Pronouns are used frequently in language, and perform a range of functions. Some pronouns are used to express coreference, and others are not. Languages and genres differ in how and when they use pronouns and this poses a problem for Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems (Le Nagard and Koehn, 2010; Hardmeier and Federico, 2010; Novák, 2011; Guillou, 2012; Weiner, 2014; Hardmeier, 2014). Attention to date has focussed on coreferential (anaphoric) pronouns with NP antecedents, which when translated from English into a language with grammatical gender, must agree with the translation of the head of the antecedent. Despite growing attention to this problem, little progress has been made, and little attention has been given to other pronouns. The central claim of this thesis is that pronouns performing different functions in text should be handled differently by SMT systems and when evaluating pronoun translation. This motivates the introduction of a new framework to categorise pronouns according to their function: Anaphoric/cataphoric reference, event reference, extra-textual reference, pleonastic, addressee reference, speaker reference, generic reference, or other function. Labelling pronouns according to their function also helps to resolve instances of functional ambiguity arising from the same pronoun in the source language having multiple functions, each with different translation requirements in the target language. The categorisation framework is used in corpus annotation, corpus analysis, SMT system development and evaluation. I have directed the annotation and conducted analyses of a parallel corpus of English-German texts called ParCor (Guillou et al., 2014), in which pronouns are manually annotated according to their function. This provides a first step toward understanding the problems that SMT systems face when translating pronouns. In the thesis, I show how analysis of manual translation can prove useful in identifying and understanding systematic differences in pronoun use between two languages and can help inform the design of SMT systems. In particular, the analysis revealed that the German translations in ParCor contain more anaphoric and pleonastic pronouns than their English originals, reflecting differences in pronoun use. This raises a particular problem for the evaluation of pronoun translation. Automatic evaluation methods that rely on reference translations to assess pronoun translation, will not be able to provide an adequate evaluation when the reference translation departs from the original source-language text. I also show how analysis of the output of state-of-the-art SMT systems can reveal how well current systems perform in translating different types of pronouns and indicate where future efforts would be best directed. The analysis revealed that biases in the training data, for example arising from the use of “it” and “es” as both anaphoric and pleonastic pronouns in both English and German, is a problem that SMT systems must overcome. SMT systems also need to disambiguate the function of those pronouns with ambiguous surface forms so that each pronoun may be translated in an appropriate way. To demonstrate the value of this work, I have developed an automated post-editing system in which automated tools are used to construct ParCor-style annotations over the source-language pronouns. The annotations are then used to resolve functional ambiguity for the pronoun “it” with separate rules applied to the output of a baseline SMT system for anaphoric vs. non-anaphoric instances. The system was submitted to the DiscoMT 2015 shared task on pronoun translation for English-French. As with all other participating systems, the automatic post-editing system failed to beat a simple phrase-based baseline. A detailed analysis, including an oracle experiment in which manual annotation replaces the automated tools, was conducted to discover the causes of poor system performance. The analysis revealed that the design of the rules and their strict application to the SMT output are the biggest factors in the failure of the system. The lack of automatic evaluation metrics for pronoun translation is a limiting factor in SMT system development. To alleviate this problem, Christian Hardmeier and I have developed a testing regimen called PROTEST comprising (1) a hand-selected set of pronoun tokens categorised according to the different problems that SMT systems face and (2) an automated evaluation script. Pronoun translations can then be automatically compared against a reference translation, with mismatches referred for manual evaluation. The automatic evaluation was applied to the output of systems submitted to the DiscoMT 2015 shared task on pronoun translation. This again highlighted the weakness of the post-editing system, which performs poorly due to its focus on producing gendered pronoun translations, and its inability to distinguish between pleonastic and event reference pronouns.

