Donkey pronouns seem to defy the conventional categories of referential and anaphoric pronouns and hence cannot be analyzed as variables. An orthodox treatment is that donkey pronouns are semantically equivalent to definite descriptions. I argue on the contrary that donkey pronouns can be analyzed as bound variables given a distinct notion of binding. I provide a systematic comparison between the static, description-theoretic approach and Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), a representative of dynamic semantics. By exposing the inadequacy of various descriptivist theories, I motivate and argue that DRT is the better alternative. DRT is superior for being a coherent and flexible analysis of donkey pronouns, a unified analysis of pronouns in general, and an intuitively appealing model of meaning. In addition, I uncover the similarities between the situational descriptivist account and DRT. I show that when fully elaborated, the former turns out to be a notational variant of the latter. I then trace their common problems to the Lewisian assumptions of quantification and conditionals; my proposed solutions suggest non-trivial modifications to and clarifications of the underlying Lewisian framework. / text

Die Dissertation präsentiert und diskutiert eine Reihe von Experimenten über Diskursanaphora im chilenischen Spanischen. Die Experimente zeigen wie Erwachsene und Kinder Subjektpersonalpronomen in verschiedenen Diskurskontexten interpretieren und generieren. Auf Spanisch können Subjektpronome entweder sichtbar (overt) oder unsichtbar (null) sein. Beide Formen werden im anaphorischen Diskurs gebraucht. Gegenstand der Dissertation ist es zu untersuchen, welche Unterschiede in der Bedeutung damit verbunden sind. Zunächst präsentiert die Arbeit einen generellen Standpunkt. Demzufolge besitzen die zwei Arten von Pronomen komplementäre anaphorische Präferenzen. Dies bedeutet, dass beim Vorhandensein von zwei möglichen Antezedenten zu erwarten ist, dass jede Form einen anderen Antezedenten wählt. Drei verschiedene Arten, Komplementarität zu konzipieren werden in Betracht gezogen. Im Verlauf der Dissertation werden ihre Vorhersagen in verschiedenen Interpretations- und Produktions-Experimenten getestet. Die Ergebnisse sprechen klar gegen die Idee von Komplimentarität. Im Anschluss wird in der Dissertation ein alternativer Standpunkt aufgezeigt welcher auf den rhetorischen Relationen zwischen den Sätzen eines Diskurses basiert. Entsprechend dieser Vorstellung kann die Pronomenauflösung als ein Nebeneffekt des Erschließens (Inferenz) dieser Relationen angesehen werden. Der Unterschied in der Verwendung von overt und null Pronomen würde dann nicht zuvor erschlossenen anaphorischen Präferenzen folgen, sondern wäre direkt abhängig von der Herstellung der Diskurskohärenz. In diesem Rahmen wird es möglich das Verhalten von Erwachsenen und Kindern in den Experimenten sinnhaft zu deuten. / This dissertation presents and discusses a series of experiments concerning how monolingual adult and child speakers of Chilean Spanish interpret and produce anaphoric subject personal pronouns in discourse. In Spanish, subject pronouns can be either overt or covert. Both forms are used in discourse anaphora. The dissertation investigates what difference in meaning they express. It begins by presenting a common general view, according to which the two kinds of pronouns have complementary anaphoric preferences. This means that, under the presence of two possible antecedents, each kind of pronoun is expected to pick out a different one. Three possible forms of conceiving complementarity are taken into account. Throughout the dissertation, their predictions are tested in different comprehension and production experiments. The results present strong evidence against the idea of complementarity. The dissertation considers then an alternative line of explanation, based on how the sentences of a discourse are related through rhetorical (coherence) relations. According to it, the resolution of pronouns can be seen as a by-product of inferring these relations. The difference between using overt and covert subject pronouns would not obey pre-determined anaphoric preferences (for subject and object antecedents, for instance), but depend on how pronouns contribute to the establishment of coherence in the discourse. Within this frame, better sense can be made of both adults’ and children’s performance in the experiments.

