The effect of gender agreement mismatches on intersentential anaphoric pronouns

This article focuses on the effect of gender agreement mismatches between personal pronouns and their antecedents across sentences. In two acceptability experiments, we test whether acceptability of gender agreement violations on animated nouns may be modulated by grammatical and contextual features of the antecedents of personal pronouns. In the first experiment, we manipulated the “specificity” feature of the antecedent in order to make the antecedent refer either to the class of individuals or to a specific referent. In the second experiment, we used stereotypically male or female proper names to test whether grammatical gender mismatches between personal pronouns and bigender nouns could be attenuated. Although the first experiment showed an effect explainable purely by grammatical factors, against many theories of “semantic” agreement, the results of the second experiment suggest that both the grammatical and the contextual features of the antecedent are computed when speakers evaluate agreement relations between personal pronouns and their antecedents.

Cyclic changes in verbal person-number indexes are unlikely

This paper discusses the emergence and demise of verbal person-number indexes on the basis of a sample of 310 languages. First, qualitative evidence is provided to show that there are different ways in which indexes may emerge, and that independent anaphoric pronouns are not the only possible source. Second, quantitative evidence is provided against the claim that indexes tend to demise via phonological attrition in the course of time. A considerable degree of demise is not a universally likely process, but rather a major restructuring process that requires additional – areal – triggers in order to come about. Thus, 92% of the languages of my sample do not show any strong tendency toward losing their indexes, and the degree of demise of their indexes is persistently low when compared to the proto-forms. This is despite the fact that indexes constantly change over time, and the phonetic shape found in the proto-languages is never faithfully preserved in the modern languages. Finally, those few languages that exhibit a relatively high degree of demise are not randomly distributed across the world, but are clustered in the following areas: Northwestern Europe, Eastern South East Asia with Oceania and, possibly, Mid Africa as well Northern South America.

Sex and Agreement

This paper is about the relation between natural and grammatical gender in Greek and the ways in which the twain are matched or mismatched. A variety of topics is discussed, including the relation between grammatical gender and declension, the resolution of gender clashes in epicene nouns and the marking of natural gender in common nouns. Particular attention is given to the gendering of neuter diminutives with male or female referents. Age and particular aspects of “maleness” or “femaleness” are shown to be major determinants in triggering male or female instead of neuter agreement patterns, especially on anaphoric pronouns, but occasionally also on other word classes such as predicative adjectives and participles.

THE MULTIPLE FUNCTIONALITY OF THE PRONOUN ʾULĀʾIKA IN THE QURʾĀN

Demonstrative pronouns may function as deictic or anaphoric pronouns. The demonstrative pronoun ʾulāʾika in Arabic is the focus of this paper. It is argued that in the Qurʾān, besides being an anaphoric/resumptive pronoun, which primarily functions as the syntactic subject, it has three additional functions: (1) as a resumptive pronoun of the left-dislocation construction, helping in retrieving the predicate, which usually consists of a short clause following a ‘heavy’ subject. (2) Possibly it has the same function as ḍamīr al-faṣl, ‘separation pronoun’—namely, ʾulāʾika occurs in a simple sentence where it separates a definite subject and a definite predicate. It also occurs between subject and predicate, while both are constructed as relative clauses, and between a ‘heavy’ subject and indefinite predicate. (3) As a number marker in conditional clauses that are headed by the conditional particle man, and two kinds of number agreement are exhibited in the clause: singular and plural.ʾulāʾika in this case marks the transition from the grammatical-number feature associated with man to the notional number of man.

A coesão referencial em textos traduzidos do inglês para o português: a questão dos sujeitos nulos

Understanding and writing a text arise from several factors. Among them, coreference relations, which allow for the identification of the referents of linguistic expressions, are of particular importance, since they ensure referential cohesion and, thus, contribute to text cohesion. One context in which recognizing referential relations is crucial involves reference chains with anaphoric pronouns. Although all languages exhibit coreference relations, the linguistic means to establish them may vary. Thus, in the context of translation, maintaining reference chains often implies the use of adaptation strategies: when working with non-null subject source languages, such as English, and null subject target languages, such as Portuguese, translators should recognize the contexts in which, in the latter, they may or must omit the subject, without affecting interpretation nor creating vagueness, conflict of interpretations or referential ambiguity. In this work, some data about reference chains in the context of English to Portuguese translation is discussed. We identify the main mismatches in translations done by university students and present clues to help train students in translation, promoting their mastering of the grammatical and textual conditions that determine the omission vs. the realization of the subject. The results show that the main problems result either from calque of the source language properties or from the overgeneralization of null subject contexts in the target language.

Features of Informality in Applied Linguistics Research Articles Published in Iranian Local Journals

This study was motivated by the recent study on informality in academic writing carried out by Hyland and Jiang (2017), to see the status of informality in Applied Linguistics research articles published in Iranian local journals. To this end, 50 research articles from two Journals of “Research in Applied Linguistics” and “Iranian Journal of applied Linguistics” were selected. The research articles were published in 2014 and 2015 issues. They were analyzed based on Hyland and Jiang’s (2017) taxonomy. The results imply that unattended anaphoric pronouns and sentence initial conjunctions have received the greatest attention from Iranian writers of Applied Linguistics writers while exclamations and contractions were totally ignored. Compared to the results reported by Hyland and Jiang (2017), the use of features of informality by Iranian writers of the present study varies to a great extent. The variations could stress the necessity of awareness of Iranian Applied Linguistics and related fields of study writers concerning the use of these features by successful writers.

Did Lycian adopt a new clause structure in place of inherited -r-passives?

The corpora of the IE Anatolian languages vary widely in script, legibility, size, date, subject matter, and in the extent to which we understand them. Four syntactic features which they appear to have inherited are: a S(ubject)- O(bject)-V(erb) clause structure; declined anaphoric pronouns attached enclitically to a clause’s first accented element; the ability to move the object or verb to the start of a clause for emphasis (“fronting”); the option not to enforce case and number agreement among more than two coordinated elements. The discovery of the Lycian languages and our current understanding of them is summarised. It is proposed, although the evidence comes primarily from Lycian A: that languages of the southwest Luwic area, namely, the alphabetically written Carian and the two from Lycia, had changed to a basic SVO clause; that Lycian A, and probably B too, abandoned the inherited medio-passive conjugations in -r-, which are absent from their corpora; that the passive preterite was expressed by a periphrastic OVS construction with fronted direct object, then me and a particle chain starting with the n- found clause-initially in Hittite but absent from other Luwic dialects, then innovatively appending *-an to the verb, and with the subject last.

Coreference Resolution for Anaphoric Pronouns in Texts on Medical Products

Coreference resolution is the task of finding all expressions that refer to the same entity in a text. It is one of the higher level NLP (Natural Language Processing) tasks. It allows, for example, to extract more information about medical products from larger texts. A product such as ‘ambidextrous gloves’ may appear in a text in many different forms. For example, they could be referred to by the pronoun ‘they’, such as in this sentence. The algorithm presented in this paper finds pronouns and for each of them (except the pleonastic ‘it’) it creates a coreference candidate with entities that appeared earlier in the same sentence or in the previous sentence. Each candidate (pair of mentions) is described by 48 binary features which represent their grammatical and location properties. In the training set, each pair is marked as a coreference or not, based on which a decision tree classifier is trained. A classifier with a high precision of 0.94 and a decent recall of 0.61 were obtained on the training set, still with a good precision out of a sample of 0.64.