Investigates whether syntax signals foregrounding/backgrounding structure in English. Backgrounded the main clause using progressive or pluperfect aspect. A rating study showed coreference was allowed more frequently for pronouns in main clauses when those clauses contained progressive or pluperfect aspect. (Author/VWL)

Shows how the subject pronoun in a cleft sentence together with the cleft clause function pragmatically as a discontinuous definite description. Presents a new syntactic analysis of clefts, which treats the cleft clause as an extraposed complement of the cleft subject pronoun, adjoined to the clefted constituent. (Author/VWL)

This study examined the referential properties of a class of complex pronouns labelled M-Pronouns, exemplified by Old English "himself," French "lui-meme," and English "his own." It is shown that M-Pronouns exhibit some properties commonly taken as characterizing reflexive anaphors, and that they also occur as…

The performance of Icelandic-speaking children on the comprehension of Icelandic pronoun gender was investigated. Eighty children ranging in age from 4-8 years were tested. It was hypothesized that if children rely primarily on formal information for determing grammatical gender, they should perform equally well on both natural and syntactic…

Concludes that children were better able to comprehend sentences containing pronouns that functioned as objects in relative clauses, but that in clauses where the pronoun functioned as subject, its presence or absence was not important. (FL)

Two groups of children were tested at ages five, six, and seven to determine metalinguistic knowledge of the syntactic subject of a sentence. Found that five-year olds had difficulty repeating the pronomial and longest subjects; ability to isolate pronouns improved with age; and ability to identify longest subjects improved with increased…

Reports elicited production and grammaticality judgment data from three experiments on the status of resumptive pronouns in English. Participants were children and adults. Examined children's acquisition of syntax in light of development of linguistic processing systems. (Author/VWL)

The standard treatment of object pronouns in Latin American Spanish assigns a direct-object function to "lo" and "la" and an indirect-object function to "le." This study challenges this descriptive attribution in light of the contradictory and refractory evidence in Spanish morphosyntax. It is suggested that more…

A study of 191 native English speaking working class children in grades two, four, and six was undertaken to investigate the development of reading comprehension of selected pronoun-referent structures. Three linguistic comparisons were made: referent type, reference order, and referent distance. Target sentences were constructed with these…

Reports results of an acquisition experiment with a group of Spanish-speaking children regarding their knowledge of a semantic restriction that prevents a referring expression from coreferring with a pronoun in certain syntactic configurations if its referent lacks consciousness. Sixteen children participated in a modified Truth-Value Judgment…

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their normally developing (ND) peers imitated proper nouns, the pronouns "he" and "you," and the article "the" in subject phrases. Both groups showed significantly more omissions of the function words than the proper nouns. A phonological explanation of subject article and pronoun omission is…

Based on the results of three variationist studies on personal pronouns used in Montreal French, shows how real-time data can shed light on apparent time interpretation and increase understanding of morphosyntactic changes. Longitudinal data for a 24-year period from three corpora of spoken French are used to discuss cases of variation.…

The study of four autistic children, aged six-nine, found support for the hypothesis that persistent pronominal errors by autistic children can be explained by failure to observe pronouns in speech addressed to another person, an aspect of language development in normal children. (Author/DB)

A set of predictions based on Reinhart's (1986) Theory of Relevance are evaluated against published results of tests of Binding Theory. Relevance Theory provides a means of understanding constraints on testing syntactic knowledge. Pragmatic factors must be systematically controlled in any evaluation of syntactic knowledge. (Contains 22…

Examined Russian-speaking children's knowledge of syntactic and discourse-related restrictions on the interpretation of pronouns in subjunctive clauses. Eighteen children (4-5 years of age) participated in a truth-value judgment task. In constructions in which syntactic knowledge is implicated, children's performance is very similar to that of…