The length of a noun phrase has been shown to influence choices such as syntactic role assignment (e.g., whether the noun phrase is realized as the subject or the object). But does length also affect the choice between different forms of referring expressions? Three experiments investigated the effect of antecedent length on the choice between pronouns (e.g., he) and repeated nouns (e.g., the a...

VP-ellipsis generally requires a syntactically matching antecedent. However, many documented examples exist where the antecedent is not appropriate. Kehler (2000, 2002) proposed an elegant theory which predicts a syntactic antecedent for an elided VP is required only for a certain discourse coherence relation (resemblance) not for cause-effect relations. Most of the data Kehler used to motivate...

The following terminology will be used. The clause containing the ellipsis (dann besbI£he ieh immer den Peter "then I always -vts# Peter" in ( 1b)) is called ellipsis clause. The constituent --other than dann ("then"), immer ("always") and possibly other particles-that remains expressed in the ellipsis clause is called the remnant (den Peter "the Peter") . The clause from which the elided infor...

Conditions under which monthly rainfall forecasts translate into monthly runoff predictions that could support water resources planning and management activities were investigated on a small watershed in central Oklahoma. Runoff response to rainfall forecasts was simulated using the hydrologic model SWAT. Eighteen scenarios were examined that represented combinations of wet, average, and dry an...

The present study examines whether children reactivate a moved constituent at its gap position and how children's more limited working memory span affects the way they process filler-gap dependencies. 46 5-7 year-old children and 54 adult controls participated in a cross-modal picture priming experiment and underwent a standardized working memory test. The results revealed a statistically signi...

In each case, the anaphorically related elements are italicized. In (1a), \a presentation" is the antecedent for the pronoun \it", and in (1b), \gave a presentation" is the antecedent for the VPE. Similarly, in (1c), we view the \past" in the rst clause as the antecedent for the \past" in the second clause. This links the time of leaving to the time of giving the presentation. In (1d), we regar...

Real-time interpretation of pronouns is sometimes sensitive to the presence of grammatically-illicit antecedents and sometimes not. This occasional sensitivity has been taken as evidence that structural constraints do not immediately impact the initial antecedent retrieval for pronoun interpretation. We argue that it is important to separate effects that reflect the initial antecedent retrieval...

Event-related brain potentials were recorded while subjects listened to sentences containing a controlled infinitival complement. Subject and object control items were used, both with 2 potential antecedents in the upper clause. Half of the sentences had a gender agreement violation between the null subject of the infinitival complement and an adjective predicated of it. The rapid detection of ...

Stimulus competition (e.g., blocking) has been observed between antecedent events (i.e., conditioned stimuli or potential causes), but recent evidence within the human causal learning literature suggests that it could also be obtained between subsequent events (i.e., unconditioned stimuli or potential effects). The present research tested this hypothesis with rat subjects. To avoid confounding ...

Clustering step in the mention-pair paradigm for coreference resolution, forms the chain of coreferent mentions from the mention pairs classified as coreferent. Clustering methods including best-first clustering considers each antecedent candidate individually, while selecting the antecedent for an anaphoric mention. Here we introduce an easyto-implement modification to best-first clustering to...