Anaphoric Reference Research Articles

Token-reflexive, anaphoric and deictic functions of ‘here’

There are basically three ways in which the reference of a token of the English proximal spatial indexicalhereand corresponding terms in other languages can be resolved in the context-dependent, pragmatic phase of the addressee's determination of the propositional content of an utterance that contains this adverbial adjunct. ‘Here’ may refer reflexively to the place of utterance, including minimally the spot occupied by the speaker (token-reflexive reference), it may be anaphoric upon a discourse antecedent that provides information necessary for identification of the referent (anaphoric reference), or resolution of the reference depends on information derived from processing of a perceptual stimulus (deictic reference). These three pragmatic paths to resolution of the reference of proximal spatial indexicals are not mutually exclusive, so they do not warrant postulation of lexical ambiguity, at least not the traditional kind of ambiguity based on differences in conceptual meaning.

Use of Articles in Learning English as a Foreign Language: A Study of Iranian English Undergraduates

The significance of error analysis for the learner, the teacher and the researcher is now widely recognized. Earlier studies of error analysis concentrated on intersystematic comparison of the “native language” and the “target language” and drew the required data largely from intuitions and impressionistic observations. This study was conducted on the basis of the following observations: (1) to restrict to the study of one area viz articles. (2) to avoid comparison in terms of the systems of native and target language. In this study the major areas of difficulties that students face in the target language, i.e. the occurrence of articles in different syntactic features was examined and an attempt was made to establish a hierarchy of difficulties 40 undergraduates faced in the use of articles. For testing the correct retrieval, a slightly modified version of Leacok’s essay ‘My Financial Career’ was prepared. It included sufficient examples of almost all the important uses of articles. The test was given to the subjects in the form of a running text. The responses of the subjects were analysed in terms of noun or noun phrases preceded by articles, noun or noun-phrases preceded by no article, and grammatical categories other than noun or noun-phrases proceeded by no article. The findings revealed that most of the errors the students committed were due to the nature as well as the grammatical complexity of the articles in English, i.e. L1 independent which cannot be explained in terms of transfer from the native language. It was also found that students’ competence using anaphoric reference is far greater than using cataphoric reference. The findings are interpreted to have pedagogical implications for syllabus designers and EFL teachers.

Anaphoric reference to quantified antecedents: An event-related brain potential study

We report an event-related brain potential (ERP) study examining how readers process sentences containing anaphoric reference to quantified antecedents. Previous studies indicate that positive (e.g. many) and negative (e.g. not many) quantifiers cause readers to focus on different sets of entities. For example in Many of the fans attended the game, focus is on the fans who attended (the reference set), and subsequent pronominal reference to this set, as in, Their presence was a boost to the team, is facilitated. In contrast, if many is replaced by not many, focus shifts to the fans who did not attend (the complement set), and reference to this set, as in, Their absence was disappointing, is preferred. In the current studies, the electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded while participants read positive or negative quantified statements followed by anaphoric reference to the reference set or complement set. Results showed that the pronoun their elicited a larger N400 following negative than positive quantifiers. There was also a larger N400 on the disambiguating word (presence/absence) for complement set reference following a positive quantifier, and for reference set reference following a negative quantifier. Findings are discussed in relation to theoretical accounts of complement anaphora.

Discourse Analyses: Characterizing Cognitive-Communication Disorders Following TBI

Discourse Analyses: Characterizing Cognitive-Communication Disorders Following TBI

Norm and Variation on Brazilian TV Evening News Programmes: The Case of Third-person Direct-object Anaphoric Reference

In this article, I undertake a qualitative analysis of third-person direct-object anaphoric reference in a corpus of Brazilian TV evening news programmes. A comparison of my results to previous studies (Bagno 2005, Duarte 1989, Schwenter and Silva 2003) reveals surprising findings in that figures for anaphoric pronouns (both clitics and tonic pronouns), as well as null objects, are extremely low. Instead, lexical NPs and passive constructions are used to establish anaphoric reference. While the use of lexical NPs to establish anaphoric reference has been analysed before, the use of passive constructions for this purpose has not been previously observed. I argue that the described pattern can be explained when taking into account the audiovisual quality of television combined with an audience design (Bell 1984) that aims to underline the seriousness of quality reporting.Neste artigo propomos uma analise qualitativa da referencia anaforica de objeto direto de terceira pessoa com base num corpus constituido ...

When do we use “they” to refer to two individuals? Scenario mapping as a basis for equivalence

When two individual characters are introduced in discourse, it is often, but not always, possible to make anaphoric reference to them as a complex reference object via a plural pronoun. According to the Equivalence hypothesis, the circumstances under which such reference is possible depend on the equivalence of the characters. Various factors have been suggested as contributing towards equivalence. In this paper we present two sentence-completion experiments which show that the roles played by the characters within a scenario are key in determining character equivalence. We conclude that scenario-mapping theory may provide a basis for equivalence.

