Anaphoric Reference Research Articles

Cross- and multimodal anaphoric references in mystery movies: A cognitive perspective

Abstract The article presents findings from both quantitative and qualitative research regarding the resolution of cross- and multi-modal anaphoric references to objects in two Sherlock Holmes movies directed by Guy Ritchie. The goal is to illustrate how words referring to objects are linked to images depicting the objects as well as sounds produced by the objects to constitute coreferential chains with respect to the viewers’ perception. The theoretical assumptions draw concepts primarily from cognitive linguistics (such as mental spaces, compression, frame-metonymic relations), with additional notions adopted from (verbal) semantics, pragmatics, visual semantics, and film studies. A cognitive account of regular and associative cross- and multimodal anaphora is suggested, along with a model for the representation of cross- and multi-modal coreferential chains for future manual and automated annotation tools. Overall, the work emphasizes the importance of considering both verbal and nonverbal cues in understanding anaphoric references in cinematic contexts by highlighting the cognitive processes involved while viewers integrate information from different modes.

Analysis of Endophoric Reference in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland

This study explores the references in Lewis Carroll's ‘Alice in Wonderland,' using Halliday and Hasan's method of cohesion analysis. Specifically, the present study aims to extract the story's endophoric references (anaphoric and cataphoric) as used by the main character, Alice. By using a qualitative approach, through reading and analyzing the data of Alice’s utterances, it has been revealed that they employ two aspects of reference: anaphoric and cataphoric. There are 153 anaphoric references and 116 cataphoric references. Further, both kinds of reference are divided into two types: personal and demonstrative. It is the personal references that dominate. The researchers were able to clarify the role of anaphora and cataphora in the story as a way of building up cohesiveness in the text, and further recommendations are discussed at the end of the paper.

An ERP-based comparison of gender representations elicited by generic masculine role nouns and the German gender star form

There is an ongoing debate about the linguistic gender forms that should be used to elicit fair mental representations of all genders. While most languages with grammatical gender traditionally use the masculine form to refer to people in a gender-independent way, numerous empirical studies have demonstrated that this form leads to a male bias in mental representations. In German, the so-called gender star form has been proposed as an alternative to the masculine form, aimed at better representing persons with nonmale gender identities. To provide empirical data on this claim, we compared the neural processing mechanisms elicited by the gender star form with those elicited by the generically intended masculine form during reference resolution. Participants in the present ERP study read sentence pairs in which a group of people was introduced with a role noun in one of the two gender forms and then revealed to be partly comprised of men or women. Following the masculine form, anaphoric references to women (vs. men) resulted in an increased ERP amplitude in the P600 range. In contrast, following the gender star form, the P600 amplitude was increased for references to men (vs. women), albeit in a slightly different spatio-temporal range. The present data thus indicate that the gender star form and the generically intended masculine form impose partially different demands on the syntactic operations performed by the brain during reference resolution but that, in the end, neither form elicits gender-balanced mental representations of men and women in German.

German Demonstrative Pronouns in Contrast

German has two demonstrative pronouns: the der, die, das paradigm and the dieser, diese, dies(es) paradigm. Previous studies mainly compared the anaphoric use of der with the personal pronoun er and observed that der refers to less prominent antecedents. However, there are only very few studies that have investigated the differences between these two demonstrative pronouns. We hypothesize that they differ in signaling topic persistence and in accessing contrastive antecedents. We tested these hypotheses in short texts that manipulated the contrast of the antecedent by inducing the expression ‘in contrast to’ vs. ‘together with’ (e.g., the cellist in contrast to the flautist vs. the cellist together with the flautist). Results from our eye-tracking reading Experiment (Experiment 1), in which participants’ eye- movements were monitored while reading sentences, show that (i) readers preferred dieser when referring to the topic of a sentence, and (ii) dieser caused less processing difficulties than der in both contrast and no-contrast contexts. Our sentence completion Experiment (Experiment 2) also confirmed that der and dieser are both used for anaphoric reference to a topical antecedent. Collectively, our experiments provide evidence that dieser functions as inducing topic persistence. These results suggest that there is a need for further experimental investigation into the semantic factors and informational structures influencing the usage of demonstrative pronouns in German.

