Pronouns In Subject Position Research Articles

Interpretation of Korean Null Pronouns in subject and object position: Comparing native and non-native speakers

We report an experiment that investigates how native and non-native Korean speakers’ interpretation of null pronouns in subject and object position is influenced by structural and discourse-level factors. We compare native Korean speakers to L2 Korean learners whose L1, Spanish, only has null pronouns in subject position. We find that native Korean speakers’ interpretation of subject and object null pronouns is guided by structural factors as well as discourse-level coherence relations, with subject nulls being more sensitive to coherence relations than object nulls. In contrast, our results suggest that L2 speakers’ interpretation of null pronouns in Korean is less influenced by coherence relations. Our results support claims that interface phenomena are challenging in L2 acquisition and provide new evidence that this occurs with null pronouns in L2 even when the L1 has null pronouns.

Who is kissing whom? Two-year-olds’ comprehension of pronouns, case and word order

Abstract Two-year olds’ comprehension of pronouns in transitive sentences was examined. Previously, children at this age have been shown to comprehend transitive sentences containing full nouns and pronouns in subject position (Gertner et. al. 2006; Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff 1996;), but little is known about when children begin to comprehend the nominative and accusative case in pronouns. Using a preferential looking task, we found that 27-month-old children were able to comprehend transitive, grammatical sentences that had subject-verb-object (SVO) word order and nominative pronouns in subject position or accusative pronouns in object position, but 19-month-old children did not demonstrate this comprehension. Furthermore, neither group showed a consistent interpretation for ungrammatical sentences containing pronouns, in contrast to adult participants. Our results suggest that the ability to use pronouns as an aid to understanding transitive sentences develops by 27 months, before children are capable of producing these pronouns in their own speech.

M190. USE OF NULL PRONOUNS IN SCHIZOPHRENIA

BackgroundSchizophrenic speech show consistent disturbances in referentiality, which, from a communicative standpoint, manifest as incoherent speech. Referential failures are especially detected in the usage of pronouns. Literature reports that schizophrenics either use more pronouns without clear reference or more semantically rich anaphors than pronouns. Additionally, it is reported that psychosis language in the context of schizophrenia, schizo-affective disorder and bipolar disorder present more first-person pronouns; within individuals at high genetic risk of schizophrenia those who subsequently developed schizophrenia produced significantly more second-person pronouns than those who did not manifest the illness; and individuals with diagnosis of primary psychotic disorder increased their usage of pronouns, including first-person and second-person pronouns during the period prior to a relapse hospitalization. The abnormalities observed in the use pronouns suggest that schizophrenic patients have semantic-pragmatic issues.There are not many experimental studies devoted to pronouns in schizophrenia, and, according to our current knowledge, none of the existent ones focuses on pronouns without phonological content (null pronouns). In order to fulfill this gap, we present here an investigation of null pronouns in dream narratives produced by Brazilian schizophrenia patients.MethodsDream narratives from 20 schizophrenics and 20 control subjects, all native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, were screened for null subject pronouns. Participants were prompt to talk by the command: “please report a recent dream”. Each narrative sample was then transcribed, and the occurrence of subject null pronouns were annotated, together with its morphosyntactic features (person & number) and referential status (referential vs. non-referential/expletives). The number of overt and null (with and without phonological content respectively) pronouns in subject position were converted into ratios by dividing the number of occurrences of each pronoun type (overt and null) by the total number of words in the narrative. Next, overt and null pronouns were compared within and between groups.ResultsT-test comparison showed that the schizophrenia group produced significantly more null pronouns than control group (t(25.126) = 3.919; p = .001); and, that null pronouns were significantly more produced than overt pronouns in the schizophrenia group (t(38) = 3.242; p = .002). Multiple regression showed that total of null pronouns differentiate schizophrenia from control group (F(1,38) = 15.357, p = .001, R2 = .288). In addition, analysis of null pronoun differences between groups based on morphosyntactic features and referential status, showed that schizophrenics used significantly more null pronouns with third-person singular features (t(27.523) =2.699; p =.012) and non-referential pronouns (expletives) (t(23.608) = 2.808; p = 0,010) than control group.DiscussionA closer look at third-person null pronouns in the schizophrenic narratives showed that these pronouns are quite often loose in terms of reference: of the total occurrences of third-person null pronouns in schizophrenia approximately 30% are without clear referent. In accordance, null expletives, which are empty of reference, are overused to the point of explaining group differences. This corroborates that schizophrenic speech has a reduced semantic-pragmatic load, with a general difficulty in using pronouns within a contextually framed discourse.

