Anaphoric Noun Research Articles

Um estudo de caso sobre o uso do artigo em inscrições dialetais gregas

This paper aims at discussing the usage of the definite article with common nouns in Ancient Greek (AG), based on a case-study of the noun ἡμέραις (hēmerais/day.dat.pl) in epigraphic inscriptions. We propose that the use of the article in the inscriptions can be accounted for by the grammaticalization of identifiability (Lyons, 1999). Given that the article appeared in AG through the grammaticalization of the demonstrative (Roberts; Roussou, 2003), we postulate that its use began as a marker for contexts in which the referents of the nouns were identifiable by their description. Diachronically, and during the time span of our corpus (containing inscriptions from V BC to III AD), the language has formalized some contexts as arthrous, to be marked as definite – starting from the prototypically identifiable ones –, and some as anarthrous. Namely, anaphoric nouns or nouns modified by qualifying adjuncts are always arthrous, even when the referent is not properly identifiable, while quantifying adjuncts occur with nouns that are anarthrous. Consequently, the distribution of the presence and absence of article did not happen evenly throughout the variants of AG: only Gortyn’s dialect marks with an article nouns that do not have either a qualifying modifier or anaphor, but only quantification. The first section presents the studies on the definiteness of AG. The second section discusses instances in which the nominal heads have modifiers. The third section analyses the occurrences in which the noun is arthrous only with a cardinal number as modifier, and the fourth gathers the conclusion of the analysis.

The Discourse Functions of Overspecified Anaphoric Expressions in Biblical Hebrew Narrative: Genesis 12-24 as a Test Case

Abstract In Biblical Hebrew, as in other languages, anaphoric reference is often overspecified; that is, an anaphoric noun (lexical anaphora) is used in a place where the inflection of the verb (inflectional anaphora) would be a sufficient indicator as to who is being referred to. The present study investigates the function of overspecified subject referents in Biblical Hebrew narrative discourse. It is found that overspecification can be associated with three main textual phenomena, namely, events of general relevance, subject referent initiative, and various textual discontinuities. The function of indicating subject referent initiative lies behind many of the occurrences of lexical anaphora at the beginning of episodic units, but it may also occur within episodes. The different functions of overspecification and inflectional anaphora arise as a result of the different mental processes triggered by lexical and deictic anaphora, whereby the former evokes general, contextindependent knowledge about the referent and impedes the access to the information contained in the previous clause, whereas the latter makes it immediately available.

Antecedent Frequency Effects on Anaphoric Pronoun Resolution: Evidence from Spanish.

High-frequency words are usually understood and produced faster than low-frequency words. Although the effect of word frequency is a reliable phenomenon in many domains of language processing, it remains unclear whether and how frequency affects pronominal anaphoric resolution. We evaluated this issue by means of two self-paced reading experiments. Native speakers of Spanish read sentences containing the anaphoric noun or pronoun at the subject syntactic position (Experiment 1) or at the object syntactic position (Experiment 2) while the antecedent of the anaphor was either a high-frequency or a low-frequency word. Results showed that nominal anaphors were read faster when referring to high-frequency than to low-frequency antecedents, and faster when referring to subjects than to objects. Critically, pronoun reading times were unaffected by the frequency and by the syntactic position of the antecedent. These results are congruent with theories assuming that syntactic information of the words is not frequency sensitive.