References in Speech of Selena Gomez Billboard Music Award: Discourse Analysis Study

The purpose of this study is to analyze the function of references within Selena Gomez's Billboard Woman of the Year speech through a comprehensive analysis. The research employs a qualitative descriptive method, with data obtained from a YouTube video posted by the Global TV team on December 2, 2018. To analyze the data, this research utilizes discourse analysis theory from Halliday and Hasan (2013). The study focuses on identifying types of references and what grammatical cohesion is found in each type of reference within the framework of discourse analysis. The distribution of found references is as follows: 49 (35.8%) data for anaphoric reference, 16 (11.7%) for cataphoric reference, and 5 (3.6%) for exophoric reference. In terms of grammatical cohesion, the data are distributed as follows: 32 (23.4%) data for pronouns, 33 (24.1%) for lexical cohesion, and 1 (0.7%) for ellipsis. The study employs systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to delve into speech functions, emphasizing the importance of grammar and language in effective communication. By examining Selena Gomez's speech, the research aims to uncover underlying meanings and cultural influences embedded in her references. Discourse analysis, as a tool, allows for a broader understanding of language's role in society communication, particularly within the realm of celebrity culture. Keywords: Anaphoric, Cataphoric, Exophoric, Discourse Analysis, Reference, Youtube Video

Children's Interpretations of Numerically Quantified Expression Ambiguities: Evidence from Quantified Noun Phrases and Bare Cardinals.

Understanding how children comprehend text by forming links between sentences has been the focus of research for decades. Such research has consistently shown that children use anaphors and resolve ambiguities in a different manner than adults. The present study examined a less-studied anaphoric reference that arises when two numerically quantified expressions (e.g., "three cats… two cats…") are used in the text. Focusing on 249 six- to eight-year-old children and 50 adults for comparison, the study employed a picture selection task across six experiments to assess interpretative preferences in ambiguous and unambiguous discourses containing numerically quantified expressions. The findings indicate a pronounced difference in interpretative strategies: unlike adults, who predominantly adopted an anaphoric subset reading, children showed a consistent preference for the non-anaphoric reading, even in contexts explicitly disambiguated towards this interpretation. This preference persisted across various experimental manipulations, highlighting challenges in text integration and comprehension among children. Contributing to the developmental trajectory of language comprehension, this study underscores the complexity of cognitive development and linguistic interpretation, revealing significant developmental differences in processing numerically quantified expressions and anaphoric references within discourse.

Di che cosa parliamo quando siamo infedeli? Alcune puntualizzazioni sulle valenze di rinvio: anafora, catafora ed esofora

In my paper, I draw an overall picture of the "referential valencies" of a text, i.e. of what we could call the text's referential skeleton. Based on Italian evidence, I give examples of the many kinds of anaphoric, cataphoric and exophoric reference, including elliptical null forms, and I pay special attention to a phenomenon that has been very little debated in the literature, viz "unfaithful" (i.e. lexically varied, e.g. hyperonymic) anaphors, trying to answer the question "What do we talk about when we are unfaithful?". Not surprisingly, the use of unfaithful anaphors depends considerably on the text type, such anaphors being e.g. more frequent in argumentative and narrative texts than in technical texts, and on the degree of text elaboration. This section of my paper is empirically based on three typologically different text corpora.

ANAPHORIC AND CATAPHORIC REFERENCES USED IN THE CHAPEL SHORT STORY

This study aims to analyze the endophoric reference including the types of Anaphora and cataphoric reference that are contained in the short story titled "The Chapel". The researcher uses the descriptive qualitative method to analyze the selection of endophoric reference including the types of Anaphora and cataphoric reference. The data is in the form of a script of "The Chapel" short story. The technique of collecting data by reading the The Chapel short story and then marking words according to the types of anaphoric and cataphoric. The results showed there are 45 anaphoric references and 5 cataphoric references found in the short story.

