Anaphora resolution is still a challenging research field in natural language processing, lacking an algorithm that correctly resolves anaphoric pronouns. Anaphoric zero pronouns pose an even greater challenge, since this category is not lexically realised. Thus, their resolution is conditioned by their prior identification stage. This paper reports on the distribution of zero pronouns in Roman...

In this paper we present a method of detecting zero pronouns in Japanese clauses and identifying their antecedents using aligned sentence pairs from a Japanese-English bilingual corpus and open resource tools. We use syntactic and semantic structures and the alignment of words and phrases in the sentence pairs to automatically detect zero pronouns and determine their antecedents using English t...

Pronouns without explicit noun phrase antecedents pose a problem for any theory of reference resolution. We report here on an empirical study of such pronouns in the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, a corpus of spontaneous, casual conversation. Analysis of 2,046 third person personal pronouns in fourteen transcripts indicates that 330 (or 16.1%) lack NP antecedents. These pronou...

This paper presents a new study on the distribution, identification, and resolution of zero pronouns in Romanian. A Romanian corpus, including legal, encyclopaedic, literary, and news texts has been created and manually annotated for zero pronouns. Using a morphological parser for Romanian and machine learning methods, experiments were performed on the created corpus for the identification and ...

In two self-paced, sentence-by-sentence reading experiments we examined the difference in the processing of Spanish discourses with repeated names, overt pronouns, and null pronouns in emphatic and non-emphatic contexts. In Experiment 1, repeated names and overt pronouns caused a processing delay when they referred to salient antecedents in non-emphatic contexts. In Experiment 2, both processin...

This paper addresses the question of whether and how the semantics of third-person pronouns can vary across languages. I investigate third-person non-demonstrative pronouns in St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish), including null pro and its overt animate plural counterpart wit. I provide evidence for a striking cross-linguistic difference between the St’át’imcets pronouns and English ones: third-pers...

The paper presents a tentative overview of pronouns in Ginyanga, an understudied Kwa language spoken Togo and Ghana; particular, personal pronouns, reflexive demonstratives, quantifiers. There are no subject Ginyanga. We define two pronoun series with designated for each noun class: basic (emphatic possessive) object. set is used independent possessive contexts, as well constructions. Guang sys...

This paper discusses two theoretically challenging phenomena concerning the phi-features on plural pronouns: (i) ‘dependent plural pronouns’, i.e. plural pronouns that denote atomic individuals, and (ii) partial binding, i.e. plural pronouns with more than one antecedent. I will offer a novel semantic account of these two phenomena where all occurrences of phi-features are both semantically and...

In Norwegian, possessive pronouns can be prenominal (min bil 'my car') or postnominal (bilen min 'car.DEF my'). In the Principles and Parameters literature, the standard assumption is that possessive pronouns are prenominal in underlying structure, while the postnominal position is a result of N-movement. This paper takes a different approach. The focus is the grammatical differences between th...

An eye-movement reading experiment investigated whether the ease with which pronouns are processed is affected by the lexical frequency of their antecedent. Reading times following pronouns with infrequent antecedents were faster than following pronouns with frequent antecedents. We argue that this is consistent with a saliency account, according to which infrequent antecedents are more salient...