Resolução de pronomes em posição de sujeito em orações completivas na retoma de antecedentes em SNs complexos: estudo comparativo entre Português Brasileiro e Português Europeu

In this study we tested, in EP and in BP, complement clauses with a null or an overt pronoun in subject position that is forced by number agreement to retrieve an antecedent within a complex subject NP in the main clause. With an eye-tracking while reading paradigm, we analysed the impact of structural position on pronoun resolution, investigating if the bias described for null-subject and overt-object pronoun resolution for null subject languages replicates for antecedents with different structural positions: null-NP1, the highest structural entity, and overt-NP2, the lowest structural entity. Moreover, we especially investigate the impact of structural position in BP, where c-command relations are considered to be of great relevance for null subject resolution. Results indicate that structural position impacts on pronoun resolution in the predicted way: null-highest NP, overt-lowest NP. Also, BP results reveal that, not only is the null form more constrained by c-command relations, preferentially referring to the c-commanding antecedent (NP1), but also that the overt pronoun does not show a clear bias also when considering structural position (as does not for syntactic function, as shown in previous studies).

Lexical and Morphological Features of Translational Lithuanian

Summary In Lithuanian public and academic discourse, discussions about the influence of English have received considerable attention. Much has been written on the English borrowings in Lithuanian or various translation strategies applied at word, phrase or syntactic levels of language, whereas there have been only few attempts to investigate how Lithuanian translated from English differs from original language. This is why we found it interesting to investigate lexical an morphological features of translated Lithuanian applying the methods of corpus liguistics. For research purposes, we used a morphologically annotated comparable 4 mln. word corpus of original and translated fiction and popular science literature ORVELIT. It has been found that translations deviate in certain ways from original Lithuanian. Translated Lithuanian has: a lower lexical density, higher proportion of function words, shorter sentences, and higher proportion of list heads; translated fiction has a lower lexical variability and smaller proportion of low frequency words, whereas in popular science translations, these differences are less evident. Keyword analysis has shown content differences in originals and translations and the overuse of personal and possessive pronouns in popular science translations. The distribution of content and function words differs in originals and translations and in different registers. Translated Lithuanian has: more verbs (especially finite forms and adverbial participles), but less nouns and adjectives; fiction translations have less and popular science more adverbs than originals; there are more pronouns and prepositions in both popular science and fiction translations; depending on the register, there are higher or lower numbers of conjunctions, particles and interjections. Some of the differences may be explained by the English language interference as: the overuse of the optional 1st person pronoun in subject position, the overuse of optional preposition “su” with instrumental case, or the overuse of optional link verb in the complex predicate. In other words, the English influence is seen in transferring certain features obligatory for analytical language where omission would be a more natural choice in original Lithuanian. These findings in most cases agree with the previous research on translationese of other languages. It is hoped that the identified tendencies to over- or under-use certain lexical and morphological features as a result of English language interference might appear to be useful when editing and translating.