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Esta pesquisa visa a descrever e explicar o uso das formas de tratamento tu e você em Santos, cidade do litoral do Estado de São Paulo, levando em consideração aspectos sociolingüísticos e pragmático-discursivos, que atuam na alternância destas formas. Há, segundo RAMOS (2001), dois pontos de vista que têm norteado as pesquisas sobre as formas de tratamento: um de natureza sócio-histórica, que leva em consideração o uso amplo de você como uma opção por um tratamento igualitário, e outro que trata o problema como um processo de mudança baseado na implementação da forma você com estatuto pronominal, que desta forma vem alterando a concordância e acarretando muitas mudanças no sistema pronominal a partir de meados dos séculos XIX. Assim, este trabalho apresenta um estudo quantitativo das formas de tratamento tu e você em Santos, buscando os fatores relevantes para a primeira das duas abordagens sugeridas, além de fazer algumas considerações acerca da segunda abordagem. Com o suporte da metodologia da Sociolingüística Variacionista Laboviana, busca-se explicitar até que ponto as diferentes situações interacionais levam os falantes a escolherem uma ou outra forma pronominal. Constituem o corpus analisado 20 inquéritos correspondentes a textos conversacionais realizados entre falantes santistas. Em outras palavras, busca-se verificar em que medida fatores discursivos (referenciação, expressividade,monitoramento), ao lado dos fatores sociais (gênero, faixa etária, escolaridade dos informantes) e um lingüístico (função sintática da forma de tratamento), podem explicar o fenômeno. Adota-se, por conseguinte, uma perspectiva funcionalista de análise, já que se leva em conta toda a situação comunicativa: o propósito do evento da fala, seus participantes e o contexto discursivo. / This research aims to describe and explain the ways of address “tu" and “você" in Santos, city of the coast of São Paulo, considering sociolinguistic and pragmatic discursive aspects that act on the alternation of these forms. There is, according to RAMOS(2001), two points of view that have lead the researches on the ways of address: one of socio- historical nature, that considers the ample use of “você" as an option for equalitarian treatment, and another one that sees the problem as a change in process problem, based on the implementation of the form “você" with a pronominal statute, causing by this way modifications in the concordance and provocating many changes in the pronominal system since the middle of the XIX centuries. Therefore, this work presents a quantitative study of the ways of address “tu" and “você" in Santos, looking for the relevant factors presented by the first of these two approaches above, but it makes some considerations about the second approach too. Supported by the Labovian Variacionist Sociolinguistic Methodology, it looks to explicit how the different interacional situations lead the speakers to select one or another pronominal form. The corpus is composed by 20 recordings of santistas speakers conversations. By other words, it looks for verifying how the discursive factors (referentiation, expressivity, monitoring), sided by social factors (gender, age, scholarship of the speakers) and a linguistic factor (syntactic function of the ways of address), can explain the phenomena. It takes, therefore, a functionalist perspective of analysis, because it considers all the communicative situation: the speaking event proposal, its participants and the discursive context.

Esta dissertação investiga a dita cientificidade do período dos estudos lingüísticos brasileiros na Questão da colocação pronominal a partir de aparatos teóricos do campo de pesquisa da Historiografia Lingüística. Constituíram o corpus principal de análise os textos gramaticais dos agentes: Mário Barreto (1879-1931), Alfredo Augusto Gomes (1859-1924), Maximino de Araújo Maciel (1865- 1923), Manuel Pacheco Silva Junior (1842-1899) & Lameira de Andrade (-), Eduardo Carlos Pereira (1855-1923), Ernesto Carneiro Ribeiro 1839-1920, João Ribeiro (1860-1934), Júlio César Ribeiro (1845-1890) e Manuel Said Ali (1861-1953). As análises indicam que a recepção positiva às orientações entendidas como científicas: histórica e naturalista, para o tratamento da língua, localizava-se mais na retórica dessa geração do que propriamente no modo como o problema da colocação pronominal foi tratado lingüisticamente, pois observou-se nos textos um tratamento predominantemente pedagógico. A co-ocorrência de abordagens encontrada no modo como a Questão foi tratada por essa geração sugere a não presença absoluta de uma descrição de língua promovida pela nova corrente, por isso conclui-se que não seria adequado afirmar que a gramática realizada com a Questão, no período 1880-1920, foi científica. / This thesis studies the so-called scientificity of the period of Brazilian linguistic studies in the Issue of the use of pronouns from theoretical apparatuses of the Linguistic Historiography research area. Grammatical texts by the following have comprised the main corpus of the analysis: Mário Barreto (1879-1931), Alfredo Augusto Gomes (1859-1924), Maximino de Araújo Maciel (1865-1923), Manuel Pacheco Silva Junior (1842-1899) & Lameira de Andrade (-), Eduardo Carlos Pereira (1855-1923), Ernesto Carneiro Ribeiro 1839-1920, João Ribeiro (1860-1934), Júlio César Ribeiro (1845-1890) and Manuel Said Ali (1861-1953). The analyses show that the positive welcome to guidelines seen as scientific: historical and naturalist, for treating the language, was mainly grounded in the rhetoric of that generation rather than in the manner the problem of the use of pronouns was linguistically treated, as a predominantly \'pedagogical\' treatment was seen in the texts. The co-occurrence of approaches found in the manner the Issue was dealt with by that generation suggests the absolute non-presence of a language description promoted by the new generation, therefore it is concluded that it would not be appropriate to state that the grammar carried out with the Issue, within the period from 1880 to 1920, was scientific.