This thesis focuses on the cross-linguistic differences between Italian and Spanish regarding the pragmatic restrictions on the resolution of null and overt subject pronouns (NS and OSP). It also tries to identify possible links between such cross-linguistic differences and morpho-syntactic differences at the level of the verbal morphology of the two languages. Spanish and Italian are typologically related and morpho-syntactically similar and have been assumed to instantiate the same setting of the NS parameter with respect to not only its syntactic licensing conditions, but also the pragmatic constraints determining the distribution of null and overt subject pronouns, and this assumption has had important implications for cross-linguistic research. The first aim of this study was to test directly for the first time the assumption about the equivalence of Italian and Spanish; in order to do so, I run a series of self-paced reading experiments using the same materials translated in each language, so that the results were directly comparable. The experiments were based on Carminati’s (2002) study on antecedent preferences for Italian NSs and OSPs in intra-sentential anaphora, testing the Position of Antecedent Strategy. The results suggest that while in Italian there is a strict division of labour between NS and OSP (confirming Carminati’s findings), this division is not as clear-cut in Spanish. More precisely, while Italian personal pronouns unambiguously signal a switch in subject reference, the association between OSPs and switch reference seems to be much weaker in Spanish. These results, which are interpreted in terms of Cardinaletti and Starke’s (1999) cross-linguistic typology of deficient pronouns, highlight an asymmetry between the strength of NS and OSP biases in Spanish that could not have emerged through the traditional methodology used by the numerous variationist studies on the subject, based on corpus analysis. A subsequent pair of experiments tested the hypothesis that the cross-linguistic differences attested might be related to the relative syncretism of the Spanish verbal morphology compared to the Italian one with regard to the unambiguous expression of person features on the verbal head. The results only provided weak support for the hypothesis, although they did confirm the presence of the cross- linguistic differences in the processing and resolution of anaphoric NS and OSP dependencies revealed by the previous experiments.

This dissertation investigates the relationship between verbs and reflexive markers within reflexive constructions, setting forth the hypothesis that the verb plays a determining role in anaphoric binding. The work builds upon Dalrymple’s (1993) argument that binding constraints are lexically specified by anaphoric elements and demonstrates that reflexive requirements can be lexically specified for distinct groups of verbs, an approach which offers another level of descriptive clarity to theories of anaphoric binding and introduces a means of predicting reflexive selection in domains where syntactic constraints do not readily apply. This is shown to be particularly pertinent in languages with more than one reflexive type that have overlapping syntactic binding domains. The hypothesis is substantiated by data from five typologically distinct languages: English, Dutch, French, Russian, and Fijian. Contributing to this data set, new empirical evidence in favour of previously unrecognized reflexive forms in the Fijian language is introduced in this work. Following Sells et al. (1987), it is demonstrated that reflexive constructions are definable over four different components of linguistic representation and a quadripartite linguistic analysis is, therefore, adopted that incorporates c-structure, f-structure, lexical structure, and semantic structure within a Lexical Functional Grammar theoretical framework. The level of semantic structure is found to be particularly interesting since the realization of a reflexive construction is shown to be influenced by differing semantic requirements between verbs and reflexives. On the basis of several semantic tests, verbs in reflexive constructions are shown to have two different predicate structure types, ‘transitive’ and ‘intransitive’, and reflexive markers are shown to have three different internal semantic structures, ‘strict’ (x,x), ‘close’ (x,f(x)), and ‘near’ (x,y). The syntactic, semantic, and lexical characteristics of the reflexives and verbs analyzed over the data set presented in this work result in the identification of eight different reflexive/verb types and the establishment of two implicational relationships: <ol><li>Reflexive markers in lexically intransitive reflexive constructions have no semantic content.</li><li>Verbs that take a reflexive argument with a strict (x,x) or close (x,f(x)) internal structure must be intransitive at the semantic component of linguistic structure.</li></ol> These results contribute to our understanding of anaphoric binding theory, directed verb categories, the syntax-semantics interface, and the licensing of multiple reflexive types within a given language.