Um tratamento unificado da omissão e da expressão de sujeitos e objetos diretos pronominais de 3ª pessoa em português brasileiro

Este trabalho apresenta um estudo sobre dois fenômenos envolvendo pronomes que vêm ocorrendo de maneira concomitante na história do português brasileiro (PB): a realização de objeto direto nulo (ON) de 3ª pessoa e o preenchimento pronominal do sujeito. Realizamos uma pesquisa diacrônica que buscou: (i) verificar se houve aumento de sujeitos pronominais expressos no intervalo de 20 anos em Porto Alegre (RS); (ii) verificar se houve aumento de objetos nulos na retomada anafórica nesse mesmo período, nessa mesma cidade; e (iii) verificar quais traços semântico-discursivos do referente (animacidade, especificidade ou gênero semântico) estão atuando como gatilho para a manifestação do pronome nas ocorrências de sujeito e de objeto direto pronominais. Analisamos dois corpora de língua falada espontânea: o corpus do projeto VARSUL, da década de 1990, e o corpus LinguaPOA, produzido e transcrito entre 2015 e 2018. Também usamos dados do NURC, com base no levantamento de Monteiro (1994). Nossos resultados mostram que houve apenas um leve aumento nas ocorrências de sujeito expresso no período de tempo analisado, o que sinaliza que essa mudança está estável em PB. Da mesma forma, também encontramos apenas um leve aumento de ONs no período, o que parece indicar, igualmente, a estabilização de uma mudança. Com relação ao objetivo (iii), mostramos que a distribuição de sujeitos nulos vs expressos e de objetos nulos vs pronomes plenos pôde (até certo ponto) ser explicada com a hipótese do gênero semântico do antecedente. Para os casos destoantes, deixamos sugestões para análises futuras.

Contraposição não oracional com mas

A proposta deste estudo é investigar a relação adversativa entre sintagmas e palavras, sob a perspectiva da Gramática Discursivo-Funcional (Hengeveld; Mackenzie, 2008). Para essa teoria, em construções como The work took longer than expected, but it was easy, ocorre concessão entre dois atos discursivos não equipolentes, sendo o ato discursivo nuclear marcado com but. Este estudo tem como objetivo verificar se expressamente e implicitamente na construção a carta está, não expressamente, mas implicitamente, dividida em pequenas quadrículas. (PT89:CartografiaPortuguesa:49), constituem atos discursivos e o tipo de processo morfossintático que esse fenômeno engendra. Para isso, utiliza como universo de investigação os materiais do corpus “Português oral”, desenvolvido pelo Projeto “Português Falado: Variedades Geográficas e Sociais”. A análise das ocorrências mostra que há dois atos discursivos não equipolentes relacionados, com núcleo lexical, morfossintaticamente mapeados por sintagmas e palavras, constituindo então casos de listagem. Esse tipo de estrutura pode indicar que (1) o falante apresenta no primeiro ato discursivo uma informação que é logo refutada e substituída pela informação contida no segundo ato discursivo; ou que (2) o falante sente a necessidade de acrescentar uma informação que supõe ser importante para a correta interpretação do ouvinte.

A sense of agency

AbstractRoper Kriol exhibits variation in the shape of the first-person singular pronoun in subject position. This paper provides an account of the numerous syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors that appear to influence the selection of eitheraiormibased predominantly on a study of a corpus of the written language. It is claimed that the synchronic distribution ofaiandmiis an innovation primarily motivated by speaker reanalysis of the semantic entailments frequently associated with English subject and object arguments – effectively evidence of the partial grammaticalisation of agentivity in these varieties. This work has implications for our understanding of ‘agentivity’ as a cross-linguistic, cognitive category and for the dynamic relationship between semantic roles and the morphosyntactic encoding of grammatical relations.

