Abstract
When people tend to refer to a previous mentioned discourse entity, they can use various types of anaphoric expressions, such as pronouns, definite noun phrases, proper names or expressions that are introduced by a lexical modifier or a comparative adjective. Among the different types of anaphoric expressions, pronoun is most common and frequently used which contains only a little information about the referent, while definite expressions contain much richer semantic information. As pronouns contain very little information on their own, they are always ambiguous. The cognitive mechanism that underlies the comprehension of pronouns, especially the ones with ambiguities, catches the interests of many researchers. Various tasks have been used to investigate this issue and the results did not go for the same direction. A combination of multiple research methods is needed for a better and deeper understanding of anaphora.
Highlights
In order to successfully comprehend a text, language users always have to determine whether expressions in different parts of the text refer to the same discourse entity
When people tend to refer to a previous mentioned discourse entity, they can use various types of anaphoric expressions, such as pronouns, definite noun phrases, proper names or expressions that are introduced by a lexical modifier or a comparative adjective
Anaphora is a common way that people tend to use when producing natural language utterances and the comprehension of anaphors catches the interests of many researchers
Summary
In order to successfully comprehend a text, language users always have to determine whether expressions in different parts of the text refer to the same discourse entity. Anaphora refers to the linguistic relation that a linguistic element refers to another linguistic element in a text which usually occurs before it. The interpretation of the anaphoric expression is usually dependent on the interpreta-. The interpretation of an anaphor is somewhat dependent on its antecedent. The process of determining the antecedent of an anaphor is referred as anaphora resolution. An interesting question is what affects people’s choices of anaphoric expressions in language production and what affects peoples’ resolution of anaphora in language comprehension? Pronouns form a special class of anaphors because of their empty semantic structure, i.e. they do not have an independent meaning from their antecedent. Sentence (1) is an example of pronominal anaphora in which the pronoun “she” need to be referred back to the previously mentioned linguistic entity “Mary” for its interpretation
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