The Japanese particle wa is widely considered a marker for topic. This paper presents new evidence that contrary to this general view, wa does not only mark topic, but it also marks items that are simply discourse anaphoric. The evidence comes from the observation that a wa-phrase displays distinct syntactic behaviour depending on whether it is interpreted as a topic or discourse anaphoric. It ...

This paper describes a corpus of Brazilian Portuguese texts built in view of the construction of an Anaphora Resolution system, which is part of a fully-fledged Natural Language Processing system (STRING). The ZAC corpus is aimed at the resolution of the so-called zero-anaphora, that is, an anaphora relation where the anaphoric expression (or anaphor) has been zeroed The paper briefly discusses...

Notwithstanding conclusive psychological and corpus evidence that at least some aspects of anaphoric and referential interpretation take place incrementally, and the existence of some computational models of incremental reference resolution, many aspects of the linguistics of incremental reference interpretation still have to be better understood. We propose a model of incremental reference int...

Anaphoric connectives are event anaphors (or abstract anaphors) that in addition convey a coherence relation holding between the antecedent and the host clause of the connective. Some of them carry an explicitly-anaphoric morpheme, others do not. We analysed the set of German connectives for this property and found that many have an additional nonconnective reading, where they serve as nominal ...

Anaphora resolution has proven to be a very difficult problem; it requires the integrated application of syntactic. semantic. and pragmatic knowledge. This paper examines the hypothesis that instead of attempting to construct a monolithic method for resolving anaphora. the combination of multiple strategies, each exploiting a different knowledge source, proves more effective -theoretically and ...

The paper presents a study on the translation into Portuguese of the demonstrative pronoun this, whenever used as an anaphor. The study relies on the analysis of a sample of tokens collected in a parallel English-Portuguese bilingual corpus containing literary texts and international law texts, as well as technical and scientific materials. Only tokens appearing in texts originally produced in ...

Abstract In this article, we investigate a puzzle for standard accounts of reference in natural language processing, psycholinguistics and pragmatics: occasions where, following an initial (e.g., the ice ), subsequent is achieved using same noun phrase (i.e., as opposed to anaphoric form it ). We argue that such non-anaphoric can be understood motivated by central principle: expression agency i...