Esta dissertação investiga a dita cientificidade do período dos estudos lingüísticos brasileiros na Questão da colocação pronominal a partir de aparatos teóricos do campo de pesquisa da Historiografia Lingüística. Constituíram o corpus principal de análise os textos gramaticais dos agentes: Mário Barreto (1879-1931), Alfredo Augusto Gomes (1859-1924), Maximino de Araújo Maciel (1865- 1923), Manuel Pacheco Silva Junior (1842-1899) & Lameira de Andrade (-), Eduardo Carlos Pereira (1855-1923), Ernesto Carneiro Ribeiro 1839-1920, João Ribeiro (1860-1934), Júlio César Ribeiro (1845-1890) e Manuel Said Ali (1861-1953). As análises indicam que a recepção positiva às orientações entendidas como científicas: histórica e naturalista, para o tratamento da língua, localizava-se mais na retórica dessa geração do que propriamente no modo como o problema da colocação pronominal foi tratado lingüisticamente, pois observou-se nos textos um tratamento predominantemente pedagógico. A co-ocorrência de abordagens encontrada no modo como a Questão foi tratada por essa geração sugere a não presença absoluta de uma descrição de língua promovida pela nova corrente, por isso conclui-se que não seria adequado afirmar que a gramática realizada com a Questão, no período 1880-1920, foi científica. / This thesis studies the so-called scientificity of the period of Brazilian linguistic studies in the Issue of the use of pronouns from theoretical apparatuses of the Linguistic Historiography research area. Grammatical texts by the following have comprised the main corpus of the analysis: Mário Barreto (1879-1931), Alfredo Augusto Gomes (1859-1924), Maximino de Araújo Maciel (1865-1923), Manuel Pacheco Silva Junior (1842-1899) & Lameira de Andrade (-), Eduardo Carlos Pereira (1855-1923), Ernesto Carneiro Ribeiro 1839-1920, João Ribeiro (1860-1934), Júlio César Ribeiro (1845-1890) and Manuel Said Ali (1861-1953). The analyses show that the positive welcome to guidelines seen as scientific: historical and naturalist, for treating the language, was mainly grounded in the rhetoric of that generation rather than in the manner the problem of the use of pronouns was linguistically treated, as a predominantly \'pedagogical\' treatment was seen in the texts. The co-occurrence of approaches found in the manner the Issue was dealt with by that generation suggests the absolute non-presence of a language description promoted by the new generation, therefore it is concluded that it would not be appropriate to state that the grammar carried out with the Issue, within the period from 1880 to 1920, was scientific.