Neural Mechanisms of Anaphoric Reference Revealed by fMRI

Pronouns are bound to their antecedents by matching syntactic and semantic information. The aim of this functional magnetic resonance imaging study was to localize syntactic and semantic information retrieval and integration during pronoun resolution. Especially we investigated their possible interaction with verbal working memory manipulated by distance between antecedent and pronoun. We disentangled biological and syntactic gender information using German sentences about persons (biological/syntactic gender) or things (syntactic gender) followed by congruent or incongruent pronouns. Increasing the distance between pronoun and antecedent resulted in a short and a long distance condition. Analysis revealed a language related network including inferior frontal regions bilaterally (integration), left anterior and posterior temporal regions (lexico-semantics and syntactic retrieval) and the anterior cingulate gyrus (conflict resolution) involved in pronoun resolution. Activities within the inferior frontal region were driven by Congruency (incongruent > congruent) and Distance (long > short). Temporal regions were sensitive to Distance and Congruency (but solely within long distant conditions). Furthermore, anterior temporal regions were sensitive to the antecedent type with an increased activity for person pronouns compared to thing pronouns. We suggest that activity modulations within these areas reflect the integration process of an appropriate antecedent which depends on the type of information that has to be retrieved (lexico-syntactic posterior temporal, lexico-semantics anterior temporal). It also depends on the overall syntactic and semantic complexity of long distant sentences. The results are interpreted in the context of the memory–unification-control model for sentence comprehension as proposed by Vosse and Kempen (2000), Hagoort (2005), and Snijders et al. (2009).

Anaphora: Text-based or discourse-dependent?

The traditional definition of anaphora in purely co-textual terms as a relation between two co-occurring expressions is in wide currency in theoretical and descriptive studies of the phenomenon. Indeed, it is currently adopted in on-line psycholinguistic experiments on the interpretation of anaphors, and is the basis for all computational approaches to automatic anaphor resolution (see Mitkov 2002). Under this conception, the anaphor, a referentially-dependent expression type, requires “saturation” by an appropriate referentially-autonomous, lexically-based expression — the antecedent — in order to achieve full sense and reference. However, this definition needs to be re-examined in the light of the ways in which real texts operate and are understood, where the resulting picture is rather different. The article aims to show that the co-textual conception is misconceived, and that anaphora is essentially an integrative, discourse-creating procedure involving a three-way relationship between an “antecedent trigger”, an anaphoric predication, and a salient discourse representation. It is shown that it is only in terms of a dynamic interaction amongst the interdependent dimensions of text and discourse, as well as context, that the true complexity of anaphoric reference may be satisfactorily described. The article is intended as a contribution to the broader debate within the pages of this journal and elsewhere between the formalist and the functionalist accounts of language structure and use.

THE ROLE OF COHESION IN RECOUNT TEXTS : A CASE STUDY OF SECOND SEMESTER STUDENTS OF STMIK PROVISI IN ENGLISH 2 WRITING ASSIGNMENT

This study is a descriptive research aiming at discovering to what extent students applied cohesion in recount texts in their writing assignment. The participants were STMIK PROVISI students taking English 2. Data were taken from students’ writing assignments in June 2008 and they were gathered by applying qualitative methods. Results indicated that most students were relatively aware of the stages in recount texts even though some of them applied past and present tenses interchangeably without any logical reasons. Referring to cohesive devices, the students mostly used anaphoric reference, personal reference, and demonstrative reference, as well as simple additive conjunction.

Constraints on ontology changing complexation processes: Evidence from event-related brain potentials

This paper investigates complex anaphoric reference (i.e., when an anaphor refers to a propositionally structured referent). Complex anaphors (e.g., this process, this event) differ in their ontological feature setup, and the ontological type assigned to a referent can change due to the lexical meaning of the complex anaphor. Previous research has proposed that such changes have to comply with an ontological ‘abstractness constraint’ restricting the direction of ontological change. We present an event-related potential study that provides evidence that violations of the abstractness constraint result in processing costs. The data reveal that violating this constraint by shifting the referent towards a less abstract ontological type elicits an enhanced N400, while reduction of ontological features towards a more abstract type exerts no extra processing demands. The data indicate that the abstractness constraint affects real-time sentence comprehension and that different ontological types are implicationally related.

Functions of demonstratives in Makhuwa narratives

Demonstratives are used very frequently in Makhuwa narratives, especially the distal demonstratives. Although all types of demonstratives can be used for exophoric deixis, referring to an entity in the speech setting, the distal demonstratives are predominantly used for anaphoric reference. They occur in topic shifts, tail-head linking and at episode boundaries, referring to entities that are relatively less accessible at that point in the narrative (which is in line with Accessibility Theory). Demonstratives in Makhuwa narratives are not only used anaphorically for referent identification, but they also indicate importance of a certain referent and drawing attention, and they play an important role in text-structuring.