Scoring Coreference Chains with Split-Antecedent Anaphors

Anaphoric reference is an aspect of language interpretation covering a variety of types of interpretation beyond the simple case of identity reference to entities introduced via nominal expressions covered by the traditional coreference task in its most recent incarnation in ONTONOTES and similar datasets. One of these cases that go beyond simple coreference is anaphoric reference to entities that must be added to the discourse model via accommodation, and in particular split-antecedent references to entities constructed out of other entities, as in split-antecedent plurals and in some cases of discourse deixis. Although this type of anaphoric reference is now annotated in many datasets, systems interpreting such references cannot be evaluated using the Reference coreference scorer Pradhan et al. (2014). As part of the work towards a new scorer for anaphoric reference able to evaluate all aspects of anaphoric interpretation in the coverage of the Universal Anaphora initiative, we propose in this paper a solution to the technical problem of generalizing existing metrics for identity anaphora so that they can also be used to score cases of split-antecedents. This is the first such proposal in the literature on anaphora or coreference, and has been successfully used to score both split-antecedent plural references and discourse deixis in the recent CODI/CRAC anaphora resolution in dialogue shared tasks.

Непрямая анафорическая референция в англоязычном журналистском дискурсе (на материале жанра некролога)

The subject of this research is indirect anaphoric reference viewed as an article means of expression of the mental process of individualization. Consequently, the article focuses on the development of the theory of reference that started to form more than a hundred years ago. The aim of the study is to investigate whether the worked out classification of indirect anaphoric reference is applicable to English journalistic discourse and what is the role of this phenomenon in the realization of the function of impact which is typical of journalistic discourse. The analysis is conducted on the material of extracts borrowed from obituaries found in the editions of The Economist published in 2022 and includes three stages – syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. The extracts from the obituaries are classified in accordance with the type of the link between antecedent and anaphor. As a result, the relevance of the classification for the analyzed type of journalistic discourse is established and the potential of indirect anaphoric reference for carrying out the function of impact is shown.

Text Linguistics of “Textuality”: Making a Sequence of Sentences Communicative English Written Texts

Textuality makes a sequence of sentences a communicative English written text. It, nonetheless, hardly becomes a major theme of foreign language learning in the Indonesian English Writing Classes/context nowadays. This study, therefore, aimed at diagnosing the “incorrect/missing uses of the seven elements of the textuality in the students’ cause and effect essay. Qualitatively, Politeknik Negeri Padang was the locus of the study. The 2nd-year ED students (n=32) were the research participants selected through the convenience sampling techniques. The documentation and observation were the techniques of data collection while the 1967 Corder’s Clinical elicitation was exercised as ways of analysing the data. The findings disclosed that the students missed using nominal substitution and lexical cohesion of repetition and synonym along with incorrectly used verbal and clausal substitution, nominal, verbal and clausal ellipsis, anaphoric and cataphoric references, and lexical cohesion of grammatical and lexical collocations. They, however, succeeded in correctly using three different types of conjunctions and coherence though they flopped to utilise the acceptable phrases of drawing a conclusion. Hyponymy, metonymy and antonymy were ignored. In conclusion, the deficiencies made the students’ sequences of sentences flawed and characterless. It, therefore, encourages EFL teacher to place emphasis on teaching textuality in the English Writing Classes.

Exploring Anaphoric and Cataphoric References Used in “Bright, an English Textbook”

This study aims to investigate the use of anaphoric and cataphoric references in narrative text in “Bright An English” Textbook for 8th-grade junior high school students, and to identify the most commonly used in the texts. This study examined the data that contained the anaphoric and cataphoric by the theory of Halliday and Hasan (1976). The study used a qualitative descriptive approach because it dealt with descriptive. The main data for this study was “Bright, an English textbook” for 8th-grade junior high school students, written by Nur Zaida and published by Erlangga. The results showed those anaphoric and cataphoric references contained in the English textbook; 22 sentences had anaphoric and cataphoric references in detail of which fifteen sentences were anaphoric, and seven sentences were cataphoric. “Bright, an English textbook” for eighth-grade junior high school students frequently uses pronominal anaphora because it addresses the referent of the anaphora with a pronoun. Pronouns were important because they linked sentences, which helped to avoid the nouns being used repeatedly. Besides, the cataphoric reference was rarely used, which is considered more difficult for 8th graders to understand.

