Coreference and discourse coherence in L2:The roles of grammatical aspect and referential form

Discourse-level factors, such as event structure and the form of referential expressions, play an important role in native speakers’ referential processing. This paper presents an experiment with Japanese- and Korean-speaking learners of English, investigating the extent to which discourse-level biases that have gradient effects in L1 speakers are also implicated in L2 speakers’ coreference choices. Results from a story continuation task indicate that biases involving referential form were remarkably similar for L1 and L2 speakers. In contrast, event structure, indicated by perfective versus imperfective aspect, had a more limited effect on L2 speakers’ referential choices. The L2 results are discussed in light of existing accounts of L1 reference processing, which assume that referential choices are shaped by speakers’ continually updated expectations about what is likely to be mentioned next, and argued to reflect L2 speakers’ reduced reliance on expectations.NS

The effect of perceptual availability and prior discourse on young children's use of referring expressions.

Choosing appropriate referring expressions requires assessing whether a referent is “available” to the addressee either perceptually or through discourse. In Study 1, we found that 3- and 4-year-olds, but not 2-year-olds, chose different referring expressions (noun vs. pronoun) depending on whether their addressee could see the intended referent or not. In Study 2, in more neutral discourse contexts than previous studies, we found that 3- and 4-year-olds clearly differed in their use of referring expressions according to whether their addressee had already mentioned a referent. Moreover, 2-yearolds responded with more naming constructions when the referent had not been mentioned previously. This suggests that, despite early social–cognitive developments, (a) it takes time tomaster the given/new contrast linguistically, and (b) children understand the contrast earlier based on discourse, rather than perceptual context

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

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 hän ‘s/he’ and the demonstrative tämä ‘this.’ In this paper, I present the results of three psycholinguistic experiments investigating the referential properties of these two anaphors, and show that hän and tämä 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

Third Person References: Forms and Functions in Two Spoken Genres of Spanish

This volume, a case study on the grammar of third person references in two genres of spoken Ecuadorian Spanish, examines from a discourse-analytic perspective how genre affects linguistic patterns and how researchers can look for and interpret genre effects. This marks a timely contribution to corpus linguistics, as many linguists are choosing to work with empirical data. Corpus based approaches have many advantages and are useful in the comparison of different languages as well as varieties of the same language, but what is often overlooked in such comparisons is the genre of language under examination. As this case study shows, genre is an important factor in interpreting patterns and distributions of forms. The book also contributes toward theories of anaphora, referentiality and Preferred Argument Structure. It is relevant for scholars who work with referentiality, genre differences, third person references, and interactional linguistics, as well as those interested in Spanish morphosyntax. [From the Publisher]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1096/thumbnail.jp

NeuralREG: An end-to-end approach to referring expression generation

Traditionally, Referring Expression Generation (REG) models first decide on the form and then on the content of references to discourse entities in text, typically relying on features such as salience and grammatical function. In this paper, we present a new approach (NeuralREG), relying on deep neural networks, which makes decisions about form and content in one go without explicit feature extraction. Using a delexicalized version of the WebNLG corpus, we show that the neural model substantially improves over two strong baselines. Data and models are publicly available.Comment: Accepted for presentation at ACL 201

Between anaphora and deixis...the resolution of the demonstrative noun-phrase ‘that N’

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that the demonstrative noun phrase (NP) that N, as an anadeictic expression, preferentially refers to the less salient referent in a discourse representation when used anaphorically, whereas the anaphoric pronoun he or she preferentially refers to the highly-focused referent. The findings, from a sentence completion task and two reading time experiments that used gender to create ambiguous and unambiguous coreference, reveal that the demonstrative NP specifically orients processing toward a less salient referent when there is no gender cue discriminating between different possible referents. These findings show the importance of taking into account the discourse function of the anaphor itself and its influence on the process of searching for the referent

Information structure and the accessibility of clausally introduced referents

This paper will examine the role of various factors in affecting the salience, and hence the accessibility to pronominal reference, of entities introduced into a discourse by a full clause. We begin with the premise that the possibility of pronominal reference with it versus that depends on the cognitive status of the referent, in the sense of Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski (1993). This formulation of the problem provides grounds for an explanation of the data presented above, and provides a framework within which we examine the role of various other factors in promoting the salience of a clausally introduced entity, including the information structure of the utterance in which the entity is introduced. For entities introduced by clausal complements to bridge verbs, we show that the information structure of the utterance introducing the entity has a partial, or one-sided, effect on the salience of the entity. When the complement clause is focal, the salience of the entity depends only on its referential givenness-newness (in the sense of Gundel 1988, 1999b), as we would expect. But when the complement clause is ground material, the salience of an entity introduced by the clause is enhanced. Other factors, including the presuppositionality of factive and interrogative complements, also serve to enhance the salience of entities introduced by complement clauses