1. Introduction A recurring theme in theoretical discussions of language contact is the question of borrowability—specifically, whether there are any substantive constraints governing the kinds of lexicon and structure that can be borrowed. Nowadays historical linguists are less likely to propose absolute constraints than they used to be, because everyone knows at least a few examples of 'odd' ...

In this paper we discuss a computational cognitive model of children’s poor performance on pronoun interpretation (the so-called Delay of Principle B Effect, or DPBE). This cognitive model is based on a theoretical account that attributes the DPBE to children’s inability as hearers to also take into account the speaker’s perspective. The cognitive model predicts that child hearers are unable to...

Eye movements of listeners were monitored to investigate how gender information and accessibility in ̄uence the initial processes of pronoun interpretation. Previous studies on this issue have produced mixed results, and several studies have concluded that gender cues are not automatically used during the early processes of pronoun interpretation (e.g. Garnham, A., Oakhill, J. & Cruttenden, H. (...

Introduction There is a recurrent view that language processing takes place in a cascade, with grammatical principles acting as an automatic filter on what information is made available to semantic and pragmatic processing mechanisms. Alternatively, one may view grammatical principles and semantic and pragmatic knowledge as applying more or less simultaneously (as the relevant information is en...

Most personal pronouns have one entry in the mental lexicon, but they can have different referents depending on the context they appear in. They are sometimes fairly ambiguous. There is also evidence that pronoun resolution is impaired in many developmental deficits. Children have to learn how to find the intended referent, but we do not know much about how resolution strategies are acquired. H...

This paper discusses the proposals of Li and Thompson (1977), Yen (1986), and Feng (1993) in relation to the development of the Chinese copula and argues that Li and Thompson’s suggestion of a topic mechanism, Yen’s analogical change, and Feng’s phonological pause are unsatisfactory in explaining the development of the copula. It is suggested that Katz’s (1996) cognitive concept of existence in...

This paper proposes a statistical zero pronoun resolution method that utilizes features of verbs. In Japanese speech, the subject is often omitted, especially when it is the first person. To resolve such zero pronouns, features related to the verbs such as functional expressions play important roles. However, recent state-of-the-art zero-pronoun resolution systems lack these features because th...

Two experiments explore how pronoun resolution is influenced by a) properties of discourse referents, specifically whether they are underspecified and in need of description, and b) the contribution of the pronoun-containing utterance, specifically whether it provides a description or specifies an event. We find that these factors interact, such that when an underspecified referent is in focus,...

Indefinite noun phrases in certain contexts are unable to support anaphoric coreference to an individual entity, and therefore should be ignored when searching for coreferent antecedents of anaphoric pronouns. However, many algorithms for anaphora resolution utilize noun phrase chunking or shallow parsing, and therefore do not make the needed distinctions to avoid this type of spurious antecede...