Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1980. / Typescript. Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 194-197).

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The focus of this thesis is to determine what factors predict zero anaphora in Meithei. The data for this thesis is derived from pear stories. Arguments were tabulated in spreadsheets counting nouns, pronouns, and zero anaphors; they were also examined for their semantic role and information status. The findings showed the agent role was typically represented by reduced forms of reference, the majority of the time by zero anaphora. Other semantic roles were typically represented by lexical full forms of reference. Agents were strongly correlated to previous subjects. Other semantic roles were typically found in the other information status categories. The conclusion drawn from these findings is semantic role and information status influence accessibility, and accessibility determines whether or not arguments are represented by zero anaphors in Meithei.

This dissertation investigates the utility of the web for anaphora resolution. Aside from offering a highly accurate, web-based method for pleonastic it detection, which eliminates up to 4% of errors in pronominal anaphora resolution, it also introduces a web-assisted model for definite description anaphoricity determination and a prototype system of anaphora resolution that uses the web for virtually all subtasks. The thesis starts with a thorough analysis of the relationship between anaphora and definiteness, a study that bridges the gap between previously reported empirical studies of definite description anaphora and the linguistic theories developed around the concept of definiteness. Various naturally-occurring definite descriptions found in the WSJ corpus are analyzed from both perspectives of familiarity and uniqueness, and a new classification scheme for definite descriptions is developed. With the fundamental issues solved, the rest of the thesis focuses on the various ways the web can be exploited for the purpose of anaphora resolution. This thesis presents methods of high-precision, high-recall anaphoricity determination for both pronouns and definite descriptions. Evaluation results suggest that the performance of the pleonastic it identification module is on par with casually-trained human annotators. When used together with a pronominal anaphora resolution system, the module offers a statistically significant performance gain of 4%. The performance of the anaphoricity determination module for definite descriptions, which benefits from both the insight gained from the study on anaphora and definiteness and the significantly expanded coverage offered by the web, is also one of the highest among existing studies. The thesis also introduces a web-centric anaphora resolution system. Aside from serving as the information source for implementing selectional restrictions and discovering hyponym/synonym relationships, the web is additionally used for gender/number determination and many other auxiliary tasks, such as determining the semantic subjects of as-prepositions, identifying antecedents for certain empty categories, and assigning appropriate labels for proper names using information available from the text itself. With a design that specifically leaves room for the application of verb-argument and genitive co-occurrence statistics, the web-based features provide statistically significant gains to the system's performance. / Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems

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This study investigates the division of labor between null and overt pronouns in Spanish. The Position of Antecedent Hypothesis (Carminati 2002) posits that null and overt pronouns in null-subject languages differ with respect to antecedent choice in ambiguous constructions. The objectives of this study are to determine i) to what extent native French speakers learning Spanish in adulthood can acquire the same interpretation bias as Spanish speakers, ii) if heritage speakers (HS) of Spanish who grow up in a French environment acquire the same interpretative strategies as native speakers, and iii) if the type of exposure to Spanish influences the extent to which HS and L2 speakers of Spanish acquire the PAH tendencies. Fifty-nine participants (10 HSs, 23 L1 French and 26 L1 Spanish speakers) filled a questionnaire on language background, and completed a written production task and a self-paced judgement task. Our results show that the French and HS’ answers were similar to those of the native speakers, except for the backward anaphora with the matrix subject as the antecedent of the overt pronoun. The French and HSs rated this type of sentence significantly higher than the native Speakers did, which suggests that while French speakers and HS might have acquired the bias for sentences with null pronouns, the bias might not be as strong for the anaphora with overt pronouns. Interestingly, the French speakers tend to be “better” than the HS at rating all sentences like the native speakers.

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The psycholinguistic theory of reading developed by Kenneth Goodman, which closely parallels the analysis-by-synthesis model of listening comprehension proposed by Cooper and Stevens, claims that readers use grapho-phonic, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic cues to construct meaningful texts through cycles of sampling, inference, prediction, confirmation or disconfirmation and integration. Pragmatic cues are supplied in part by pronoun reference, which adds cohesion to texts. Evidence to support the psycholinguistic theory of reading comes from miscues, cases during oral reading when there is a difference between the reader's observed response and the expected response. The analysis of pronoun miscues provides insights into the text features and strategies readers use to assign reference. Five text features readers use to assign pronoun reference are preceding noun phrases, preceding pronouns, self-reference or direct address in dialog, the dialog carrier position, and paragraph-initial "I". Readers make significantly fewer miscues at sites where these cues are available than at other sites. For any story certain text features provide less ambiguous cues than others. However, a comparison of two stories suggests that there is no absolute hierarchy of pragmatic cues. Rather, the strength of a text feature depends on how it is realized in a particular text. Readers sometimes overgeneralize normally-successful strategies for assigning pronoun reference. Two types of overgeneralization are pronoun maintenance and topic maintenance, using a preceding pronoun or noun to assign reference when that pronoun or noun is not co-referential with the pronoun for which reference is being assigned. Patterns of correction of pronoun miscue reveal readers' tentativeness and scope of focus, two factors important for reading proficiency. Proficient readers are tentative and maintain a wide scope of focus. Correction of pronoun miscues, which frequently are disconfirmed pragmatically, requires a wide focus. In order to develop appropriate strategies for assigning reference, readers need frequent opportunities to transact with whole, cohesive texts. In addition, if readers are encouraged to read for meaning and given the chance to self-correct, they can develop the tentativeness and wide scope of focus characteristic of proficient readers.