조응성 정보와 중심화 이론에 기반한 영형 주어의 선행사 식별

본 논문은 지역적 응집성을 모델링하는 중심화 이론을 이용하여 한국어 영형대명사의 지시해결에 접근한다. 중심화 이론은 영어 대명사의 해결을 위해 널리 사용되고 있지만, 일본어, 한국어 등의 언어에서 나타나는 영형대명사 해결에 중심화의 프레임워크를 적용하는 데에는 많은 어려움이 따른다. Grosz et al.의 중심화 이론은 지시적 표현들의 비조응적 사용을 고려하지 않으므로, 문서에 나타나는 비조응적 기능의 영형 대명사가 중심화 이론을 이용한 영형대명사의 선행사 식별에 중요한 영향을 미친다. 본 논문은 이를 위해 먼저 절 간의 결속 관계를 이용하여 영형대명사, 특히 영형주어의 문장 내 조응성을 결정하고, 다음으로 중심화의 순위를 이용하여 그 영형의 선행사를 식별하는 방법을 제안한다. 실험을 통해 조응성 결정을 이용하는 제안한 방법이 이를 이용하지 않는 베이스라인 시스템보다 우수함을 알 수 있었다. This paper approaches the problem of resolving Korean zero pronouns using Centering Theory modeling local coherence. Centering Theory has been widely used to resolve English pronouns. However, it is much difficult to apply the centering framework for zero pronoun resolution in languages such as Japanese and Korean. Since in particular the use of non-anaphoric zero pronouns without explicit antecedents is not considered in the Centering Theory of Grosz et al., the presence of non-anaphoric cases negatively affects the performance of the resolution system based on Centering Theory. To overcome this, this paper presents a method which determines the intra-sentential anaphoricity of zero pronouns in subject position by using relationships between clauses, and then identifies antecedents of zero subjects. In our experiments, the proposed method outperforms the baseline method relying solely on Centering Theory.

Pronominal case and verbal finiteness contingencies in child English

ABSTRACTChild English speakers use nonnominative pronouns in subject position but do not tend to use these types of pronouns with finite verbs. Recent findings demonstrate that knowledge of the pronoun paradigm is relevant to pronoun case errors below the 60% correct finiteness marking level but irrelevant above it. We use a receptive test with children who are above the 60% correct finiteness marking level and show that judgments of nominative case and verb finiteness correlate (r= .549,p< .001,n= 49), consistent with the predictions of case theory. Children at this level of finiteness marking show no asymmetry in feminine versus masculine nonnominative errors, but they do allow third singular–swith nonnominatives, which is problematic for both agreement tense omission model and constructivist priming accounts.

Propietats pragmàtiques i gramaticals en el desenvolupament de la coreferència pronominal

Summary: In this paper, we examine the referential properties of null and overt subject pronouns in Catalan in the semi-spontaneous production of oral and written narrative texts by three groups of speakers/writers: 9–10 year olds, 12–13 year olds, and 16–17 year olds. We aim at determining whether these two types of pronouns play the same role and to what extent they contribute to anaphora resolution and discourse cohesion, both at an intra- and an inter-sentential level. We concentrate on anaphoric relations expressed by 3rd person pronouns in subject position. Our results show that, at an intra-sentential level, null pronouns normally refer to subject antecedents, mainly in the spoken modality, while overt pronouns refer back to either a subject or a non-subject antecedent. This entails that once a discourse element becomes a discourse topic and is the subject of a sentence, a null pronoun is used. Moreover, a parallel tendency is observed at an inter-sentential and discourse level. [Keywords: Reference; pronouns; Catalan; anaphora resolution; written development; oral development]

Boccaccio's Heroines: Power and Virtue in Renaissance Society by Margaret Franklin

