English Pronouns Research Articles

Variation in acceptability of neologistic English pronouns

This acceptability-judgment survey of English neopronouns, including xe, fae, ey, and ze, shows that while neopronouns are not fully ungrammatical for most English speakers, they are rated as less grammatical than canonical third-person singular pronouns like she, he, and they. We found that several social variables correlated with ratings of neopronouns in sentences, including age, gender, and sexual orientation. The neopronouns that bear orthographic resemblance to canonical pronouns were rated highest, and metalinguistic comments from participants identified that analogy was an important factor in whether they found neopronouns grammatical.

Modeling and Analysis of Language Transfer in Second Language Acquisition Assisted by Data Stream Fusion Algorithm

The Wiener process method is used to construct the degradation model, and the offline parameters are iteratively optimized using the EM algorithm combined with the training engine data. Based on Bayesian method and test engine data, an evolutionary data stream clustering algorithm (I-APDenStream) based on the fusion of nearest neighbor propagation and density is proposed. This algorithm uses the traditional two-stage processing model, namely online and offline clustering, to find the differences between English and Chinese general pronouns, the similarity and difference between the mother tongue and the target language, and the generalization of the sentence pattern or usage of the mother tongue. Use negative transfer. It aims to fully understand and scientifically grasp the status and role of language transfer in second language acquisition.

Chinese EFL learners different from English natives in cataphora resolution: Evidence from eye-tracking studies.

Previous studies on English natives have shown that encountering an English cataphoric pronoun triggers an active search for its antecedent and this searching process is modulated by syntactic constraints. It remains unknown whether the conclusion is universal to EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners, particularly those with distinct L1 like Chinese in linguistic typology. Therefore, this study used two eye-tracking experiments to investigate how Chinese EFL learners resolve English cataphora. The experiments adopted the gender-mismatch paradigm. Experiment 1 investigated whether Chinese EFL learners with different proficiency would adopt the similar processing pattern to English natives and found that gender congruency elicited longer reading times than gender incongruency between the first potential antecedent and the cataphoric pronoun, the effect early observed in high-proficiency relative to low-proficiency learners. Experiment 2 explored whether the cataphora resolution process was modulated by Binding Principle B and revealed that longer first fixation durations and first pass reading times were observed in gender-mismatch than in gender-match conditions no matter the antecedents are binding-accessible or not while longer regression path durations occurred in gender-mismatch than in gender-match conditions only as the antecedents are binding-accessible. Taken together, these results indicate that Chinese EFL learners also adopt an active search mechanism to resolve cataphoric pronouns, yet along a processing path distinct from English natives'. Specifically, Chinese EFL learners predictively link a cataphoric pronoun to the first potential antecedent in the sentence but only a gender-matching antecedent can prompt them to engage in deep processing of the antecedent. Moreover, the processing time varies with the learners' English proficiency. Furthermore, unlike native English speakers' early application of syntactic constraints in their cataphora resolution, Chinese EFL learners try to establish co-reference relations between cataphoric pronouns and antecedents regardless of following or flouting Binding Principle B in early processing stages whereas they exclusively link the cataphoric pronouns to the binding-accessible antecedents in late processing stages. This study adds evidence to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis whereby L2 learners resort to lexical prior to syntactic cues to process sentences in general, which is just opposite to the fashion adopted by the natives.

Acquisition during normative code-mixing: Trinidadian children’s varilingual pronoun usage

While monolingual English speakers acquire most pronouns by age 5, acquisition amid prevalent, normative code-mixing, such as in Trinidad, is underexplored. This study examines how Trinidadian 3- to 5-year-olds express third-person subject, object, reflexive and possessive pronouns and factors influencing pronoun choices. Seventy-five preschoolers produced pronouns via a word elicitation task conducted in Trinidadian English Creole and Trinidad and Tobago English. Responses were coded for children’s age, gender, district and socioeconomic status; task language; grammatical gender/number; and response form. Conditional inference trees facilitated statistical analysis. When choices were available, children exhibited variable production, with Creole forms often dominant. Grammatical gender influenced whether English or Creole pronouns were selected. Task language influenced possessive pronoun choices, indicating developing sociolinguistic competence. The non-significance of other variables suggests widespread mixing of English and Creole pronouns. Findings underscore the importance of describing understudied populations, especially where variation is inherent, to ensure accurate language assessment.

INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION IN THE TRILOGY OF RUSH HOUR

Intercultural communication (ICC) is a dynamic communicative phenomenon due to the cultural value presented in the multicultural communication exchange. The present study aims to explore the intercultural communication between Black and Chinese speakers in the trilogy of Rush Hour. Specifically, this study aims to see the characteristics of Black English and the communicative effects of conversation among speakers of different cultural backgrounds. Through the methods of qualitative descriptive, linguistic behavior is justified to show whether the conventions are acceptable to each community group. The results show that as an American English-speaking, Carter, a Black American is more expressive in using English because he is a native speaker, while Lee, as an L2 English from China, faces more communicative barriers. The cultural value of non-standard forms also adorns such conversation, e.g., phonological and sentence structures stigmatization. Not to mention, Chinese surnames produce homonyms with English pronouns.

基于转换–生成语法理论人称代词的研究——以英语和法语中的人称代词为例

基于转换–生成语法理论人称代词的研究——以英语和法语中的人称代词为例

First Language Transfer in the Acquisition of English Object Pronouns by Sinhala-Speaking ESL Learners

The current paper reports on an empirical study investigating the unlearning of null object pronouns by twenty-four English as a Second Language (ESL) learners from Sri Lanka. Further, the ESL learners are native Sinhala speakers. One of the main crosslinguistic differences between Sinhala and English is that Sinhala allows null object pronouns, whereas English does not. Previous studies have investigated the acquisition of object pronouns by ESL learners, and they report that the acquisition of object pronouns could be problematic for ESL learners due to first language transfer. However, there have been no empirical studies that investigate the unlearning of null arguments by Sinhala ESL learners. Therefore, the present study intends to fill the gap in the research by investigating the unlearning of null object pronouns by Sinhala ESL learners. The data were collected via an audio acceptability judgement task (audio AJT) and a production task (PT). In the audio AJT, the ESL learners accepted null object pronouns to a certain extent, whereas in the PT, they had a strong preference for null object pronouns. Therefore, based on the overall results, I suggest that Sinhala ESL learners have difficulty in unlearning null object pronouns in English.

RENDERING ENGLISH UNIVERSAL PRONOUNS INTO UKRAINIAN: A CORPUS APPROACH

The paper deals with investigation into the usage of English universal pronouns in contemporary fiction and their rendering into Ukrainian with employment of corpus approach. The universal pronouns under study were selected by the entire sampling method from the complete register compiled on the basis of the novel by J.K. Rowling “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” and its authorized Ukrainian version translated by V. Morozov. There were determined the lexico-semantic characteristics of four English universal pronouns (‘everybody’, ‘everyone’, ‘everything’, and ‘each’) based on monolingual dictionary entries’ analysis. Absolute and relative frequencies (per 1,000 words) of the above pronouns in the analyzed corpus fragment were calculated. The lexeme ‘each’ was found to be the most frequent, with ‘everybody’ being the least frequent. There were identified 12 semantic roles performed by the universal pronouns’ referents in the situations presented in the microcorpus, the agent and experiencer being the most frequent ones. The Ukrainian translation equivalents of the analyzed pronouns were determined based on bilingual dictionary entries’ analysis. By means of immediate constituents’ analysis and contextual analysis, there were described the peculiarities of the pronouns’ usage in the source text. The translation methods and types of translation shifts used for adequate rendering of the pronouns into Ukrainian were specified on the basis of transformational analysis. The most common methods of rendering the universal pronouns into Ukrainian were proved to be equivalent translation (65%), omission (21%) and lexical substitution (14%) (grammatical shifts and addition inclusive).

PRONOUNS ARE THE MOST ORIGINAL WORDS IN THE LANGUAGE

Pronouns are closely related to demonstrative pronouns. It is recognized that the root of interrogative pronouns are indicative particles, which have the meaning of adverb, particle, and pronoun, and especially, indicative pronouns - personal. English pronouns can be counted among other types of pronouns of this language, because when they are used in a sentence, they have not only a question meaning, but also a different lexical and syntactic meaning. In this article researcher has considered about the process of borrowings in parts of speech and he also mentioned that, during long history pronouns did not borrow from a language to another language.

