Interpretation of a pronoun is driven by properties of syntactic distribution. Consequently, acquiring the meaning and the distribution are intertwined. In order to learn that a pronoun is reflexive, learners need to know which entity the pronoun refers to in a sentence, but in order to infer its referent they need to know that the pronoun is reflexive. This study examines whether discourse inf...

To further our understanding of the nature of the form–function mapping in anaphoric paradigms, this study investigated the referential properties of strong pronouns (long pronouns) in Estonian. Cross-linguistically, 2 main accounts of the long–short distinction have been proposed: the salience account (long pronouns refer to less salient antecedents) and the contrast account (long pronouns ref...

Discourse deixis is a linguistic phenomenon in which pronouns have verbal or clausal, rather than nominal, antecedents. Studies have estimated that between 5% and 10% of pronouns in non-conversational data are discourse deictic. However, current coreference resolution systems ignore this phenomenon. This paper presents an automatic system for the detection and resolution of discourse-deictic pr...

This paper describes an algorithm to identify pleonastic pronouns using statistical techniques. The training step uses a coreference annotated corpus of English and focuses on a set of pronouns such as it. As far as we know, there is no corpus with a pleonastic annotation. The main idea of the algorithm was then to recast the definition of pleonastic pronouns as pronouns that never occur in a c...

The use of subject pronouns by bilingual speakers using both a pro-drop and a non-pro-drop language (e.g. Spanish heritage speakers in the USA) is a well-studied topic in research on cross-linguistic influence in language contact situations. Previous studies looking at bilinguals with different proficiency levels have yielded conflicting results on whether there is transfer from the non-pro-dro...

In this paper we document a so-far neglected case of microvariation involving resumptive pronouns in the left-dislocation construction Meranese, spoken South Tyrol, and Mòcheno, Fersina valley (Trentino). While standard German elements belong to class D-pronouns, two Tyrolean dialects considered exhibit, as pronouns, both (i) D-pronouns (ii) pronominal usages distal demonstrative formed by defi...

We examine demonstrative pronouns in a portion of the Santa Barbara Corpus of American English and propose a coding scheme that classifies pronouns with nominal as well as non-nominal antecedents into direct and indirect, depending on whether their referent is the same as the referent/denotation of the antecedent. In agreement with previous studies, we find that demonstratives more often have n...