scholarly journals Word Order, Grammatical Function, and Referential Form: On the Patterns of Anaphoric Reference in Finnish

Nordlyd ◽  
10.7557/12.28 ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elsi Kaiser
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Referring Expressions ◽  
Reference Resolution ◽  
Order Language ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Referential Expressions ◽  
Referential Form ◽  
Anaphoric Expression

Research on reference resolution has shown that there exists a connection between the form of a referring expression and the accessibility/salience of its referent. More specifically, the most salient referents – i.e. those currently at the center of attention and most prominent at that point in the discourse – are referred to with the most reduced referring expressions. This raises the question: What kinds of factors influence a referent’s salience, i.e. make it a good candidate to be referred to with a reduced anaphoric expression? This paper focuses on two factors which have been claimed to influence referent salience: (1) grammatical/syntactic role and (2) word order. These issues are addressed from the perspective of Finnish, a highly inflected, flexible word order language which has canonical SVO order and two kinds of third person anaphors: the gender-neutral pronoun <em>hän</em> ‘s/he’ and the demonstrative <em>tämä</em> ‘this.’ In this paper, I present the results of three psycholinguistic experiments investigating the referential properties of these two anaphors, and show that <em>hän</em> and <em>tämä</em> differ in their referential properties and are sensitive to different kinds of factors. The results indicate that instead of trying to define the referential properties of these forms according to a unified notion of salience, we should investigate how different factors may be relevant for different referential expressions. The implications that these findings have for our view of how referential systems work are also discussed.

scholarly journals A Comparison of the Referential Properties of Third Person Pronouns in Finnish and Estonian

Nordlyd ◽  
10.7557/12.31 ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elsi Kaiser ◽  
Katrin Hiietam
Keyword(s):  
Survey Data ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Referring Expressions ◽  
Reference Resolution ◽  
Preliminary Results ◽  
The Third ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Third Person

Abstract: This paper investigates the referential properties of third person anaphors in two closely related languages, Finnish and Estonian. Previous crosslinguistic research has shown that the most salient referents are referred to with the most reduced referring expressions. Moreover, factors such as (i) grammatical role, (ii) word order and (iii) the main/subordinate clause distinction have been claimed to be correlated with referent salience. In this paper, we focus on how these factors influence the referential properties of the different members of the third person anaphoric paradigms in Finnish and Estonian. We use corpus evidence and native speaker survey data to investigate the referential properties of the Estonian forms and to compare them to the patterns observed for the Finnish pronoun <em>hän</em> ‘s/he’ and demonstrative <em>tämä</em> ‘this’ (see Kaiser, this volume; Kaiser 2000). Our preliminary results suggest that (i) the Estonian short pronoun <em>ta</em> ‘s/he’ patterns like the Finnish pronoun <em>hän</em> ‘s/he’, in that they both prefer to refer to subjects, and (ii) the Estonian demonstratives <em>see/too</em> ‘this/that’ resemble the Finnish demonstrative <em>tämä</em> ‘this,’ generally referring to non-subjects, postverbal NPs or subjects in subordinate clauses. Moreover, we find that the Estonian long pronominal form <em>tema</em> ‘s/he’ differs from the Finnish demonstrative <em>tämä</em>, despite their historical connection: As suggested by Pajusalu (1997), in Estonian, <em>tema</em> is used to refer to entities that contrast with something, whereas in Finnish <em>tämä</em> is used for entities low in salience (Kaiser, this volume). The implications of our findings for ‘accessibility hierarchy’-based approaches to reference resolution are also discussed.

scholarly journals When speech is ambiguous, gesture steps in: Sensitivity to discourse-pragmatic principles in early childhood

2009 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
WING CHEE SO ◽  
ÖZLEM ECE DEMIR ◽  
SUSAN GOLDIN-MEADOW
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Referring Expressions ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Null Arguments ◽  
Information Status ◽  
Third Person ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Referential Expressions ◽  
Chinese And English

ABSTRACTYoung children produce gestures to disambiguate arguments. This study explores whether the gestures they produce are constrained by discourse-pragmatic principles: person and information status. We ask whether children use gesture more often to indicate the referents that have to be specified (i.e., third person and new referents) than the referents that do not have to be specified (i.e., first or second person and given referents). Chinese- and English-speaking children were videotaped while interacting spontaneously with adults, and their speech and gestures were coded for referential expressions. We found that both groups of children tended to use nouns when indicating third person and new referents but pronouns or null arguments when indicating first or second person and given referents. They also produced gestures more often when indicating third person and new referents, particularly when those referents were ambiguously conveyed by less explicit referring expressions (pronouns, null arguments). Thus Chinese- and English-speaking children show sensitivity to discourse-pragmatic principles not only in speech but also in gesture.

