Theme: Semantics and Structural types of pronoun. Plan

Theme: Semantics and Structural types of pronoun.
Plan:
Introduction………………………………………………………………………3
Chapter I . Pronoun types and basic interpretation
1.1 Indefinite pronouns……………………………………………………………10
1.2 demonstrative pronouns……………………………………………………..14
1.3 non- demonstrative pronouns……………………………………………...16

Chapter II. Semantics types of pronoun.

2.1 Structural conditions on pronoun binding………………………………..22
2.2 Semantic features on pronouns……………………………………………….26
2.3 Plural pronoun………………………………………………………………31

Conclusion

References

Introduction
Successful language comprehension requires a reader or listener to rapidly interpret referential forms such as it, him and herself. Although these forms are extremely frequent, they are referentially underspecified. A form such as her can, in principle, refer to any human feminine singular referent—in other words, to any member of a very large set. As a consequence, successful comprehension of these forms requires a narrowing of the domain of potential referents. This raises the question of what constrains the referential domains for different referring forms: how do comprehenders know which entities to exclude, and which to treat as possible referents?
For some referential forms, it has been argued that structural/syntactic information determines the choice of antecedent. For example, it is commonly assumed that the choice of referent for a reflexive like herself is specified by the structural configuration of the sentence (e.g. Chomsky, 1981 and many others). In contrast, for many other cases of reference resolution (especially when the referential form and its referent are in different clauses) non-structural information appears to play a crucial role. For example, many researchers have argued that semantic information influences the interpretation of pronouns with cross-clausal antecedents (e.g., see Garvey and Caramazza, 1974; McDonald & MacWhinney, 1995, Stewart et al., 2000; Koornneef & Van Berkum, 2006; Stevenson, Crawley & Kleinman, 1994; Arnold, 2001, for research on effects of implicit causality and thematic roles). Stevenson and colleagues (Stevenson et al., 1994) found that the thematic role of an entity (e.g., agent, goal, source, experiencer) influences its likelihood of being the antecedent for a subsequent pronoun (see also Arnold, 2001). In sum, existing work suggests that referential expressions tend to fall into
two groups: Some are interpreted in accordance with structural principles, whereas others rely more on non-structural factors such as semantic role as well as other discourse factors (e.g.,
Kehler, 2002; Wolf et al., 2004).
Even though many occurrences of referentially underspecified forms fall into one of these two groups, we argue that regarding structural information and discourse/semantic information as separate aspects of reference resolution is an oversimplification. We build on and extend what we call the form-specific multiple-constraints framework, first introduced in Kaiser (2003; see
also Kaiser, 2005; Kaiser & Trueswell, 2008; Brown-Schmidt, Byron & Tanenhaus, 2005).
Like existing multiple-constraints approaches to reference resolution (e.g., Arnold, 1998; Ariel, 1990), the form-specific approach assumes that anaphor resolution is not determined by a single constraint but rather is the result of the interaction of multiple constraints. Crucially, the formspecific approach allows for the multiple constraints that guide reference resolution to be weighted differently for different referential forms. The approach was originally formulated on the basis of data from Finnish showing that pronouns and demonstratives, both of which can be used to refer to human antecedents mentioned in a preceding clause, do not show the same level of sensitivity to the antecedent’s syntactic role and linear position (Kaiser, 2003; Kaiser & Trueswell, 2008). The asymmetrical sensitivities indicate that not all anaphoric forms are equally sensitive to the same kinds of information. This finding is also supported by crossclausal data from Estonian (Kaiser & Hiietam, 2004; Kaiser, 2003; Kaiser & Vihman, 2006), Dutch (Kaiser & Trueswell, 2004) and English (Brown-Schmidt et al., 2005).
Most of the previous studies that found different anaphoric forms exhibiting asymmetrical
sensitivities focused on cross-clausal anaphora, for which it is not surprising that non-structural (discourse/semantic) factors are relevant. One of our main aims here is to investigate whether the form-specific multiple-constraints approach also applies in the domain of within-clause reference resolution. In the clause-internal domain, many anaphor-antecedent dependencies are in structural configurations that are considered to be constrained by structural factors (e.g. the large body of work on Chomskyan Binding Theory, though see Gordon & Hendrick 1997), and the role of non-structural factors has received less attention than in the cross-clausal domain. Moreover, although existing work within the form-specific framework indicates that anaphoric forms differ in their sensitivity to different kinds of information, it does not make specific predictions regarding the range of variation that will occur for different anaphoric forms within and across languages. The ultimate goal of the form-specific approach is to develop detailed testable hypotheses about the conditions of use and weightings of constraints for each anaphoric form. This will require more research on different anaphoric forms in different languages. This paper aims to contribute to that goal.
We present four experiments investigating the processing of pronouns and reflexives in picture noun phrases (PNPs) with and without possessors (e.g. Andrew’s picture of him/himself, the picture of him/himself). The picture NP construction is widely acknowledged to represent a stumbling block for existing structure-driven approaches of within-clause reference resolution.
Since this construction has been hypothesized to be influenced by both syntactic factors and discourse/semantic factors (see for example Kuno, 1987; Pollard & Sag, 1992; Reinhart & Reuland, 1993; Tenny, 1996; Tenny, 2003), it is a useful tool for investigating how structural and non-structural information interact during within-sentence anaphor resolution. When discussing the effects of non-structural factors, we will refer to them as ‘semantic factors’ for ease of exposition. However, we leave open the question of whether the source/perceiver manipulation (described below) is best regarded as a semantic, thematic role manipulation or a discourse-level/pragmatic manipulation (e.g., having to do with perspective-taking).
We demonstrate that in picture NPs, pronouns and reflexives differ in the degree of sensitivity they exhibit to structural and non-structural information, and that these differences emerge very early during processing. Our findings are compatible with the form-specific multipleconstraints framework, but not with multiple-constraints approaches in which the relative weights of structural and semantic constraints are the same for reflexives as for pronouns, nor with approaches that propose an initial structure-only stage of processing.