Early ERP indices of gender-biased processing elicited by generic masculine role nouns and the feminine–masculine pair form

In most gender-marked languages, the masculine form is used to refer to male people specifically as well as to people of any gender generically. This dual functionality was shown in behavioral studies to lead to male-biased mental representations. Here, using EEG, we targeted the neurophysiological basis of this bias by investigating whether and how the generic masculine influences the early perceptual and cognitive processing of anaphoric references to men and women. We found that ERP amplitudes in the P200 range were larger for references to women than to men after generic masculine role nouns, while amplitudes in the P300 range were larger for references to men than to women after the feminine–masculine pair form. These findings suggest that the generic masculine primes the perceptual system towards processing men and that neither this form nor the feminine–masculine pair form elicits gender-balanced computations during early processing in the human brain.

Anaphoric reference to mereological entities

ABSTRACT Corpus evidence suggests that in contexts in which the presence of multiple antecedents might favor plural reference, the disadvantage observed for singular reference may disappear if the potential antecedents are combined in a group-like plural entity. We examined the relative salience of antecedents in conditions where the context either made a group interpretation available (i.e., mereological entity) (e.g., The engineer hooked up the engine to the boxcar …, where group = train), or not (e.g., The engineer detached the engine from the boxcar …). Results from three experiments in which participants were asked to identify referents for singular versus plural pronouns (Experiment 1), to confirm the referents of pronouns in a sentence completion task (Experiment 2), and to provide paraphrases for given texts (Experiment 3), collectively provided evidence that the creation of a group makes that entity (i) a possible referent for singular anaphoric reference and (ii) more salient than its constituents.

Les fonctions de l’argot du sexe appréhendées au travers des anaphores dans le discours pornographique externe

In the era of a new sexual revolution marked mainly by coital overstimulation (Melzer 2019: 32) and sensory exploration through practices offering new uses of the body (Breton 2017: 188), the designation of an entity in the mental representation that exists in the extralinguistic world seems extremely striking, especially with regard to the construction of anaphoric reference in new media. In this regard, it is important to note that at a time of body worship reinforced by the use of new technologies, various manifestations of love are popularized on social networks as well as on thematic sites that have become essential to strategies of effective marketing. Among these web pages, there are very specific portals, namely those with pornographic content, called X pages, where one can very easily have access to numerous photos and videos allowing users to satisfy different carnal appetites. Indeed, it turns out that the immense popularity and, therefore, the effectiveness of these web portals today is not limited only to their visual side, although it is, of course, the image that plays a key role here. Analysis of a particular genre of external pornographic discourse (Paveau 2014: 50) that we propose in this paper is based on a corpus for which we have collected diastratic variational material from non-standard language, namely a hundred information sheets, referred to as erotic biographies of 93 gay and bisexual porn actors, gathered on the French-speaking site https://www.videosxgays.com. The objective of our study is to analyse the functions of sex slang apprehended through anaphoric references, which are expressed in multimodal texts with a persuasive vocation, where images, films or photos play a key referential role. In short, we will try to highlight the discursive effects that this linguistic variation seems to produce by exploiting the anaphoric reference in a particularly persuasive context, with its enormous range of specific lexical and stylistic means: periphrases, metonymies, hyperboles, etc.

A Comparative Investigation of Anaphoric Reference Devices in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Personal Letters

This paper compares the use of anaphoric reference terms, such as le dit (and its English equivalent the said), a characteristic feature of ‘curial style’, in Anglo-Norman (hence AN) and Middle English (hence ME) personal letters. Whilst we know that this style was prevalent in the official AN letters that were used to conduct English parliamentary business until the end of the 1300s, we do not yet have a clear understanding of the extent to which it was prevalent in both AN and ME personal letters, defined here as being written to one addressee who was known to the writer. The results show that there more anaphoric reference terms in the AN epistolary material than in the ME, and that the difference is statistically significant. However, these anaphoric reference devices are very much in evidence in the ME material as well, albeit in smaller numbers, suggesting a degree of influence, or emulation, or both. It is furthermore suggested that the use of anaphoric reference devices in both the AN and ME personal letters is more similar to their use in the literary texts discussed by Burnley (1986) than to their use in their more official, administrative epistolary forebears, i.e., they are often used in a looser, relaxed way, as a kind of ‘connective convenience’ (Burnley 1986: 610). Results relating to diachronic variation demonstrate that the reference terms are most common in the latest (1380s) AN letters and earliest (pre-1431) ME letters, perhaps suggesting a period of overlap. In relation to geographic distribution, ME anaphoric reference terms appear to be used more in letters written in London and Oxfordshire than in the East Anglian or Northern letters. Finally, in the AN corpora, the anaphoric reference devices are most frequently used by writers from the gentry and professions, a finding mirrored in the ME material. Overall, the paper highlights the importance of taking different discoursal contexts, and the deliberate emulation of styles within those contexts, into account when investigating the interaction between Anglo Norman and Middle English during the medieval period.