582 Reviews relatives and dependent interrogatives are often difficult todistinguish, thedepen dent clause of the example is indeed not a relative but a dependent interrogative: dime cossa che xe sucesso 'tell me what happened' is the embedded version of the corresponding main question cossa ze successo? 'what has happened?', p. 133:What the author calls some common adverbs of time and manner' are per haps better described as 'time,manner, (and place) wh pronouns', corresponding to English how, when, where. This can help us to understand their syntactic behaviour. p. 134: To the best ofmy knowledge, Venetian does not distinguish nouns from pronouns in subject position with respect to the resumptive clitic:with both types of subjects the clitic copy is optional (with very subtle pragmatic differences, as the author says). p. 135: The idea that the 3rd person subject clitic is compulsory because the verb forms are identical in singular and plural appears common sense but iswrong; in Friulian 3rd sg. and plur. are very distinct but the subject clitic isobligatory in all contexts (even in thepresence of an overt subject). p. 178: Comparing medieval Venetian in texts of the Lagoon with other medieval Venetan varieties and modern Venetian, the author says that sigmatic inflection is absent in central-southern Venetan, and partially present in Lio Mazor. This is a small but important point, since sigmatic inflectionmeans preserving -s inflection (a Ladin feature): inflectional -5 is preserved inVenetian till after the Second World War, when protected by the enclitic interrogative pronouns; it is absent in central Veneto, present in Friulian, but completely absent in Lio Mazor texts;what can appear as an inflectional -s isnot inflectional but part of the ending, with -5remaining infinal position aftervowel-dropping: themost trickyexample is tuseres /seres/,but ifcompared with a language thatvery consistently preserves inflectional -s, such as Friulian, we find the corresponding form tu seress-is and conclude that Lio Mazor's form has undergone the loss of inflectional -s.This is confirmed by the fact that 3 sg.has the same structurepares /pares/; ifthe -swere inflection, itshould appear only in 2 sg. (or plur., in some cases). The amount of space I have devoted to the above corrections should not obscure the wealth of valuable observations and information contained in this volume, which makes amajor contribution to the history ofVenetian from a variety of interlinked perspectives. Itwill surely serve as amodel for thedescription of other dialect areas and stimulate further research intoVenetian. University of Padua Paola Beninca Boccaccio's Heroines: Power and Virtue in Renaissance Society. By Margaret Franklin. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2006. 206 pp. ?47 50. ISBN 978-0-07546 5364-6. Margaret Franklin's study of Boccaccio's celebration of exemplary women, theDe mulieribus claris (c. 1360), and its subsequent 'fortuna'within Italian literary and MLR, 104.2, 2009 583 visual culture is based on the bold assertion that the text presents a consistent delineation of theparameters of acceptable female authoritywith thegoal of provid ing a pre-emptive defence of a social framework implicitly challenged by legendary women who participated actively inpublic life*(p. 1). In distinguishing her project from earlier readings which have stressed the impossibility ofdefining a clearly iden tifiable female subject position within the textFranklin sets the frame forher study: the rearrangement ofwhat were seen as fragments by others to produce a coherent definition of female subjectivity in the text,a configuration which defines 'theappro priate functioning ofwomen in society (p. 2). Such a critical stance, it is claimed, also serves a further corrective role in seeking to remove themisogynistic label attributed to the textby a generation of feminist scholars whose political and ideo logical concerns prevented amore historicist evaluation of the text's status. Instead of chiding the author forhis failure to espouse social and political reform, Franklin argues thatBoccaccio's De mulieribus sought to 'draw the teeth from the challenge posed by unconventional women by co-opting their stories into the service of con temporary Italian standards and mores' (p. 8). In thisway they are assimilated into a moral economy thatwas never going tobe anything but patriarchal in a text thatwas primarily aimed at amale readership and the restatement of normative gender roles. For Franklin...

Writer construction in English and German popularized academic discourse: The uses ofweandwir

AbstractThe present article investigates writer–reader interaction through the construction of writer and reader personae in English and German popular scientific writing by means of first person plural pronouns in subject position. Popular scientific writing only became firmly established as a German-language genre in the last quarter of the 20thcentury when the high-profile publicationScientific Americanentered the German news magazine market with a German-language sister issue, featuring German translations of articles from the English magazine and original text production in German. We assume that language contact in the process of translation from English to German influenced both the German translations and original text production in German and helped to shape genre-specific communicative styles in the then emerging genre of popular scientific writing in German. Writer–reader interaction is considered as one aspect of communicative style. Focusing on the contribution of first person plural pronouns to the realization of writer–reader interaction through specific writer and reader personae, it will be shown that, over time, patterns of use surface in both the translated and non-translated German texts that can – at least in part – be traced back to the English communicative style in popular scientific writing.

