Since the introduction of the X-bar principles it is commonly assumed that prepositions are heads of PPs, in the same way as nouns and pronouns are heads of NPs. However, while this is well motivated for a large majority of the pronouns and the prepositions in many languages, there are also exceptions. More specifically, Van Eynde (1999) argues that the reduced or minor pronouns of Dutch—as opp...

Behavioral studies investigating the influence of the relative word frequency of antecedent nouns on the processing of anaphoric pronouns have yielded contradictory results. While some researchers found no effect of an antecedent's frequency of occurrence on coreference resolution [J. Simner, R. Smyth, Phonological activation in anaphoric lexical access (ALA), Brain Lang. 68 (1999) 40-45], othe...

This paper revisits the relationship between the form of referring expressions and the assumed salience of their referents. Previous work suggests that pronouns must refer to highly salient discourse entities, while descriptive noun phrases should be used to refer to less salient items. Our claim is that the referring expression itself is only part of this relationship, since it is not the only...

Research on Binding Theory shows that the syntactically-conditioned complementarity normally exhibited by pronouns and reflexives breaks down in certain syntactic environments, including possessorless picture-NPs (e.g. picture of {her/herself}). We report two psycholinguistic experiments which investigate what kinds of factors influence how pronouns and reflexives in picture-NPs are interpreted...

The study examined the relationship between language use and perception of group processes. In an experiment, participants discussed their views about climate change in a chat. Afterward, ( n = 239) filled out themselves Participants who perceived more similarity among members used less complex (cognitive processes language) assenting language. As felt knowledgeable credible topic, “we” pronoun...