In the framework of an artistic-scientific project on eye-movements during reading, my collaborators from the psychology department at the KU Leuven and I had a close look at the poem "Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard" ("A throw of the dice will never abolish chance") by Stéphane Mallarmé. The poem is an intriguing example of nonlinear writing, of a typographic game with white and spac...

Previous approaches to pronominalization have largely been theoretical rather than applied in nature. Frequently, such methods are based on Centering Theory, which deals with the resolution of anaphoric pronouns. But it is not clear that complex theoretical mechanisms, while having satisfying explanatory power, are necessary for the actual generation of pronouns. We first illustrate examples of...

Previous work on pronouns in SMT has focussed on third-person pronouns, treating them all as anaphoric. Little attention has been paid to other uses or other types of pronouns. Believing that further progress requires careful analysis of pronouns as a whole, we have analysed a parallel corpus of annotated English-German texts to highlight some of the problems that hinder progress. We combine th...

Time 25 minutes Introduction Here is a fun card game to help students practice the modal verbs of possibility 'may' and 'might' and the demonstrative pronouns 'this' and 'these'. Procedure Divide the students into groups of four. Give each group a set of picture cards. Ask the students to shuffle the cards and place them face down in a pile on the desk. Tell the students that they are going to ...

In this paper we describe the results of unsupervised (clustering) and supervised (classification) learning experiments with the purpose of recognising the function of singular neuter pronouns in Danish corpora of written and spoken language. Danish singular neuter pronouns comprise personal and demonstrative pronouns. They are very frequent and have many functions such as non-referential, cata...

Children acquiring their native language (L1) have been reported to have greater difficulty in interpreting pronouns than reflexives. In addition, they are less accurate when pronouns refer to referential antecedents than to quantified antecedents, and when they hear full pronouns as opposed to reduced pronouns. We hypothesize that similar difficulties of interpretation will occur for (non-adva...

Personal pronouns have been shown to influence cognitive perspective taking during comprehension. Studies using single sentences found that 3rd person pronouns facilitate the construction of a mental model from an observer's perspective, whereas 2nd person pronouns support an actor's perspective. The direction of the effect for 1st person pronouns seems to depend on the situational context. In ...

We propose an annotation framework to explicitly identify dropped subject pronouns in Chinese. We acknowledge and specify 10 concrete pronouns that exist as words in Chinese and 4 abstract pronouns that do not correspond to Chinese words, but that are recognized conceptually, to native Chinese speakers. These abstract pronouns are identified as “unspecified”, “pleonastic”, “event”, and “existen...