Anaphoric reference in a German-Polish bilingual child

Abstract The study examines the use of referring expressions in anaphoric contexts in a German-Polish bilingual child between age 2;0 to 4;0. The longitudinal corpus consists of 160 video recordings of spontaneous speech in both languages. There are fundamental differences in the way anaphoric reference is expressed in German and Polish. Speakers of German refer to discourse-given referents either with a definite NP, a personal or a demonstrative pronoun. Speakers of Polish – a pro drop language without articles – mostly use bare nouns or null pronouns. Overt pronouns and demonstrative determiners are restricted to specific information structure conditions. We found an overuse of overt pronouns and demonstrative determiners in Polish in comparison to a monolingual Polish child of the same age and also qualitative differences in the use of the relevant expressions. Despite the fact that the earliest child grammar in both languages rather resembles the Polish target (no articles, no pronouns), the reliable markers of discourse-givenness encountered in the German input are rapidly acquired and overextended to Polish, before the more implicit Polish system is in place.

Computational Models of Anaphora

Interpreting anaphoric references is a fundamental aspect of our language competence that has long attracted the attention of computational linguists. The appearance of ever-larger anaphorically annotated data sets covering more and more anaphoric phenomena in ever-greater detail has spurred the development of increasingly more sophisticated computational models; as a result, the most recent state-of-the-art neural models are able to achieve impressive performance by leveraging linguistic, lexical, discourse, and encyclopedic information. This article provides a thorough survey of anaphora resolution (coreference) throughout this development, reviewing the available data sets and covering both the preneural history of the field and—in more detail—current neural models, including research on less-studied aspects of anaphoric interpretation such as bridging reference resolution and discourse deixis interpretation.

SPEECH ANALYSIS (DISCOURSE SEMANTIC ANALYSIS BASED ON SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS THEORY)

This study is concerned with discourse semantic analysis of three selected victory speeches of the US Presidents. It was conducted for and aimed at describing, explaining, and analyzing the field, the interpersonal meaning (tenor) the mode of the texts, the schematic structure, and the unity of the texts by using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as the basis of analysis. The speech texts were changed into clauses and then analyzed. The results of the analysis found that the register category of field is similar. The transitivity patterns of the grammar, reference, and lexical string analysis share common features that is the realization of experiential action done by the speaker and audience for the progress of America. The interpersonal meaning of the texts is slightly different, in which, Joe Biden and Barack Obama established an intimate relationship with the audience, while in Donald trump’s text, the sense of intimacy and the distance with the audience are far. Since the nominal groups used were simple, the mode of all texts belongs to the spoken mode. Besides, In terms of schematic structure, the texts were constructed similarly consisting of an introduction, body, and conclusion. Finally, this study also found that the anaphoric reference which was predominantly used, a good pattern of conjunction relations, and lexical relations between lexical items appearing cross clauses categorize the texts as being highly cohesive.

Referential Cohesion in the Translation of English-swahili Healthcare Texts

Referential cohesion in African languages is a largely neglected area of study. Given the foregoing, this study, theoretically anchored on Descriptive Translation Studies and Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) seminal model, explores referential cohesion in the translation of English-Swahili healthcare texts with an endeavour to describe its use and establish if there is variation when texts are translated. Cohesion in translation is fundamental since it is the basis of a network of relations that allows readers to interpret a text. The results show that personals and demonstratives are the most widely used references in both the source and target texts. Further, anaphoric reference is the most prevalent. In addition, it emerged that the translated Swahili text uses more reference items than their English counterparts. This is partly due to explicitation and the nature of the Swahili verb. This study brings to the fore the role of translators in making texts cohesive notwithstanding the reference items used in the source texts.