Two story-telling experiments examine the process of choosing between pronouns and proper names in speaking. Such choices are traditionally attributed to speakers striving to make referring expressions maximally interpretable to addressees. The experiments revealed a novel effect: even when a pronoun would not be ambiguous, the presence of another character in the discourse decreased pronoun us...

Many languages allow a pronoun to go unpronounced in the presence of inflectional marking for person and number. This paper explores the hypothesis that inflection may itself be ‘pronominal’ using data from Irish which exhibits a well-known complementary distribution between person/number inflection and pronouns. Such complementarity follows if inflection forms a syntactic chain with a pronoun ...

This paper investigates reference to clausally introduced entities and proposes an explanation for why these are more readily available to immediate subsequent reference with a demonstrative pronoun than with the personal pronoun, it. New evidence is provided supporting proposals that such entities are typically activated, but not brought into focus, upon their introduction into a discourse. Th...

We describe a pronoun interpretation experiment in which a Coherence Hypothesis is tested against preference-based analyses of pronoun interpretation, including the Parallel Function Preference and the Subject Preference. We demonstrate that preferences can be systematically disrupted through the manipulation of coherence, and that only the Coherence Hypothesis can predict the full range of cor...

In this paper we present our systems for the DiscoMT 2017 cross-lingual pronoun prediction shared task. For all four language pairs, we trained a standard attention-based neural machine translation system as well as three variants that incorporate information from the preceding source sentence. We show that our systems, which are not specifically designed for pronoun prediction and may be used ...

1 Binding It has long been observed that pronouns (he/she/him/her, etc.) and reflexives (himself/herself, etc.) seem to be in complementary distribution in English. This means that in the same structural position a pronoun and a reflexive will have different interpretations. In (1) for example, a pronoun in object position is barred from taking the subject as its antecedent, but a reflexive in ...

It has been noted that examples with extractions out of relative clauses have attested in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are judged to be unacceptable Icelandic Faroese. We hypothesize this may reflect whether or not speakers tend prepose unstressed object pronouns as a way establishing coherent discourse. In article we investigate what extent pronoun preposing is used Swedish, Faroese there any...

language is a system and every system has rules that govern the structure of its vocabulary. the rules of the arabic language are based on the vowels that consistent with the meanings used in the context represent the words' position. there are some basic rules in addition to vowels which are mostly seen in the written texts. one of these rules is the matching rule that refers to the condi...

This paper proposes a method to analyze Japanese anaphora, in which zero pronouns (omitted obligatory cases) are used to refer to preceding entities (antecedents). Unlike the case of general coreference resolution, zero pronouns have to be detected prior to resolution because they are not expressed in discourse. Our method integrates two probability parameters to perform zero pronoun detection ...

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 first-mentioned noun phrase the preferred antecedent of an ambiguous pronoun. According to the subject-preference account, the preferred anteceden...