This article focuses on the structural and semantic analysis of the sentences containing the pronoun "it" as a formal object. Although at first sight "it" seems to have no meaning whatsoever, it actually plays an important role in the semantic structure of the sentence. The formal object "it" changes the…

A technique is demonstrated whereby an implicit semantic feature can be related to a grammatical alternative (pronoun-antecedent assignment) and thereby made explicit. It is also demonstrated that pragmatic, syntactic and other semantic features interact in an orderly way with this implicit feature of causality in verbs. (RC)

Synonyms are not in syntactic free-variation. Some text composition rules are examined and it is shown that they prevent the occurrence of paradoxical utterances which could arise if synonyms were freely substitutable. (Text is in German.) (TL)

Identifies the characteristics of clear references to explain why certain kinds of broad pronoun reference are clear while others are not. (HTH)

An experiment is reported that uses cross-modal priming to look at the resolution of anaphoric reference. Subjects given a visual lexical decision test simultaneously with an auditorily presented sentence showed selective semantic activation of the pronoun's referent on the basis of the pronoun's lexical properties. This finding is discussed in…

Many syntactic and semantic studies have focused on the distribution of closed-class lexical noun phrases (NPs) such as "her, herself, and each other." Recent work has demonstrated that many other NPs are also referentially dependent. A model-theoretic semantic analysis of a number of such referentially dependent NPs is presented. These…

Expands on an earlier article that explained how a Gricean theory of implicature might provide a systematic partial reduction of the Binding Conditions, and introduces a radical alternative that uses the same pragmatic framework but gives an account better adjusted to some languages. (113 references) (GLR)

Transcripts of 24 spontaneous speech samples from 2 year old children are analyzed for use of nouns and pronouns in sentences. (Author/DEP)

A class of sentences is discussed in which pronominal forms and their antecedents do not have semantic identity. "One" pronominalization, in particular, is discussed. (SC)

Reflexives in Japanese and English show a number of interesting differences. Morphologically, there is a single form "jibun" ("jishin") in Japanese, which does not vary for person or number. In English there are various forms which always agree in person and number ("myself,""himself,""themselves,"…

Subjects completed sentences of the form NP1 aux V NP2 because (but) Pro...(e.g., John may scold Bill because he...) with a reason or motive for the action described. A basic perceptual strategy was hypothesized to underlie the comprehension of these sentences which have a potentially ambiguous pronoun in the subject position of the subordinate…

The analysis predicts the distribution of cleft-like sentence types whose introducing particle is "this" or "that" rather than "it," and asserts a correlation between judgements of grammaticality of pseudo clefts and sentences containing free relatives. (Author/NCR)

Working within the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework of Anna Wierzbicka, this study proposes reductive paraphrase explications for a range of first-person pronominal meanings. It is argued that NSM explications are preferable to conventional feature analysis because they are less subject to charges of arbitrariness and obscurity and…

Results of an empirical study of the learners' language of a group of Chinese language students show that topic-controlled deletion is a prominent feature in Chinese that is distinctly different from English and that it may result in English speakers' difficulty in forming Chinese topic chains. (nine references) (LB)