A thematic analysis of attitudes towards English nonbinary pronouns

The article provides a comprehensive overview of attitudes towards nonbinary pronouns, with the aim of better understanding why these pronouns are either accepted or rejected. Attitudes towards nonbinary they and the neopronouns ze and xe are explored with a thematic analysis of data derived from a larger online survey on pronouns (n = 1128). While the results demonstrate various polarized stances for both types of pronouns, the participants’ reactions highlight greater acceptance of and support for nonbinary they. In addition, the paper proposes that broader ideologies about gender are behind the participants’ overt reactions to nonbinary pronouns. Most notably, while some participants rejected the pronouns on the basis of a binary gender ideology, others viewed gender as a matter of self-identification, accepting any pronoun an individual chooses for themselves.Peer reviewe

CONSERVATION LAW IN RELATIVE CLAUSES

The purpose of this present paper is to present a cognitive framework, coined as “Conservation Law,” which may shed new light on insightful understanding of the structures of sentences involving relative pronouns. Given that there are roughly four types of relative pronouns; namely, general, compound, relative adverbial, and quasi-relative, a conservation law in both structures and semantics exists. We start by combining two simple sentences into a resulting sentence with relative pronouns, and, through careful observation and calculation, we found the equivalence in word counts between original and resulting sentences. The conservation law mainly refers to the structure equivalence on either words or meanings among these four types of relative pronouns, or relative clauses. With the help of conservation law, the understanding of relative clauses can be much easier, because they are, among others, the most difficult and complex structures in English syntax, especially for EFL learners. Hopefully, this cognitive framework may be of great contribution to EFL English instruction.   Article visualizations

Quantificational Pronouns in Uyghur

This thesis examines the syntactic distribution and semantic function of four series of indefinite quantifier pronouns in Uyghur: i) the universal or her-series, ii) the negative indefinite or héchseries, iii) the indefinite bir-series, iv) the indefinite birer-series. Sections, 3, 4, and 5, provide brief background information on Uyghur including phonology, orthography, properties of noun phrases, general syntactic properties, and QUESTION formation. Sections 6 and 7 constitute the main focus of this thesis. In section ‎ 0, the syntactic distributions of each of these four series are discussed at length. All four of the series of pronouns may occur in various argument positions and may scramble in the same manner of other DPs in the language. The stems of her-series, héch-series, and bir-series may be composed of either wh- items or generic ontological nouns. Even though they may be composed of wh- items, the pronouns do not carry interrogative interpretation. The stems of the birer-series may only be generic ontological nouns. With respect to polarity, the universal her-series and the negative indefinite héch-series are polarity sensitive while the indefinite bir series and birer-series are not. The universal her-series may not occur in the same clause as negation, while the negative indefinite héch-series must obligatorily occur in the same clause as verbal negation. No such restriction exists for the indefinite bir series and birer-series. Section 7 uses Haspelmath's (1997) approach to semantic properties of indefinite pronouns to explore the semantic differences between the four series of pronouns as they are used as iv indefinite pronouns in Uyghur. Haspelmath proposes a set of nine semantic functions that indefinite pronouns serve cross-linguistically: SPECIFIC KNOWN, SPECIFIC UNKNOWN, IRREALIS, QUESTIONS, CONDITIONALS, INDIRECT NEGATION, DIRECT NEGATION, COMPARATIVES, and FREE CHOICE. In Uyghur, the universal her-series may function in COMPARATIVE and FREE CHOICE contexts. The negative indefinite héch-series may function in only the DIRECT NEGATION contexts. The bir-series indefinite pronouns may serve in SPECIFIC KNOWN, SPECIFIC UNKNOWN, IRREALIS, QUESTION, and CONDITIONAL contexts. Finally, the birer-series indefinite pronouns may serve in SPECIFIC UNKNOWN, IRREALIS, QUESTION, CONDITIONAL, and INDIRECT NEGATION contexts. This thesis expands on previous descriptive accounts of Uyghur pronouns and incorporates new data. This thesis provides an in-depth analysis of the semantic meanings of these four series of pronouns in Uyghur using the semantic map theory outlined by Haspelmath (1997). Organizing the data in terms of its semantic meaning serves to further our understanding of Uyghur as a whole. By examining Uyghur indefinite pronouns in this manner, the goal of this thesis is to expand our understanding of Uyghur as a whole, improve our understanding of the semantic properties of indefinites cross-linguistically, and provide ground work for future research