Las etiquetas discursivas: del mantenimiento a la construcción del referente

Las etiquetas discursivas se definen en este artículo como sintagmas nominales anafóricos que condensan el contenido de una o más predicaciones del discurso y las categorizan o conceptualizan de acuerdo con el plan del discurso elaborado por el emisor (ej. este fenómeno, tal argumento). El objetivo de este artículo es caracterizar el funcionamiento anafórico de las etiquetas discursivas. Para ello, se parte de un análisis manual de corpus con el propósito de identificar las diferentes unidades sintáctico-discursivas que pueden funcionar como antecedente textual de una etiqueta discursiva. Una vez delimitadas e identificadas estas unidades, se analiza la capacidad de cada una de ellas para funcionar como expresiones referenciales, siguiendo la concepción de referencia definida por la gramática cognitiva, que gira en torno a la noción de anclaje (grounding). El análisis realizado permite, por una parte, situar el etiquetaje discursivo en el continuo entre las relaciones de anáfora directa y las de anáfora indirecta; y por otra, diferenciar tres posibilidades de funcionamiento cognitivo de las etiquetas discursivas (mantenimiento del referente, reificación del referente o construcción del referente), en función de la unidad sintáctico-discursiva que actúa como antecedente textual. Este artículo pone de relieve la necesidad de tener en cuenta estas unidades a la hora de caracterizar el funcionamiento de procedimientos de encapsulación como las etiquetas discursivas.

Generalizing nouns

This paper deals with specific nouns that are discussed from the semantic point of view as unspecific and abstract. From the functional perspective they can be seen as components of certain lexicogrammatical patterns used to compose a text. Therefore this specific functional noun group is identified on the junction between lexis and grammar. These nouns have not been detected by Lithuanian linguists, but they have been identified and analyzed in the English langauge. Nouns such as aim, fact, problem, thing, etc. are given different names by different linguists: container nouns, general nouns, unspecific nouns, anaphoric nouns, carrier nouns, shell nouns, signalling nouns, etc. Nevertheless, all of them share the same features. They are of unspecific meaning and perform the function of generalizing stretches of text; therefore, they are called generalizing nouns in this paper. As these nouns are of abstract meaning, they require specific complementation in the text; alternately, these nouns are chosen when the need is to generalize and to sum up certain parts of a text. This paper describes research on English generalizing nouns; discusses possibilities of identifying and classifying Lithuanian generalizing nouns; and presents a typical case of the usage of the noun dalykas (thing).

L’anaphore syntaxiquement lourde dans Oliver Twist ou du possible “jeu” dans la reprise

Dit artikel handelt over syntactisch zware anaforen, een terugkerend stijlgegeven in Oliver Twist, en er wordt gekeken naar de gehanteerde vertaalstrategieën in een corpus van vier Franse vertalingen (twee vertalingen uit de negentiende, en twee uit de twintigste eeuw). In deze twee onderdelen wordt er steeds teruggegrepen naar de dubbele betekenis van het Franse woord “ jeu” : het spel van woorden waar de auteur zich mee inlaat, wordt verbonden aan een ander spel waarbij de vertaler zich sommige speelse vrijheden vooroorlooft bij de vertaling van die anaforen. In dit artikel worden de verschillende syntactische strategieën die de vertaler aanwendt om de vertaling van nominale anaforen lichter te maken geanalyseerd, gaande van ingrepen om de vertaling slechts minder zwaar te maken, tot ingrepen waarbij de nominale anaforen volledig worden weggelaten. De strategieën geven blijk van twee verschillende stilistische oriëntaties : een gerichtheid op een vloeiende tekst bij de negentiende eeuwse vertalers en de gerichtheid op een exacte weergave van de brontekst bij de vertalers uit de twintigste eeuw. De vertaalkeuzen staan niet los van de komische functie die genoemde metaforen in Dickens teksten hebben.

Effects of role typicality on processing person information in German: Evidence from an ERP study

The present ERP study investigated how reference resolution is affected by semantic cues to referent gender such as the gender typicality of role names. Participants read general statements about social and occupational groups denoted by a role name (e.g., pilots, florists), which was followed by a co-referring NP with masculine, feminine or neutral lexical gender (e.g., these men/women/people) that could either semantically match, mismatch or be neutral to the role name's gender typicality. The study was run in German. Between 300 and 400 ms (N400) responses to all anaphors were more negative after typically male than after typically female antecedents. Between 500 and 700 ms (P600) role name typicality interacted with the lexical gender of the anaphor. Responses to feminine anaphors were more positive in case of incongruent compared to congruent typicality of the antecedent. The effects suggest that participants anticipate a possible semantic incongruity before the anaphor is actually resolved. They, furthermore show that different cues to referent gender are conceptually integrated after 500 ms following the onset of the anaphoric noun. Results are discussed with regard to two-stage models of reference resolution.

