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Dissertation Abstract

Abstract. This article provides evidence based on the phenomenon of reconstruction asymmetry in English, and anaphoric clitics in Romance to show that binding conditions—more specifically condition A—apply cyclically on the basis of information contained at the level of the syntactic phase. Given that cyclicity is a property of derivations, the facts analyzed here constitute evidence in favor of an essentially "derivational" approach to binding relations based on the central concept of syntactic phase. Evidence is also presented against LF analyses, which assume a "representational" approach to binding, and against an alternative derivational approach, which assumes that binding principles apply at arbitrary points in the syntactic derivation.

Abstract This paper describes the behavior of the anaphoric element ta- in Karitiana (Arikém branch, Tupian family) showing that it is a third person anaphor which must be bound (c-commanded and coindexed) by an antecedent in the same sentence. ta- may occur as a possessor clitic attached to a nominal, or as a subject or object clitic attached to a verb. We show with elicited and spontaneous data that the Karitiana anaphor is subject oriented when occurring in embedded environments, being able to refer to the subject of the matrix clause or to the subject of an embedded clause in cases of multiple embedding. We analyze this lexical item as a medium-distance anaphor, following the definition of Reuland and Koster (1991). Logophoric uses of the ta- anaphor are also exemplified and briefly discussed.

Review Article

This paper presents an algorithm for identifying noun phrase antecedents of third person personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, reflexive pronouns, and omitted pronouns (zero pronouns) in unrestricted Spanish texts. We define a list of constraints and preferences for different types of pronominal expressions, and we document in detail the importance of each kind of knowledge (lexical, morphological, syntactic, and statistical) in anaphora resolution for Spanish. The paper also provides a definition for syntactic conditions on Spanish NP-pronoun noncoreference using partial parsing. The algorithm has been evaluated on a corpus of 1,677 pronouns and achieved a success rate of 76.8%. We have also implemented four competitive algorithms and tested their performance in a blind evaluation on the same test corpus. This new approach could easily be extended to other languages such as English, Portuguese, Italian, or Japanese. ; This work has been supported by the Spanish government (CICYT) with Grant TIC97-0671-C02-01/02.

This paper presents an algorithm for identifying noun-phrase antecedents of pronouns and adjectival anaphors in Spanish dialogues. We believe that anaphora resolution requires numerous sources of information in order to find the correct antecedent of the anaphor. These sources can be of different kinds, e.g., linguistic information, discourse/dialogue structure information, or topic information. For this reason, our algorithm uses various different kinds of information (hybrid information). The algorithm is based on linguistic constraints and preferences and uses an anaphoric accessibility space within which the algorithm finds the noun phrase. We present some experiments related to this algorithm and this space using a corpus of 204 dialogues. The algorithm is implemented in Prolog. According to this study, 95.9% of antecedents were located in the proposed space, a precision of 81.3% was obtained for pronominal anaphora resolution, and 81.5% for adjectival anaphora. ; This research has been supported by the Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT) of the Spanish government, under project numbers TIC97-0671-C02-01/02 and HB1998-0068.

This paper evaluates the different tasks carried out in the translation of pronominal anaphora in a machine translation (MT) system. The MT interlingua approach named AGIR (Anaphora Generation with an Interlingua Representation) improves upon other proposals presented to date because it is able to translate intersentential anaphors, detect co-reference chains, and translate Spanish zero pronouns into English—issues hardly considered by other systems. The paper presents the resolution and evaluation of these anaphora problems in AGIR with the use of different kinds of knowledge (lexical, morphological, syntactic, and semantic). The translation of English and Spanish anaphoric third-person personal pronouns (including Spanish zero pronouns) into the target language has been evaluated on unrestricted corpora. We have obtained a precision of 80.4% and 84.8% in the translation of Spanish and English pronouns, respectively. Although we have only studied the Spanish and English languages, our approach can be easily extended to other languages such as Portuguese, Italian, or Japanese. ; This research has been supported by the Spanish Government, under projects TIC2000-0664-C02-02 and FIT-150500-2002-416.

The paper deals with representation of obligatory participants of a situation described by the verb which do not get a syntactic role in the syntactic structure of a Khmer sentence, i. e. incorporation in the verb semantic structure, excorporation into a lexical complex, deictic zero, zero anaphors. Special attention is paid to the role of lexical complex, which is a unique resource of the Khmer language, and its use for implicit and explicit representation of the participants of the situation described. An issue of a particular interest is participants' representation as a component of a lexical complex, rather than a component of the sentence syntactic structure. Language data of Modern Khmer, Middle Khmer, and Old Khmer is used to show that this mode of representation has been used throughout the whole period of the evolution of Khmer beginning with the Old Khmer inscriptions. An attempt is made to reveal the functional character of the phenomenon discussed. It is maintained that this strategy is used for semantic derivation, for a more detailed conceptualization of the situation described, as well as for word polysemy elimination in the text. Examples are cited where lexical complexes with incorporated participants are used to make up for the inherent semantic emptiness of predicates of evaluation. In case of participants incorporated in deictic verbs, the deictic zero in Khmer may refer to participants other than "observer". Specific features of zero anaphora in Khmer are also mentioned.

Development of the "Minimalist Program" (MP) (Chomsky 1995) from a "Government and Binding" framework (GB) (Chomsky 1981, 1986) gave rise to numerous debates concerning the validity of long established parameters and parametric variation such as the "pro-drop parameter" in linguistic theory, which is supposed to be on in null-subject languages (NSL) and off in non-null-subject languages (non-NSL). Critically, these debates have consequences for both theories of language and language acquisition. Specifically, studies of language development, be it L1 or Ln, need to reinterpret their results in light of the newly emerging theoretical constructs in order to give an explanatory account of what was traditionally understood as parameter setting. The main objectives of the present paper are twofold. Firstly, it proposes to account for how multilingual learners acquire binding relations between referentially connected elements in subject-controlled adverbial subordination using a minimalist account of the featural setup of pronominal anaphora. Secondly, the paper attempts to support the viability of a model of acquisition as a computational rather than a maturational process (see Flynn and Lust 2002 for an overview) where "parameter setting" in development is to be understood as a gradual process allowing time for the learner to work out the linguistic implications deriving from the target setting (also in Flynn and O'Neil 1988). This paper provides support for reinterpreting parameter setting as the process in which learners dissociate and integrate linguistic components consistent with the properties of a specific target grammar (Flynn et al. 2005). ; Energie-Umweltmanagement