINAL is a criminal no matter what THEY wear in spoken English and the presence of such patterns in written English since the gender-neutral language reform movement of the 197os, an argument is made for why they is an effective and at times optimal choice as an epicene pronoun. Then, a systematic sampling of pronoun chains in contemporary newspapers is used to investigate the effect of such factors as quoted versus nonquoted text, writers' sex, and antecedent type on rates of they usage relative to two other epicene alternatives: historically prescribed he and currently available he or she. The results indicate that although male and female writers use they at similar rates, females use he less often than males do. The results also indicate that with lexical NP antecedents, both male and female writers exhibit lower rates of they and greater use of the disjunction he or she. This is especially true with sex-stereotyped, occupational NP antecedents, such as a CEO or a doctor. It is argued that this pattern of use in contemporary newspaper prose is because of heightened sensitivity to sexism and because of psycholinguistic factors that allow male but not female writers to see themselves included in a generic he-reference chain.

21 citations

01 Jan 2007
TL;DR: In this article, an LTAG analysis of reflexives like himself and reciprocals like each other is presented, where anaphoric items need to find a c-commanding antecedent from which they retrieve (part of) their own denotation and with which they syntactically agree.
Abstract: This paper presents an LTAG analysis of reflexives like himself and reciprocals like each other. These items need to find a c-commanding antecedent from which they retrieve (part of) their own denotation and with which they syntactically agree. The relation between anaphoric item and antecendent must satisfy the following important locality conditions (Chomsky (1981)). First, when the anaphoric item is the argument of a verb, its antecedent can be any (c-commanding and agreeing) NP argument of that same verb. If more than one antecedent is available, the sentence is ambiguous:

21 citations

01 Jan 2009
TL;DR: This paper addresses the question of how the uses of so relate to the deictic and anaphoric uses and explains why a demonstrative expression can function as an intensifying device and a hedging device, respectively.
Abstract: German so is a demonstrative expression which picks up degrees or properties and combines as a modifier with gradable as well as non-gradable expressions. Like other demonstratives it can be used deictically and anaphorically, and in addition occur 'out of the blue', without a demonstration gesture or antecedent. If an 'out of the blue' use of so is combined with a gradable expression it yields an intensifying effect, similar to the degree modifier very. But if it is combined with a non-gradable expression it appears like hedging, the speaker being uncertain whether the term she chose is appropriate. This paper focuses on the uses of so and addresses the question of how they relate to the deictic and anaphoric uses. Provided it is the same lexical item: Why can a demonstrative expression function as an intensifying device and a hedging device, respectively?

21 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1998
TL;DR: This paper presents a robust, knowledge-poor approach to resolving pronouns in technical manuals, which operates on texts pre-processed by a part-of-speech tagger, and can be successfully adapted for other languages with minimum modifications.
Abstract: Most traditional approaches to anaphora resolution rely heavily on linguistic and domain knowledge. One of the disadvantages of developing a knowledge-based system, however, is that it is a very labour-intensive and time-consuming task. This paper presents a robust, knowledge-poor approach to resolving pronouns in technical manuals, which operates on texts pre-processed by a part-of-speech tagger. Input is checked against agreement and for a number of antecedent indicators. Candidates are assigned scores by each indicator and the candidate with the highest score is returned as the antecedent. Evaluation reports a success rate of 89.7% which is better than the success rates of the approaches selected for comparison and tested on the same data. In addition, preliminary experiments show that the approach can be successfully adapted for other languages with minimum modifications.

21 citations


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