Conceptual similarity effects on working memory in sentence contexts: Testing a theory of anaphora

The degree of semantic similarity between an anaphoric noun phrase (e.g., the bird) and its antecedent (e.g., a robin) is known to affect the anaphor resolution process, but the mechanisms that underlie this effect are not known. One proposal (Almor, 1999) is that semantic similarity triggers interference effects in working memory and makes two crucial assumptions: First, semantic similarity impairs working memory just as phonological similarity does (e.g., Baddeley, 1992), and, second, this impairment interferes with processes of sentence comprehension. We tested these assumptions in two experiments that compared recall accuracy between phonologically similar, semantically similar, and control words in sentence contexts. Our results do not provide support for Almor's claims: Phonological overlap decreased recall accuracy in sentence contexts, but semantic similarity did not. These results shed doubt on the idea that semantic interference in working memory is an underlying mechanism in anaphor resolution.

The others Compared to each other – Consequences for the Theory of Reciprocity

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The interplay between semantic and referential aspects of anaphoric noun phrase resolution: Evidence from ERPs

In this event-related brain potential (ERP) study, we examined how semantic and referential aspects of anaphoric noun phrase resolution interact during discourse comprehension. We used a full factorial design that crossed referential ambiguity with semantic incoherence. Ambiguous anaphors elicited a sustained negative shift (Nref effect), and incoherent anaphors elicited an N400 effect. Simultaneously ambiguous and incoherent anaphors elicited an ERP pattern resembling that of the incoherent anaphors. These results suggest that semantic incoherence can preclude readers from engaging in anaphoric inferencing. Furthermore, approximately half of our participants unexpectedly showed common late positive effects to the three types of problematic anaphors. We relate the latter finding to recent accounts of what the P600 might reflect, and to the role of individual differences therein.

Collocations and colligations associated with discourse functions of unspecific anaphoric nouns

This paper investigates how particular collocations and colligations are associated with discourse functions of unspecific anaphoric nouns. Unspecific anaphoric nouns such as problem, reason, idea and fault, called labels here, encapsulate and replace a preceding stretch of discourse. Such nouns used as a cohesive device also perform an evaluative function by recategorizing their specific meanings. Labels prefer particular syntactic environments according to the discourse function that is highlighted. Corpus-based research also reveals that unspecific nouns differ in their favoured syntactic pattern and in the favoured premodifiers used in each pattern. Differences between writing and speech in collocations and colligations associated with labels are also attributed to the different discourse functions they realize in each genre. paper argues that discourse dimensions should be brought into collocational and colligational descriptions of words that have discourse-managing functions.

Tense as discourse anaphor

In this paper, I consider a range of English expressions and show that their context-dependency can be characterized in terms of two properties:1. They specify entities in an evolving of the that the listener is constructing;2. The particular entity specified depends on another entity in that part of the evolving discourse model that the listener is currently attending to.Such expressions have been called anaphors. I show how tensed clauses share these characteristics, usually just attributed to anaphoric noun phrases. This not only allows us to capture in a simple way the oft-stated but difficult-to-prove intuition that tense is anaphoric, but also contributes to our knowledge of what is needed for understanding narrative text.

What’s in a (Role) Name? Formal and Conceptual Aspects of Comprehending Personal Nouns

Two eye-tracking studies assessed effects of grammatical and conceptual gender cues in generic role name processing in German. Participants read passages about a social or occupational group introduced by way of a generic role name (e.g., Soldaten/soldiers, Künstler/artists). Later in the passage the gender of this group was specified by the anaphoric expression diese Männer/these men or diese Frauen/these women. Testing masculine generic role names of male, female or neutral conceptual gender (Exp. 1) showed that a gender mismatch between the role name's conceptual gender and the anaphor significantly slowed reading immediately before and after the anaphoric noun. A mismatch between the antecedent's grammatical gender and the anaphor slowed down the reading of the anaphoric noun itself. Testing grammatically gender-unmarked role names (Exp. 2) revealed a general male bias in participants' understanding, irrespective of grammatical or conceptual gender. The experiments extend previous findings on gender effects to non-referential role names and generic contexts. Theoretical aspects of gender and plural reference as well as gender information in mental models are discussed.