The Syntax of Dagbani personal pronouns: an analysis

Cross-linguistically, personal pronouns are noted as being deficient in relation to some morphosyntactic and phonological properties. Some striking asymmetries have been identified between strong and weak personal pronouns in relation to modification, coordination/conjunction, whether they have a semantic referent, and can encode focus. This study explores the personal pronominal system of Dagbani along Cardinaletti and Starke’s (1994) typology and observed asymmetries. Using insights from published literature on Dagbani pronouns as well as my understanding as a native speaker, I argue that, unlike personal pronouns in Romance/Germanic languages, Dagbani personal pronouns can be modified by quantifiers, can be coordinated, and can occur in conjunction constructions, as well as encode topic and focus as salient semantic discourse properties. Furthermore, the pre/post verbal distinctions among nonemphatic pronominal forms in Dagbani still hold, even as these occur in coordinated and modified constructions, due to structural constraints imposed on them by coordinating conjuctions and quantifiers

Svenska generiska pronomen hos finska språkbadselever. En jämförelse mellan två årskurser

This is a study of the use of generic pronouns in Swedish as a second language (L2) by L1 Finnish immersion students. We compare two groups, 12-year-olds, and 15-year-olds, to see if there is a difference and to identify which the most challenging cases are in both groups. Norm deviations are compared to see if they mainly consist of overuse of generic pronouns or more formal aspects, such as the pronoun which is chosen, and the understanding of the relation between the generic subject, object, possessive and reflexive pronouns. Both groups use generic pronouns in the subject position in a manner which mostly follows the standard, and mainly have problems with possessive pronouns in connection to generic pronouns. It is possible that object generic pronouns would also be problematic, but there are none in our data. Generic pronouns are sometimes left out as subjects, which is ungrammatical in Swedish. There is also occasional overuse of man where it is not idiomatic, and some mixed forms with man and s-passive. Results show possible transfer from the first language (L1) of the learners, but less in the older group. Furthermore, there also appears to be transfer from L3 English, which our informants are learning at school. This seems more present in the older group

The role of Comprehension in Requirements and Implications for Use Case Descriptions

Within requirements engineering it is generally accepted that in writing specifications (or indeed any requirements phase document), one attempts to produce an artefact which will be simple to comprehend for the user. That is, whether the document is intended for customers to validate requirements, or engineers to understand what the design must deliver, comprehension is an important goal for the author. Indeed, advice on producing ‘readable’ or ‘understandable’ documents is often included in courses on requirements engineering. However, few researchers, particularly within the software engineering domain, have attempted either to define or to understand the nature of comprehension and it’s implications for guidance on the production of quality requirements. Therefore, this paper examines thoroughly the nature of textual comprehension, drawing heavily from research in discourse process, and suggests some implications for requirements (and other) software documentation. In essence, we find that the guidance on writing requirements, often prevalent within software engineering, may be based upon assumptions which are an oversimplification of the nature of comprehension. Hence, the paper examines guidelines which have been proposed, in this case for use case descriptions, and the extent to which they agree with discourse process theory; before suggesting refinements to the guidelines which attempt to utilise lessons learned from our richer understanding of the underlying discourse process theory. For example, we suggest subtly different sets of writing guidelines for the different tasks of requirements, specification and design

Focusing for Pronoun Resolution in English Discourse: An Implementation

Anaphora resolution is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing. This study examines focusing as a tool for the resolution of pronouns which are a kind of anaphora. Focusing is a discourse phenomenon like anaphora. Candy Sidner formalized focusing in her 1979 MIT PhD thesis and devised several algorithms to resolve definite anaphora including pronouns. She presented her theory in a computational framework but did not generally implement the algorithms. Her algorithms related to focusing and pronoun resolution are implemented in this thesis. This implementation provides a better comprehension of the theory both from a conceptual and a computational point of view. The resulting program is tested on different discourse segments, and evaluation and analysis of the experiments are presented together with the statistical results.Comment: iii + 49 pages, compressed, uuencoded Postscript file; revised version of the first author's Bilkent M.S. thesis, written under the supervision of the second author; notify Akman via e-mail ([email protected]) or fax (+90-312-266-4126) if you are unable to obtain hardcopy, he'll work out somethin