Restrictive relative clauses in Greek Heritage speakers in the US

This paper investigates the production of restrictive relative clauses (henceforth RRCs) in Heritage Greek in contact with US English. In Greek, RRCS are introduced either by the pronoun o opios ‘the who’ which agrees with the nominal head it modifies and is preferred in formal registers; or by the un-inflected complementizer pu 'that', which appears mostly in colloquial speech. In English, RRCs are introduced by the non-agreeing pronouns who and which and by the complementizer that. The findings suggest that both groups favour the production of pu RRCs but we cannot attribute the overuse of pu RRCs by HSs to English interference. There is no clear evidence that o opios is preferred in formal registers by monolinguals and we argue that HSs avoid o opios RRCs as they have difficulties with establishing agreement between nouns and modifiers. This is corroborated by their use of the English non-agreeing pronouns who and which.

Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis

Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis

Students’ Problems in Using English Pronouns at Junior High School Number 15 Jambi

This study aims to find out what are the students' problems in using English pronouns in using personal and possessive pronouns at SMP Negeri 15 Jambi. In this study, this research used qualitative research. The subjects of this study were class VIIG students of SMP Negeri 15 Jambi in the academic year 2021/2022. All problems in the use of pronouns have been categorized and identified, namely subject, object, possessive adjective, and possessive pronoun. In simple terms, the students face more problems in using object pronouns. This can be seen from the percentage results where the problem of using object pronouns is 35.2%, questions are answered incorrectly. Meanwhile, at least students face problems in using possessive pronouns by 14.4%. The result of this research found that the seventh grade students of SMP Negeri 15 Jambi mostly face the problem of using object pronouns, which is the most difficult thing for students because they do not really understand how to use object pronouns.

Dependency resolutions of null and overt subjects in English speakers’ L2 Chinese: Evidence for the cue-based model

This study investigates whether there are different first-language–second-language (L1–L2) dependency resolutions by focusing on less-studied crosslinguistic variances in L2 acquisition of Chinese, a null-subject language, by speakers of English, a non-null-subject language. The overt subject pronoun of a Chinese main clause has free orientation and its antecedent can be the subject or object of the preceding causal subordinate clause, depending on pragmatic biases. The null subject of a Chinese main clause, however, is subject-oriented, and this subject orientation is not affected by any pragmatic bias. English does not allow null subjects and, like Chinese, overt subject pronouns in English have free orientation. An acceptability judgement task and an interpretation task were adopted, and the results suggest that only the free orientation of overt subjects, but not the subject orientation of null subjects, is acquirable for English-speaking learners; they are found to be influenced by the pragmatic bias. This provides evidence for the cue-based model (Cunnings, 2017), which states that L1–L2 differences in dependency resolution can be explained in terms of L1–L2 differences in susceptibility to interference and L2ers’ over-reliance on discourse-based/pragmatic cues. It is also observed that in L1 Chinese, competition between the target antecedent and distractors occurs during the reading of the sentence, while in L2 Chinese, this occurs after the reading of the sentence. These findings add to our growing understanding of different mechanisms in L1 vs. L2 dependency resolutions.

The Translation of Subject Pronoun I from English into Balinese in the Novel The Little Prince and Raja Cenik

Balinese language has various varieties for its subject pronoun I. Investigating whether the translator presents these varieties when translating the English subject pronoun I into Balinese using the novel The Little Prince and its Balinese translation Raja Cenik is the focus of this study. As the finding, the translator utilizes three different lexicons in translating the English subject pronoun I into Balinese. These varieties include Icang, Titiang and Gelah. The utilization of these three lexicons depends on the social status of the speakers and the interlocutors. Balinese language possesses a number of different linguistic registers. Each of the register addresses the social status of the speakers and the interlocutors. The finding of this study shows that culture and language are intricately interwoven to each other in the translation process.

The Acquisition of Arabic and English Relative Clauses by L2 English and Arabic Learners

This study explored the acquisition of Arabic and English relative clauses by L2 English and Arabic learners. It examined the extent to which the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH) (Keenan and Comrie 1977) and the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH) (Eckman 1977) account for the acquisition of English and Arabic relative pronouns by English and Arabic L2 learners. Twenty Arabic-speaking learners of English and twenty English-speaking learners of Arabic were selected. To this end, four different tasks were used in this regard, namely the Sentence Combination task, the Multiple-Choice task, the Picture Description task, and the Grammaticality Judgement task. The results of this study showed that Arabic learners of English were able to comprehend and produce relative pronouns successfully. However, their performance was found to be affected by the system of relative pronouns of Arabic. For example, they were found better in producing who than whom. Additionally, the study found that the performance of Arabic learners of English was influenced by the type of the task (i.e., Sentence Combination Task is harder than the Multiple-Choice Task). On the other hand, the English-speaking learners of Arabic (i.e., the L2 Arabic group) produced and comprehended the Arabic relative pronouns easily despite their L1 language interference. The overall results showed that the NPAH and the MDH were able to predict the mistakes made by L2 learners of Arabic and English.