Pragmatics for Latin

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. M. Devine ◽  
Laurence D. Stephens
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Informational Content ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Association With Focus ◽  
Narrow Scope ◽  
Order Language ◽  
Free Word

Latin is often described as a free word order language, but in general each word order encodes a particular information structure: in that sense, each word order has a different meaning. This book provides a descriptive analysis of Latin information structure based on detailed philological evidence and elaborates a syntax-pragmatics interface that formalizes the informational content of the various different word orders. The book covers a wide ranges of issues including broad scope focus, narrow scope focus, double focus, topicalization, tails, focus alternates, association with focus, scrambling, informational structure inside the noun phrase and hyperbaton (discontinuous constituency). Using a slightly adjusted version of the structured meanings theory, the book shows how the pragmatic meanings matching the different word orders arise naturally and spontaneously out of the compositional process as an integral part of a single semantic derivation covering denotational and informational meaning at one and the same time.

scholarly journals Word order in Latin locative constructions: a corpus study in Caesar’s De bello gallico

2011 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stavros Skopeteas
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Motion Verbs ◽  
Structural Domains ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
First Order ◽  
Order Language ◽  
Free Word

AbstractClassical Latin is a free word order language, i.e., the order of the constituents is determined by information structure rather than by syntactic rules. This article presents a corpus study on the word order of locative constructions and shows that the choice between a Theme-first and a Locative-first order is influenced by the discourse status of the referents. Furthermore, the corpus findings reveal a striking impact of the syntactic construction: complements of motion verbs do not have the same ordering preferences with complements of static verbs and adjuncts. This finding supports the view that the influence of discourse status on word order is indirect, i.e., it is mediated by information structural domains.

scholarly journals Grammatical licensing and relative clause parsing in a flexible word-order language

Cognition ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 178 ◽  
pp. 207-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew W. Wagers ◽  
Manuel F. Borja ◽  
Sandra Chung
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Relative Clause ◽  
Order Language

Objects in the German prefield

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-39
Author(s):  
Markus Bader
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Initial Position ◽  
Experimental Investigations ◽  
Demonstrative Pronoun ◽  
New Findings ◽  
The Subject ◽  
New Speakers ◽  
Referential Form ◽  
Free Word

From the perspective of language production, this chapter discusses the question of whether to move the subject or the object to the clause-initial position in a German Verb Second clause. A review of experimental investigations of language production shows that speakers of German tend to order arguments in such a way that the most accessible argument comes first, with accessibility defined in terms like animacy (‘animate before inanimate’) and discourse status (e.g. ‘given before new’). Speakers of German thus obey the same ordering principles that have been found to be at work in English and other languages. Despite the relative free word order of German, speakers rarely produce sentences with object-before-subject word order in experimental investigations. Instead, they behave like speakers of English and mostly use passivization in order to bring the underlying object argument in front of the underlying subject argument when the object is more accessible than the subject. Corpus data, however, show that object-initial clauses are not so infrequent after all. The second part of the chapter, therefore, discusses new findings concerning the discourse conditions that favour the production of object-initial clauses. These findings indicate, among other things, that the clausal position of an object is affected not only by its referent’s discourse status but also by its referential form. Objects occur in clause-initial position most frequently when referring to a given referent in the form of a demonstrative pronoun or NP.

Parsing Korean: A Free Word Order Language

1986 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 123-128
Author(s):  
K.-S. CHOI
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Order Language ◽  
Free Word

Two Factors in Latin Word-Order

1909 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
E. H. Sturtevant
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Latin Word ◽  
Two Factors

Dialogical factors in toddlers’ use of clitic pronouns

2010 ◽  
Vol 30 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 375-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Salazar Orvig ◽  
Haydée Marcos ◽  
Aliyah Morgenstern ◽  
Rouba Hassan ◽  
Jocelyne Leber-Marin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Subject Pronouns ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Referential Expressions

Young (1;9—2;4) children’s use of third person clitic subject pronouns in natural dialogues was examined in both longitudinal and cross-sectional data. Considering that young children mainly use pronouns in the context of referential continuity, this study aims at identifying some of the factors that affect this use. Two possible dialogical factors are examined: (1) the use of clitic pronouns can be interpreted as a reproduction of the adult’s discourse, either by taking up whole utterances containing a pronoun or by taking up only the clitic pronouns without reproducing the adult’s utterance. (2) The use of pronouns could be driven by pragmatic-discursive factors. In order to assess this hypothesis the use of clitic pronouns was observed in the context of dialogical continuity. Three kinds of links were considered: children repeat or reformulate the adult’s utterances, add a new predication on the same topic, or establish a contrast. The results suggest that the reproduction of the adult’s utterance does not significantly influence children’s use of pronouns, whereas pragmatic-discursive factors are found to affect their choice of referential expressions.

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