Intentional Control and Operational Constraints in Prosodic Phrasing: A Study of Picture-elicited Narrations by French Children

This study deals with the determinants of prosodic phrasing in French schoolchildren's narratives. Children (aged 7 to 11) told picture stories to a silent same-age peer. The establishment of temporal and/or causal relations between the events was more or less guided by the drawings (ordered vs. arbitrary sequences). The comprehension of the referential links was more or less supported by the way the frames were displayed (simultaneous vs. consecutive display mode). Four storytelling conditions that differed by the constraints imposed on inference-resolving and memory-searching were thus defined. Naïve French listeners were asked to segment tape-recorded narrations using prosodic variation as a criterion, and to decide whether each prosodic segment was "conclusive" or "continuative." The comparison of the listeners' segmentation labels to those of an expert (functional and formal annotation) showed that more than 91% of the labels corresponded to prosodic boundaries and more than 78% of the non-terminal labels corresponded to non-terminal boundaries, but only 55% of the terminal labels corresponded to terminal boundaries. The storytellers' boundaries were then analyzed as a function of age and storytelling conditions. Non-terminal and terminal boundaries varied with the picture-display mode. Terminal boundaries also depended on the type of event sequence, and non-terminal boundaries on the improvement of the linguistic and communicative skills of the narrators. Terminal judgments of non-terminal boundaries mainly occurred in texts where each event was told in a single proposition either without anaphoric references to the main character or with anaphoric pronouns.

Anaphora and Semantic Innocence

Semantic theories that violate semantic innocence, that is require reference shifts when terms are embedded in ‘that’ clauses and the like, are often challenged by producing sentences where an anaphoric expression, while not itself embedded in a context in which reference shifts, is anaphoric on an antecedent expression that is embedded in such a context. This, in conjunction with a widely accepted principle concerning unproblematic anaphora (the ‘Principle of Anaphoric Reference’), is used to show that such reference shifting has absurd consequences. We show that it is the widely accepted principle concerning anaphora that is to be blamed for these consequences and not the supposed sin of reference shifting.

Deriving and measuring group knowledge structure from essays: The effects of anaphoric reference

Essays are an important measure of complex learning, but pronouns can con- found an author's intended meaning for both readers and text analysis software. This descriptive investigation considers the effect of pronouns on a computer-based text anal- ysis approach, ALA-Reader, which uses students' essays as the data source for deriving individual and group knowledge representations. Participants in an undergraduate business course (n = 45) completed an essay as part of the course final examination. The investi- gators edited the essays to replace the most common pronouns (their, it, and they) with the appropriate referent. The original unedited and the edited essays were processed with ALA- Reader using two different approaches, sentence and linear aggregate. These data were then analyzed using a Pathfinder network approach. The average group network similarity values comparing the original to the edited essays were large (i.e., about 90% overlap) but the linear aggregate approach obtained larger values than the sentence aggregate approach. The linear aggregate approach also provided a better measure of individual essay scores (e.g., r= 0.74 with composite rater scores). This data provides some support that the ALA-

Pre-construction of third-person elicited narratives

Recently, Labov (2006) described a process of narrative pre-construction that must occur during the short period of time between a conversationalist’s question, “Where should I begin?,” and the start of a narrative of personal experience. The present article is concerned with the microgenesis of narrative pre-construction in elicited third-person retellings. The central proposal is that the microgenesis of anticipatory goal statements — summaries of characters’ motivations for their actions, feelings and beliefs — relies on processes of increasing discourse cohesion that are learned, practiced and automatized in earlier ontogenetic development. In the proposed account these form a trajectory from extra- to intralinguistic (anaphoric) reference, and from sequenced descriptions of events to cataphoric summaries that are generalizations of original, perceived experiences. Analyses of narrative change across an intermediate, mesodevelopmental span of time — the repeated retellings of a story — provide insight into how change may occur in microgenesis. The proposal extends to the level of discourse Vygotsky’s (1987) account of the role of the social word in advancing thought from heaps to complexes to concepts.