Analysis of Students' Errors in Translating English Pronouns into Arabic

This research explores the analysis of students' errors in translating English pronouns into Arabic. In order to examine students' translations, translation test, which consists of different sentences that have different pronouns types, as data for this study. Quantative and qualitative study is used in this study. Fifteen students from Semester VIII from the Faculty of Education, Benghazi University in the academic year 2020 undertake the test to render some pronouns into Arabic. The results showed that students face difficulty in the translation of pronouns into their mother tongue, Arabic. The findings also revealed that they had difficulty in translating relative pronouns with the percentage of 50%; followed by demonstrative 34%. The lowest percentage was interrogative and possessive pronouns. It is revealed that in spite of that students have studies pronouns in their grammar courses at the faculty, yet most of them were not successful to render them properly.

Still no evidence for audience design in syntax: Resumptive pronouns are not the exception

Speakers often tailor their speech to the needs of their interlocutors to facilitate comprehension. While such audience design can be observed in the words speakers choose (e.g., using simpler words when talking to children) or the volume of their voice (louder in noisier environments), it has rarely been observed in what syntactic structures speakers use. Consequently, many researchers have concluded that syntactic audience design is impossible. However, there exists a parallel literature in which syntactic audience design is assumed to play a central role. Specifically, English resumptive pronouns (e.g., …pronouns that nobody knows why people saythem) are puzzling in that, despite being ungrammatical, they are regularly and reliably produced. To account for this, some theories hold that speakers produce resumptive pronouns to improve the acceptability of their utterances. If so, this would be an exceptional case of syntactic audience design. In three experiments, we test this hypothesis by eliciting sentences from speakers while manipulating acceptability. We consistently show no effect of acceptability on rates of resumptive pronoun production, despite successfully manipulating production rates with a comparably sized control manipulation. We conclude that resumptive pronouns are not in fact the result of audience design, and therefore do not constitute a challenge to the idea that syntactic audience design is impossible.

Variation in English gendered pronouns

Abstract This paper describes an ongoing shift in the pronominal system of English that is primarily related to transgender and non-binary identities. Apparent time evidence suggests that this is an ongoing change, and metalinguistic comments support the indexical link between the change and the increased visibility of transgender and non-binary English speakers. Sociopragmatic variation enabled by this change shows that the pronoun system of English functions much less like a grammatical gender (noun class) system, and much more like a system of honorifics. The second half of the paper puts forward a position for social justice around pronoun use and gender autonomy, including advice for professional linguists who work in related fields.

A thematic analysis of attitudes towards English nonbinary pronouns

Abstract The article provides a comprehensive overview of attitudes towards nonbinary pronouns, with the aim of better understanding why these pronouns are either accepted or rejected. Attitudes towards nonbinary they and the neopronouns ze and xe are explored with a thematic analysis of data derived from a larger online survey on pronouns (n = 1128). While the results demonstrate various polarized stances for both types of pronouns, the participants’ reactions highlight greater acceptance of and support for nonbinary they. In addition, the paper proposes that broader ideologies about gender are behind the participants’ overt reactions to nonbinary pronouns. Most notably, while some participants rejected the pronouns on the basis of a binary gender ideology, others viewed gender as a matter of self-identification, accepting any pronoun an individual chooses for themselves.

A Study of Translation Strategies in Translating Personal Pronouns in Disney’s movie entitled Rapunzel into Thai Version

The aim of the study is to analyze translation strategies in the translation of personal pronouns used in the Disney movie Rapunzel into the Thai version. The objectives of the study are: 1) to describe the strategies used in the translation of personal pronouns in Rapunzel movie, and 2) to determine the frequency of each translation strategy used in the translation of personal pronouns in Rapunzel movie. The data of the study were gathered from English personal pronouns from the subtitle on DVD Rapunzel which was released in 2010. The result of the study showed that ten translation strategies based on Pokasamrit (2011), Nida (1964), and Vinay and Darbelnet (1958) were identified as used in the study. The strategies of translation were pronoun to pronoun/literal translation, explicitness to implicitness, kinship terms, formal language, informal language, editorial pronoun, addition, alterations/transposition, and inversion. The frequency of each translation strategy found was determined by considering the following elements: the formulation of personal pronouns and the differences between personal pronouns in English and Thai.