Since the sex of the speaker is normally as obvious as can be, there is no point in coding first-person singular gender – or so it may seem. This typological study examines the extent of sex-based gender marking in personal pronouns, possessive determiners, predicative adjectives, and verbs across first-, second-, and third-person singular. A worldwide perusal of grammars in addition to data elicitation yields a total of 115 languages with first-person gender. The paradigms of pronouns and possessives are found to be highly inconsistent, whereas those of verbs show a tendency towards consistency. Gender marking on adjectives is fully consistent. The likelihood of first-person gender is increased by a general sensitivity to gender and a dedicated gender morpheme. A distinction is made between pronouns and possessives as referential units and gender markers on verbs and adjectives as grammatical units. By their very nature, referential markers are sensitive to the contingencies of the extralinguistic world and subject to communicative constraints such as redundancy and economy. They therefore end up being organized in inconsistent paradigms. By contrast, grammatical units are largely untouched by these extraneous influences and may therefore develop consistent paradigms.

The study investigates the acquisition of Hebrew zero and pronominal subjects in the context of first and second person. We provide distributional evidence relative to verb tense, number, person, and conversational utterance type, in a peer-talk corpus (2;0-8;0 years). Findings show that acquisition starts early on, that verb inflectional morphology is crucial for the development of pronominal subjects, and that communicative contexts affect subject realization. Zero and pronominal subjects are not evenly distributed relative to the study variables, and cannot be treated as an alternation. A cluster analysis shows that each realization is linked to a distinguishable usage pattern, corresponding with particular discursive and communicative functions. These are defined as three Discourse Profile Constructions: (A) “calling for action” by 1st.Pl.Fut zero subjects (3;0 year olds); (B) “commenting on the interlocutor’s actions” by 2nd.Sg.Past zero subjects (ages 4;0-6;0); and (C) “planning one’s own actions” by 1st.Sg.Fut pronominal subjects (7;0-8;0 year olds).

This article examines the internal structure of personal pronouns in Inuktut. Building on previous work on syntactic variation and universals in personal pronoun systems (Harley and Ritter 2002, Ghomeshi and Massam 2020) and drawing on arguments that these and demonstrative pronouns are structurally complex (Déchaine and Wiltschko 2002, Leu 2015), it is argued that Inuktut pronouns are morphosyntactically complex, with exponents realizing multiple functional heads as well as an overt root. In particular, it is claimed that (local) person is represented twice, both as a root and in a higher functional projection. Previous arguments that Inuktut pronouns should instead be analyzed as D heads based on Adnominal Pronoun Constructions are also addressed (Yuan 2018, 2021).

The present thesis lies at the interface of logic and linguistics; its object of study are control sentences with overt pronouns in Romance languages (European and Brazilian Portuguese, Italian and Spanish). This is a topic that has received considerably more attention on the part of linguists, especially in recent years, than from logicians. Perhaps for this reason, much remains to be understood about these linguistic structures and their underlying logical properties. This thesis seeks to fill the lacunas in the literature or at least take steps in this direction by way of addressing a number of issues that have so far been under-explored. To this end, we put forward two key questions, one linguistic and the other logical. These are, respectively, (1) What is the syntactic status of the surface pronoun? and (2) What are the available mechanisms to reuse semantic resources in a contraction-free logical grammar? Accordingly, the thesis is divided into two parts: generative linguistics and categorial grammar. Part I starts by reviewing the recent discussion within the generative literature on infinitive clauses with overt subjects, paying detailed attention to the main accounts in the field. Part II does the same on the logical grammar front, addressing in particular the issues of control and of anaphoric pronouns. Ultimately, the leading accounts from both camps will be found wanting. The closing chapter of each of Part I and Part II will thus put forward alternative candidates, that we contend are more successful than their predecessors. More specifically, in Part I, we offer a linguistic account along the lines of Landau’s T/Agr theory of control. In Part II, we present two alternative categorial accounts: one based on Combinatory Categorial Grammar, the other on Type-Logical Grammar. Each of these accounts offers an improved, more fine-grained perspective on control infinitives featuring overt pronominal subjects. Finally, we include an Appendix in which our type-logical proposal is implemented in a categorial parser/theorem-prover.

Abstract prepared by María Inés Corbalán.

E-mail: [email protected]

URL: http://repositorio.unicamp.br/jspui/handle/REPOSIP/331697

This study investigated Chinese-speaking English learners’ use of implicit causality and consequentiality biases in establishing coreference under a Bayesian view of reference interpretation, which distinguishes between context-based priors about which entity will be re-mentioned and new evidence provided by the referential expression form. In two sentence-completion experiments, participants wrote continuations to sentence fragments with either implicit causality (Experiment 1) or consequentiality (Experiment 2) biases that ended either with or without a pronoun. In both experiments, L2 speakers showed native-like re-mention biases following no-pronoun fragments, indicating native-like predictions about the next-mentioned referent. Following pronoun fragments in NP2-biasing contexts, L2 speakers produced more NP1 continuations than native speakers. We show that this difference lies in different beliefs about pronoun use in the two populations. Specifically, L2 speakers showed a stronger association between pronouns and NP1 referents than native speakers following NP2-biasing verbs.

Earlier research states that if an unaccented pronoun refers to the subject of the preceding sentence, a focally accented pronoun will refer to the object. In the current study, we tested whether Norwegian adults select the intended pronoun referent in this context. Our study is also the first one to use eye-tracking to investigate children's developing sensitivity to intonational cues in pronoun resolution, and consequently the first one where Norwegian is the object language. The participants were monolingual 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old children, and a group of adults. They listened to the Norwegian version of utterances like ‘Sarai hugged Mariaj. Then shei/SHEj hugged her own teddy bear’, while watching two corresponding figures on a screen. This was followed by the question, in Norwegian, ‘Who hugged her own teddybear?’ When answering the question, the adults selected the subject referent (Sara) after unaccented pronouns, and the object referent (Maria) after focally accented pronouns. Eye-tracking data revealed that the 7-year-olds initially looked towards the object referent after hearing the pronoun, and then switched to look at the subject referent, regardless of the pronoun's intonation. The 5-year-olds answered the question by selecting the intended referent more often after a focally accented pronoun than after an unaccented one. Finally, the 3-year-olds showed no clear preferences. These results suggest that Norwegian children under the age of seven are still not adult-like when resolving accented and unaccented pronouns.