Cette thèse de linguistique anglaise se propose d'étudier l'ensemble des usages référentiels et non référentiels de IT. Diverses questions sont examinées. L'objectif premier de ce travail est de tenter de définir le concept de référence. La question du statut de "pronom" de IT est également étudiée. Enfin, les différents emplois de IT (anaphorique, cataphorique, déictique, non référentiel, etc.) sont analysés dans l'ensemble des constructions où il se rencontre (extraposition du sujet et de l’objet, clivée, dislocation à gauche et à droite, expressions idiomatiques, slogans publicitaires, etc.). L'hypothèse avancée est que le statut référentiel de IT ne peut simplement se scinder en deux catégories : référentiel ou non référentiel. Il semble plutôt que la référence soit à envisager comme un continuum ou gradient allant du plus fortement référentiel vers le plus faiblement référentiel. / This thesis in English linguistics studies all the uses of IT, whether referential or non-referential. Firstly, this work tries to define the concept of reference as precisely as possible. The status of IT as a "pronoun" is also analysed. Moreover, all the uses of IT (anaphoric, cataphoric, deictic, non-referential, etc.) are analysed in a wide variety of sentences (subject and object extraposition, it-cleft, left and right dislocation, idioms, advertising slogans, etc.) This thesis claims that the referential status of IT cannot simply be divided in two categories : referential or non-referential. On the contrary, it seems that reference can be calculated on a continuum or scale from strongly referential to weakly referential.

Submitted by Silvana Teresinha Dornelles Studzinski (sstudzinski) on 2015-06-30T15:11:49Z No. of bitstreams: 2 KeliS.Luz.pdf: 21321053 bytes, checksum: e5b9cad05f392fa966d6e312be5fc184 (MD5) KeliS.Luz.pdf: 21321053 bytes, checksum: e5b9cad05f392fa966d6e312be5fc184 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-06-30T15:11:49Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 KeliS.Luz.pdf: 21321053 bytes, checksum: e5b9cad05f392fa966d6e312be5fc184 (MD5) KeliS.Luz.pdf: 21321053 bytes, checksum: e5b9cad05f392fa966d6e312be5fc184 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-09-03 / Milton Valente / A não-linearidade tem sido apontada como uma das principais características do hipertexto, nele a sequencialidade não linear pode sugerir imprecisão lógica ou estrutural, ou falta de coesão linguística. Investigar sobre a organização do hipertexto, nos estudos linguísticos é fundamental para que ele seja compreendido como texto, a partir de enunciações digitais e da leitura do sujeito. A pesquisa a ser apresentada investigou ações e movimentos hipertextuais que possibilitaram propor a existência de uma organização linguística hipertextual, a partir da produção textual dos alunos, com hipertextos. Tais ações e movimentos hipertextuais foram identificados e analisados, em uma pesquisa empírica de cunho participante (WELLS, 2007), a partir de gravações em vídeo, produzidas durante o processo de busca por informações na internet, para a realização de um trabalho escolar por um grupo de estudantes de uma escola pública do município de Novo Hamburgo. Para analisar os dados, o referencial teórico teve características de interdisciplinaridade, trabalhando com os seguintes conceitos: hipertexto (LANDOW, 1995; 1997); referenciação (MONDADA; DUBOIS, 2003), concepção cultural de produção de sentido, construída a partir do cotidiano, (CERTEAU, 1994), estendido através de (LEMOS, 2001) com o ciber flânerie. A partir da leitura em contexto digital, a pesquisa identificou ações hipertextuais realizadas pelos usuários, as quais desencadeiam movimentos hipertextuais recorrentes com funções anafóricas e dêiticas, que possibilitam o reconhecimento de uma organização para o hipertexto. A análise permitiu verificar que as funções anafóricas e dêiticas são constituidoras da referenciação no hipertexto e responsáveis por sua organização, possibilitando que o texto digital seja compreendido como um processo de produção textual constituído pelos recursos da linguagem digital. / Non-linearity has been claimed to be one of the main characteristics of hypertext, in which non-linear sequence may suggest logical or structural imprecision, or even lack of linguistic cohesion. Investigating the hypertext structure in linguistics is fundamental for it to