Pronominal Reference in the Plinius Corpus (Memorandum Report)

• Book ID: 104361275
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 141 KB
• Volume: 11
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0957-4174
• DOI: 10.1016/s0957-4174(97)86771-1

✦ Synopsis

The report presents the results of an investigation of pronominal reference within the framework. Occurrences of pronouns in a corpus of short texts about ceramic materials and their properties were examined and classified according to the nature of the links between pronouns and their antecedents, some of their syntactic characteristics, and the conceptual characteristics of their referents. This inventarization was done by hand. Attention was above all devoted to singular pronominal forms. Two most essential distinctions that have been proposed and employed: (1) between pronouns used for co-reference, substitution or association, and (2) between occurrences of pronouns that exhibit a referential or a syntactic link with their antecedents. A detailed account is presented of a phenomenon called Subject Extraposition. These occurrences of the pronoun 'it' are considered to involve syntactically determined links between the pronoun and its antecedent, and simplified grammar rules describing the relationships are proposed.