traditional work on pro-drop languages identified a set of parametric values ‎associated with the availability of null subjects, including the presence of null ‎expletive subjects. in the same vein, but more within the framework of minimalist ‎program, i will discuss while referential subjects may optionally be overt or covert ‎in the persian, expletives are obligatorily null. in this regard, a...

In this paper we show how a natural language system can learn to find the antecedents of relative pronouns. We use a well-known conceptual clustering system to create a case-based memory that predicts the antecedent of a wh-word given a description of the clause that precedes it. Our automated approach duplicates the performance of hand-coded rules. In addition, it requires only minimal syntact...

In this paper we show how a natural language system can learn to find the antecedents of relative pronouns. We use a well-known conceptual clustering system to create a case-based memory that predicts the antecedent of a wh-word given a description of the clause that precedes it. Our automated approach duplicates the performance of hand-coded rules. In addition, it requires only minimal syntact...

The ultimate aim of the following pages is to explore the hypothesis that sentences containing a pronoun be analyzed as involving a topic pronoun doubling relation in a way that closely parallels the one overtly realized in Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) and Hanging Topic (HT) structures in Italian/Romance. In a nutshell: when a pronoun is present in the clause, a silent doubled non-overt topic...

A visual-world eye-tracking experiment investigated the influence of order of mention and grammatical role on resolution of ambiguous pronouns in Finnish. According to the first-mention account, general cognitive structure-building processes make the firstmentioned noun phrase the preferred antecedent of an ambiguous pronoun. According to the subject-preference account, the preferred antecedent...

The  present study aims at exploring the processing difficulty of cleft structures as a type of relative clause for EFL and Persian as  first language learners.The impact of head nouns with various functions as well as that of embedding on the processing of Persian and English cleft structures has been investigated in the present study.The participants  were 68  Iranian male and female students...

Some extent of ambiguity is ubiquitous in everyday conversations. For example, words have multiple meaning and very common pronouns, like "he" and "she" (anaphoric pronouns), have little meaning on their own and refer to a noun that has been previously introduced in the discourse. Ambiguity triggers a decision process that is not a subroutine of language processing but rather a more general dom...

In relative clauses, the wh relative pronoun can be embedded in a larger phrase, as in a boy [whose brother] Mary hit. In such examples, we say that the larger phrase has pied-piped along with the whword. In this paper, using a similar syntactic analysis for wh pied-piping as in Han (2002) and further developed in Kallmeyer and Scheffler (2004), I propose a compositional semantics for relative ...

Based on the theoretical-methodological assumptions of Variationist Sociolinguistics, this study aims to analyze variation relativization strategies in popular speech city Fortaleza-CE. The transmitted data were extracted from 54 informants sociolinguistic descriptions DID type (Dialogue between Informant and Documenter), belonging database Projeto Norma Oral do Português Popular de Fortaleza (...