be understood as a text in a perspective of digital utterances and of the reader. This research investigates hypertextual actions and moves that allow the existence of a hypertextual structure to be proposed using as it corpus students compositions with hypertexts. Such hypertextual actions and moves are identified and analyzed in an empiric participative research (WELLS, 2007), from video recordings made in the process of searching for information on the internet in order for a school paper to be done by a group of students from a public school in Novo Hamburgo, Brazil. The theoretical references have an interdisciplinary characteristic to analyze the data by working with the following concepts: hypertext (LANDOW, 1995; 1997); referenciation (MONDADA; DUBOIS, 2003); cultural conception of sense production, built from the daily life (CERTAU, 1994), and expanded via Lemos’ (2001) cyberspacial flaneurie. From the reading in the digital context, this research has identified the hypertextual actions deployed by the users, which engender anaphoric and deictic hypertextual moves, which facilitate the acknowledgment of a structure for the hypertext. The analysis has allowed the verification of the anaphoric and deictic functions as constitutes of referenciation in the hypertext and as responsible for its structure, which fosters the understanding of the digital text as a process of composition constituted by digital language resources.

Le thème général de cette thèse est l’identité linguistique: la relation qui fait que différents éléments linguistiques comptent comme "un même élément" ou comme “identiques” même s'ils sont hétérogènes d'un point de vue interne ou présentent des propriétés de surface différentes. Je traite de six questions sur ce thème.Le chapitre 1 concerne les segments phonétiques. La phonétique traditionnelle modélise la parole continue comme une concaténation de segments discrets de durées temporelles non spécifiées. Cependant, au cours des dernières années, les idéalisations segmentales de la parole ont été remises en question par des approches éliminativistes à l’égard des segments phonétiques. Le chapitre tente de justifier la phonétique segmentale face aux arguments éliminativistes.Le chapitre 2 concerne les objets phonologiques. Les énoncés phonologiques quantifient sur les phonèmes, qui sont des entités controversées. Aucune ontologie standard n'accepte de les faire figurer parmi l’“ameublement du monde”. Par conséquent, se pose la question suivante: comment les énoncés de règles phonologiques parviennent-ils à recevoir les valeurs de vérité attendues ? Le chapitre propose d'aborder la question en appliquant le non-factualisme de Stephen Yablo aux objets phonologiques.Le chapitre 3 traite du problème type-token. Il existe plusieurs théories concurrentes de la relation spécifique désignée par le prédicat “est un token de”, tel qu’on l'emploie dans le domaine linguistique. La théorie dominante est que les tokens instancient les types, mais cette thèse fait face à plusieurs difficultés conceptuelles. S'appuyant sur des travaux antérieurs de Zoltan Szabó, le chapitre propose une nouvelle approche du problème type-token, basée sur l'idée que les sons et les inscriptions du langage représentent des formes phonologiques et orthographiques.Le chapitre 4 traite du comptage de mots. Selon certains, l'identité des mot-types dépend de leur similarité en matière d'attributs structurel-fonctionnels. Selon d'autres, l'identité des mot-types dépend de leur lignée historique-causale. Les deux cadres donnent lieu à des manière différentes de compter les mots. Lequel d'entre eux est métaphysiquement adéquat ? Le chapitre propose une théorie quiétiste du comptage de mots, en soutenant qu'il n'y a pas de réponse factuelle et non-théorique à la question de “combien de mot-types existent” dans un monde ou scénario linguistique.Le chapitre 5 porte sur un problème dans la théorie de l'anaphore. On pense habituellement que l'anaphore implique la coréférence. Ce principe général, cependant, semble être contredit par des phrases où un pronom non lié hors-citation dépend d'un antécédent dans une citation. Le chapitre soutient que les phrases présentant les caractéristiques décrites ci-dessus n'invalident pas le principe général, et articule une analyse des cas problématiques axée sur la notion de "saillance".Le chapitre 6 porte sur la coréférence