Relational Grammar (RG) was introduced in the 70’s as a theory of grammatical relations and relation change, for example, passivization, dative shift, and raising. Furthermore, the idea behind RG was that transformations as originally designed in generative grammar were unable to capture the common kernel of, e. g., passivization across languages. The research conducted within RG has uncovered ...

We describe here a theory of semantic composition, which integrates referent systems into argument structure. The main idea is that argument structure is the key component in linguistic signs, and that it provides the interface between syntax and semantics. To make this idea work for language, referent systems as defined in Vermeulen (1995) have been used. Referent systems (RS) are based on the...

Prosodic correlates of 6 referent status taxonomies and 3 distance-from-last-mention heuristics both on the acoustic and on the symbolic level (ToBI) were investigated in a corpus of short news reports read by 6 professional newsreaders. Symbolic correlates are found mainly for pronouns, acoustic correlates for nouns and proper names. However, both form and extent of these correlates varies con...

The computational model in present paper confirms that memory-based accounts are sufficient to account for a high rate of success at first-pass referent retrieval for anaphoric (and non-anaphoric) nouns. Because even definite noun phrases can often be non-anaphoric (e.g., Poesio & Vieira, 1998), an adequate model must account for how a reader makes an explicit or implicit decision about the ana...

Abstract One cue that may facilitate children's word learning is iconicity, or the correspondence between a word's form and meaning. Some have even proposed iconicity in early lexicon serve to help children learn how words, supporting acquisition of noniconic, arbitrary , word–referent associations. However, this proposal remains untested. Here, we investigate caregivers’ speech young during na...

Three experiments examined 3- to 5-year-olds' (N = 428) understanding of the relationship between pictorial iconicity (photograph, colored drawing, schematic drawing) and the real world referent. Experiments 1 and 2 explored pictorial iconicity in picture-referent confusion after the picture-object relationship has been established. Pictorial iconicity had no effect on referential confusion whe...

Comprehension studies find that a referent, which is expected to be picked up more often in the subsequent discourse, is also more prone to be realized by means of a more reduced type of referring expression (typically a pronoun), compared to a referent that is less expected to be re-mentioned (Ariel 1988, Arnold 1998). This paper evaluates this assumption and shows that it does not always hold...

When people make a judgment as to whether a trait describes themselves or not, cognitive structure about the self must play an important role. Cognitive dimensions are a characteristic of such cognitive structure. The present study examined whether a self-referent information processing was mediated by cognitive dimensions of the self. For the purpose, Klein, Loftus, and Burton's task facilitat...