I present a unified account of interpretation preferences of stressed and unstressed pronouns in discourse. The central intuition is the Complementary Preference Hypothesis that predicts the interpretation preference of a stressed pronoun from that of an unstressed pronoun in the same discourse position. The base preference must be computed in a total pragmatics module including commonsense pre...

This paper describes an implemented system which uses centering theory for planning of coherent texts and choice of referring expressions. We argue that text and sentence planning need to be driven in part by the goal of maintaining referential continuity and thereby facilitating pronoun resolution: obtaining a favourable ordering of clauses, and of arguments within clauses, is likely to increa...

Though there has emerged a number of studies that have dealt with (null) pronoun resolution in various languages, such as English, Finnish, Italian, Spanish, and Russian (Kazanina et al., 2007; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006; Kaiser, 2003), relatively little attention has been paid to pronoun resolution in Korean-type null subject languages, in which pronouns whose referents are easily accessible in th...

It is well-known that young children may omit referential subjects regardless of whether they are acquiring a pro-drop language such as Italian or a nonpro-drop language such as English. The classic proposal of Hyams (1986) according to which these early null subjects instantiate pro in both types of languages has recently come under attack from various sides. Bloom (1990, 1993) and Valian (199...

The purpose of this study is to shed light on the neural mechanisms underlying the modulation of pronoun resolution processes by the information status of the antecedent. Information status was manipulated by using a structurally based constraint (e.g., order of mention) as well as a pragmatically based constraint (i.e., topichood). We found that the pronouns referring to topic entities [the in...

In Study 1 we analyzed Italian child-directed-speech (CDS) and selected the three most frequent active transitive sentence frames used with overt subjects. In Study 2 we experimentally investigated how Italian-speaking children aged 2;6, 3;6, and 4;6 comprehended these orders with novel verbs when the cues of animacy, gender, and subject-verb agreement were neutralized. For each trial, children...

Abstract The article provides a comprehensive overview of attitudes towards nonbinary pronouns, with the aim better understanding why these pronouns are either accepted or rejected. Attitudes they and neopronouns ze xe explored thematic analysis data derived from larger online survey on ( n = 1128). While results demonstrate various polarized stances for both types participants’ reactions highl...

1 A constraint is proposed in the Centering approach to pronoun resolution in discourse. This "property-sharing" constraint requires that two pronominal expressions that retain the same Cb across adjacent utterances share a certain common grammatical property. This property is expressed along the dimension of the grammatical function SUBJECT for both Japanese and English discourses, where diffe...

Much of this literature has concentrated on chosing between one of two analyses: either the OM is a pure agreement marker, analogous to subject markers/agreement in Bantu and other languages, or it is a cliticized pronoun that counts as the true object of the verb even though it appears on the verb on the surface. On the latter analysis, the overt NP in (1c) is not the true grammatical object o...

This paper focuses on subject distribution in Greek and Chilean Spanish, both null languages, as evidenced the oral production of monolingual bilingual speakers. Narratives elicited from 40 monolinguals 76 bilinguals different types, namely, first- generation immigrants, heritage speakers, L2 were analysed quantitatively qualitatively to explore potential differences expressing reference betwee...