When anaphor resolution fails: Partial encoding of anaphoric inferences

Klin, Weingartner, Guzmán, and Levine (2004) Levine, Guzmán, and Klin (2000) concluded that readers fail to resolve noun phrase anaphors when the antecedent is difficult to retrieve from memory and the inference is not necessary for comprehension. In four experiments we investigated the hypothesis that these inferences were actually partially encoded. Although the results of a lexical decision task demonstrated that readers did not encode a specific lexical item, the results of a reading time measure indicated that they treated the anaphoric noun phrases as co-referential, having reinstated some features from the antecedent episode. We conclude that readers were satisfied with an underspecified representation ( Ferreira, Bailey, & Ferraro, 2002; Sanford, 2002); although they knew that an antecedent was present in the passage, they did not devote the resources to fully reinstate it. Further, readers can quickly evaluate the importance of text inputs to comprehension and adjust their attentional resources accordingly.

Comprehending anaphoric metaphors.

In this study we investigate the comprehension of various kinds of anaphoric metaphors in context. We describe an experiment that manipulated the metaphoricity of simple noun + verb + ending sentences by using either a metaphoric noun or a metaphoric verb or both. Our results show that metaphoric nouns affect sentence comprehension to a greater extent than do metaphoric verbs. Thus, even though there were no sentence-reading time differences between metaphoric and literal targets, metaphoric nouns were read more slowly than were literal nouns, and they also affected the reading time of the following verb. Moreover, in trials involving metaphoric-noun targets, participants read the endings of the targets faster and made more mistakes in answering posttrial questions than they did in literal-noun trials. We argue that these results suggest a comprehension deficit for anaphoric noun metaphors even when they are preceded by a context.

On the interpretation of anaphoric noun phrases: towards a full understanding of partial matches

Starting from the assumption that NPs of all kinds can be anaphoric on antecedents in the linguistic context, we work towards a general theory of context-dependent NP meaning. Two complicating factors are that the relation between anaphors and antecedents is by no means unrestricted and that often there is a partial match between anaphor and antecedent. We argue that the presuppositions-as-anaphors approach of van der Sandt provides a natural starting point for our enterprise. Unfortunately, this theory has a number of deficiencies for our purposes, in particular where the treatment of partial matches is concerned. We propose a number of modifications of van der Sandt's formal theory and apply the modified algorithm first to definite NPs and later to NPs of all kinds. The resulting modified version of the presuppositions-as-anaphors theory is argued to be more general, formally more precise, and empirically more adequate than its predecessor.

On the interpretation of anaphoric noun phrases: towards a full understanding of partial matches

On the interpretation of anaphoric noun phrases: towards a full understanding of partial matches

Procedural vocabulary as a device to organize meaning and discourse

Abstract Procedural vocabulary has been defined as a type of core vocabulary with low lexicality and high indexicality (Widdowson 1983 1984; Robinson 1989 1992). This paper analyzes the linguistic notion of procedural vocabulary and proposes that several vocabulary concepts described by different authors (e.g. Vocabulary 3, Anaphoric nouns) are part of this type of vocabulary. The paper also discusses the role of procedural vocabulary in discourse and suggests that the concepts of schema and procedure are relevant for the description of this type of vocabulary and its categorization into two types: procedural defining vocabulary and procedural organizing vocabulary. Procedural defining vocabulary is used for negotiating meaning and for defining concepts related to a particular content schema. Procedural organizing vocabulary is concerned with the actualization of formal schemata and contributes to organizing the development of the discourse.

The Interpretation of Anaphoric Noun Phrases Time Course, and Effects of Overspecificity

The Interpretation of Anaphoric Noun Phrases Time Course, and Effects of Overspecificity

The Interpretation of Anaphoric Noun Phrases Time Course, and Effects of Overspecificity

Two experiments investigated the interpretation of anaphoric noun phrases, and in particular those that could 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.