"The hare hugs the rabbit. He is white ... Who is white?": Pronominal anaphora in Russian

This paper investigates the production and comprehension of intrasentential anaphoric pronominal reference in Russian. In particular, it examines the elicited imitation and comprehension of three anaphoric pronouns in subject position – personal 3rd singular masculine, demonstrative and zero – in one hundred and eighty monolingual Russian-speaking children and twenty adults. The three types of pronouns were designed to have an antecedent in the preceding sentence containing a verb and two arguments. These antecedents differ in their syntactical role and animacy. The sentence position, agentivity and topicality remained constant. The sentences with (in)animate subjects and objects constituted the following four 'conditions': two sentences with a subject and an object being either animate or inanimate and two sentences with a subject and an object exhibiting a diverse (in)animacy. Regarding the resolution of the anaphoric pronouns the similarity principle (or feature-concord rule) and its possible violations were tested. This principle suggests that an anaphoric pronoun is most likely resolved to the antecedent with a maximum of similar characteristics or features and it primarily governs the assignment of an antecedent to anaphoric pronouns in subject position in the absence of the violating conditions. Results show the influence of this rule on the anaphora resolution process increasing with age, on the one hand, and the development of the impact of animacy, syntactic role and the type of anaphoric pronouns that violate the feature-concord rule, on the other.

A visual graphic tool to support the production of simple sentence structures in a student with learning disability

A tool was devised to improve spoken syntax through manipulation of graphic symbols. The participant, a French-speaking 11-year-old girl with general learning disability, learned to produce subject-verb-object (SVOn) sentences and transform them into a subject-object-verb (SOpV) structure in which the object becomes pronominal in a preverbal position. The production of personal pronouns in subject position was also targeted. Didactic methods were selected and administered for a total of 12 individual sessions. Pre-and post-measurements in an elicitation task (picture description) and language sample analysis showed significant improvement on target productions.

Agrammatism in Spanish: A Case Study

This article presents a case study of a Spanish-speaking Broca′s patient with a selective deficit in syntactic production. The analysis indicates difficulties in processing certain abstract categories such as clitic pronouns without any other significant morphological errors. This pattern and the abundant use of strong pronouns in subject position are accounted as a syntactic production deficit related to the computation of phonetically null elements e that enter in a syntactic chain. At the same time, the patient shows a milder problem in the production of canonical word order at the sentence level, which is also explained in syntactic terms.

Comprehending Conceptual Anaphors in Spanish.

This paper examines the mechanisms involved in the assignment of an antecedent to an anaphoric element. In general, pronouns must match their antecedents at least with respect to number and gender. Sensitivity to such constraints has been shown in several experiments. But Gernsbacher (1991) has also shown that people have no difficulty comprehending a plural pronoun with an antecedent that is grammatically singular but conceptually plural. In the first three experiments, we tested whether such a "conceptual effect" was preserved with zero anaphors in Spanish. (The typical omission of pronouns in subject position in Spanish.) Verbs in a second clause were marked with plural or singular endings. Plural verbs were rated more natural than singular verbs when they followed three types of singular but conceptually plural antecedents (Experiment 1). Clauses containing plural verbs were read faster when they followed one type of singular but conceptually plural antecedents, i.e. collective sets (Experiments 2 and 3). In fact, clauses containing plural verbs were read equally fast when they followed literally singular collective sets or explicitly group nouns. Using pronominal anaphors, these reading time effects were replicated and extended to sentences that contained generic types as antecedents (Experiment 4). The results are discussed in terms of the use of information during the comprehension of anaphors.