Esta pesquisa visa a descrever e explicar o uso das formas de tratamento tu e você em Santos, cidade do litoral do Estado de São Paulo, levando em consideração aspectos sociolingüísticos e pragmático-discursivos, que atuam na alternância destas formas. Há, segundo RAMOS (2001), dois pontos de vista que têm norteado as pesquisas sobre as formas de tratamento: um de natureza sócio-histórica, que leva em consideração o uso amplo de você como uma opção por um tratamento igualitário, e outro que trata o problema como um processo de mudança baseado na implementação da forma você com estatuto pronominal, que desta forma vem alterando a concordância e acarretando muitas mudanças no sistema pronominal a partir de meados dos séculos XIX. Assim, este trabalho apresenta um estudo quantitativo das formas de tratamento tu e você em Santos, buscando os fatores relevantes para a primeira das duas abordagens sugeridas, além de fazer algumas considerações acerca da segunda abordagem. Com o suporte da metodologia da Sociolingüística Variacionista Laboviana, busca-se explicitar até que ponto as diferentes situações interacionais levam os falantes a escolherem uma ou outra forma pronominal. Constituem o corpus analisado 20 inquéritos correspondentes a textos conversacionais realizados entre falantes santistas. Em outras palavras, busca-se verificar em que medida fatores discursivos (referenciação, expressividade,monitoramento), ao lado dos fatores sociais (gênero, faixa etária, escolaridade dos informantes) e um lingüístico (função sintática da forma de tratamento), podem explicar o fenômeno. Adota-se, por conseguinte, uma perspectiva funcionalista de análise, já que se leva em conta toda a situação comunicativa: o propósito do evento da fala, seus participantes e o contexto discursivo. / This research aims to describe and explain the ways of address “tu” and “você” in Santos, city of the coast of São Paulo, considering sociolinguistic and pragmatic discursive aspects that act on the alternation of these forms. There is, according to RAMOS(2001), two points of view that have lead the researches on the ways of address: one of socio- historical nature, that considers the ample use of “você” as an option for equalitarian treatment, and another one that sees the problem as a change in process problem, based on the implementation of the form “você” with a pronominal statute, causing by this way modifications in the concordance and provocating many changes in the pronominal system since the middle of the XIX centuries. Therefore, this work presents a quantitative study of the ways of address “tu” and “você” in Santos, looking for the relevant factors presented by the first of these two approaches above, but it makes some considerations about the second approach too. Supported by the Labovian Variacionist Sociolinguistic Methodology, it looks to explicit how the different interacional situations lead the speakers to select one or another pronominal form. The corpus is composed by 20 recordings of santistas speakers conversations. By other words, it looks for verifying how the discursive factors (referentiation, expressivity, monitoring), sided by social factors (gender, age, scholarship of the speakers) and a linguistic factor (syntactic function of the ways of address), can explain the phenomena. It takes, therefore, a functionalist perspective of analysis, because it considers all the communicative situation: the speaking event proposal, its participants and the discursive context.

Several studies have shown that women tend to use more personal pronouns and therefore show more involvement with the reader. This paper examines the differences between male and female editors’ letters in magazines. The study applied the method of corpus linguistics in order to examine forty editor’s letters twenty from the male-targeted magazine Gentlemen’s Quarterly and twenty from the female-targeted magazine Harper’s Bazaar. First person singular and second person singular pronouns were examined to determine whether the female editor showed more involvement with the reader than the male editor. The result shows that the male editor from the Gentlemen’s Quarterly shows more involvement with the reader than the female editor from Harper’s Bazaar, which clashes the findings of previous studies.

In this thesis, I aim to investigate the variation of Persian pronominal address system and politeness strategies in contemporary Iranian society from a quantitative and qualitative sociolinguistic perspective. I focus on Persian speakers’ use and perception of pronominal address forms in the light of socio-cultural norms in contemporary Iran. Persian, has two personal pronouns for singular address, to ([to]) the familiar or intimate ‘you’ and šoma ([∫oma:]) the deferential or formal ‘you’ (historically the second person plural but now also used as second person singular). Moreover, Persian is a pro-drop language, so the interaction between address pronouns and agreement marking on the verb must be taken into account. Another significant feature of colloquial Persian is a hybrid usage of the overt deferential second person pronoun and informal agreement forming a mismatch construction (i.e. šoma with 2s verb agreement) and intra-speaker pronominal address switches that occur between the deferential and casual pronominal address forms. Those deviations from the prescribed forms and/or distribution of the address pronouns are very interesting aspects that may show different levels of politeness even in one utterance. Consequently, this research examines spontaneous data looking at the sociolinguistic distributions and the pragmatic functions of pronominal address forms in contemporary Persian language and politeness synchronically. Three types of spontaneous data were collected for the purpose of analysis: a) participant observation, b) natural media conversations and c) sociolinguistic interviews with Persian speakers. In this study, the quantitative analysis investigates the correlation of pronominal address forms with extralinguistic factors such as age and gender of speaker and addressee in the interactional data. The qualitative analysis sheds light on how pronominal address forms and their variation encode communicative strategies in face-to-face interactions. Based on triangulation of quantitative and qualitative results with sociolinguistic interviews, I propose a dynamic model of indexicality for Persian pronominal address forms, which accommodates different forms and functions of address pronouns in interactional stances.