The German Temporal Anaphor danach—Ambiguity in Interpretation and Annotation

I present different types of ambiguity that occur in annotating and resolving the German anaphoric adverbial danach (“thereafter”). By means of two pilot studies it is shown that referential ambiguity (i.e. the anaphor has several plausible referents) and structual dissociation (i.e. different antecedents specify the same referent) cause bad inter-annotator agreement. Both phenomena can only be explored in detail as the annotation studies do not only concentrate on the textual but also on the referential level involved in anaphoric references. Thus, it can be shown that the competing referents in most referentially ambiguous cases are more or less temporally and conceptually related to each other and specify a similiar reference time for danach (“thereafter”). Moreover, the competing antecedents often textually overlap so that some structurally dissociated cases can be handled by stricter annotation guidelines. Thus, considering the textual and the referential dimensions of anaphoric reference provides further insights into the cognitive processing of sentential anaphors like danach (“thereafter”).

Anaphoric pronominal reference in Russian and German narratives: bilingual and monolingual settings

Abstract The study compares the rate and type of the anaphoric pronominalisation in narratives produced by adults, by monolingual and by consecutive and simultaneous bilingual five-year-old children. In particular, it addresses the question which types of pronouns children use to refer to previously introduced antecedents and which syntactic role these antecedent NPs exhibit. Results show that consecutive bilinguals show a lower pronominalisation rate as compared to the narratives of monolingual German-speaking children and to their own Russian narratives. These findings are discussed within the construction-based model of language acquisition (Tomasello 2003). Language-specific organisation of the pronominal systems as well as the language-specific structural features are argued to have an impact on the pronominalisation rate in discourse.

The effects of focused and unfocused written corrective feedback in an English as a foreign language context

Truscott [Truscott, J., 1996. The case against grammar correction in L2 writing classes. Language Learning 46, 327–369; Truscott, J., 1999. The case for “the case for grammar correction in L2 writing classes”: a response to Ferris. Journal of Second Language Writing 8, 111–122] laid down the challenge to teacher educators and teachers to justify their faith in written corrective feedback (CF) with hard evidence from studies that have investigated its effects on subsequent writing. The study reported in this article set out to provide evidence that CF is effective in an EFL context. Using a pre-test–immediate post-test–delayed post-test design, it compared the effects of focused and unfocused written CF on the accuracy with which Japanese university students used the English indefinite and definite articles to denote first and anaphoric reference in written narratives. The focused group received correction of just article errors on three written narratives while the unfocused group received correction of article errors alongside corrections of other errors. Both groups gained from pre-test to post-tests on both an error correction test and on a test involving a new piece of narrative writing and also outperformed a control group, which received no correction, on the second post-test. The CF was equally effective for the focused and unfocused groups. This study, together with a few other recent studies, indicates that written CF is effective, at least where English articles are concerned, and thus strengthens the case for teachers providing written CF.

Differences in the processing of anaphoric reference between closely related languages: neurophysiological evidence

BackgroundThe present study examines the involvement of syntactic and semantic/conceptual processes in the comprehension of pronouns in Dutch using the technique of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) replicating and extending an earlier study in German. Dutch and German are closely related and share the same logic in referring to non-diminutive and diminutive NPs (i.e. adding an affix which changes the syntactic gender into neutral). Both languages separate male (hij/er (he)) and female pronouns (zij/sie (she)), as well as a pronoun that refers to an entity of neutral gender, (het/es (it)). However, the neutral pronoun het in Dutch is not only a pronoun, it also is the article of a neutral noun. To investigate the influence of this word class ambiguity on pronoun resolution, as well as to establish the generality of the finding of the German study we manipulated syntactic and biological gender congruency between a personal pronoun and its antecedent in Dutch.ResultsIn Dutch, sentences with the word-class (pronoun/article) ambiguous pronoun het elicited an early negative shift (150–280 ms) which continued in the time frame of the N400. For sentences with a syntactically and biologically incongruent pronoun a P600 (in absence of an N400) was obtained, which was independent of the morphological form of the referent.ConclusionThe neurophysiological pattern found for Dutch stimuli was clearly different from the German study, indicating that the processing of pronouns in these two languages differs. This can be explained in terms of language specific characteristics concerning the word class ambiguous neutral pronoun het. Moreover, in contrast to the findings in the German study, there was no clear effect caused by the morphological form of the referent. Additionally, in Dutch, the pronoun resolution in sentences with a non-diminutive antecedent seems to reflect processes of revision (P600 in absence of an N400), whereas for German evidence was found for clear involvement of conceptual/semantic processes as well as structure building processes (N400/P600 complex).

Anaphoric Reference to Entities and Places in Literal and Metaphorical Contexts

This article reports on corpus research into the occurrence of [from + anaphor]. Developing distinctions derived from the typology of entities and qualities in Functional Grammar as well as the notion of metaphoricality found in the work of Lakoff, we find that in the syntactic context chosen for analysis the anaphor there is applied when the language-user conceives of the antecedent as a metaphorical place, whereas the occurrence of anaphoric it indicates a non-metaphorical conceptualization. The suggestion is advanced that choice of anaphor could be used as a test for metaphoricality where the source domain is location or movement in space.