de jure. La coréférence de jure est un type particulier de relation de coréférence qui a attiré beaucoup d'attention dans la littérature récente. Cependant, son autonomie par rapport à d'autres variétés de coréférence (notamment la coréférence accidentelle) et ses propriétés distinctives font l'objet de controverses. Le chapitre fournit une présentation systématique des motivations sous-jacentes à l'introduction de la notion de coréférence de jure et défend une approche conservatrice de sa relation avec la grammaire de la phrase: la distinction entre coréférence accidentelle et coréférence de jure est réelle mais invisible du point de vue de la structure linguistique. / The overarching theme of this dissertation is linguistic sameness: the feature by which different bits of language are able to count “as a unit” or as “the same” even if they are internally heterogeneous or exhibit different surface properties. I pursue six issues within this theme.Chapter 1 is about phonetic segments. Mainstream phonetics models continuous speech as a concatenation of discrete, letter-sized segments of unspecified temporal duration. In recent years, however, segment-based idealizations of speech have been called into question by eliminativist approaches to phonetic segments. The chapter attempts to vindicate segmental phonetics in face of the eliminativist arguments.Chapter 2 is about phonological objects. Phonological statements quantify over phonemes, which are controversial particulars. No standard ontology accepts them as part of the furniture of the world. Hence, the question arises of how phonological statements manage to exhibit their perceived distribution of truth values. The chapter proposes to address the issue by applying Stephen Yablo’s non-factualism to phonological objects.Chapter 3 is about the type-token problem. There are competing accounts of what specific relation is designated by the predicate “is a token of” as applied to the linguistic domain. The mainstream view is that tokens instantiate types, but this thesis presents several conceptual difficulties. Building on previous work by Zoltan Szabó, the chapter proposes a novel approach to the type-token problem, one based on the notion that speech sounds and inscriptions represent phonological and orthographic forms.Chapter 4 is about word counting. According to some, word type identity is established by similarity in structural-functional attributes. According to others, word type identity is established by sameness of causal-historical lineage. The two frameworks yield competing word counting policies. Which of them is metaphysically adequate? The chapter articulates a quietist take on word counting, one arguing that there is no non-theoretical fact of the matter about “how many word types exist” in any given language-infused world or scenario.Chapter 5 is about a puzzle in the theory of anaphora. Anaphoric dependency is commonly thought to entail coreference. This mainstream principle, however, appears to be violated by sentences where an off-quote unbound pronoun depends on an antecedent within closed quotation marks. The chapter argues that sentences exhibiting the described pattern do not invalidate the mainstream principle, and articulates a salience-based analysis of the problematic cases.Chapter 6 is about de jure coreference. De jure coreference is a peculiar kind of coreference relation that has attracted much attention in recent research. However, its autonomy from other varieties of coreference (most notably, accidental coreference) and its signature properties are the subject of controversy. The chapter provides a systematic presentation of the motivations underlying the introduction of de jure coreference, and defends a conservative account of its relationship to sentence grammar: the de jure vs. accidental divide is real but invisible from the standpoint of linguistic structure.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1982. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES / Bibliography: leaves 412-419. / by Joseph Aoun. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1979. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ENGINEERING. / Bibliography: leaves 275-282. / by Candace Lee Sidner. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1982. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 587-597. / by Cheng-Teh James Huang. / Ph.D.