• Title/Summary/Keyword: English Pronoun

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A study of English relative pronoun That (영어 관계대명사 That 연구)

  • Choi, Jong-Wook
    • English Language & Literature Teaching
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    • no.6
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    • pp.199-217
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    • 2000
  • Relative pronoun that is one of the important relative pronouns but we have an impression that its scope of use has been somewhat narrowed. In the light of history of relative pronouns relative pronoun toot has the longest history of all relative pronouns and it was widely used even in Middle English and early Modem English. On The other hand, we can see that the relative use of that has been gradually weakened as the relative pronouns who and which has expanded their scope of use. It is quite natural that the scope of use of toot as a relative pronoun has been narrowed as who is mainly used in referring to person and which is mainly used in referring to things. And we can note that that is used only in restrictive clauses, not in nonrestrictive clauses, for that has a strong characteristics of relative conjunction in comparing with who and which. That as a relative pronoun still has its own weight because it can take an antecedent referring to person and thing. In particular, it is general tendency that who is used more frequently than that in the case of referring that it is not adequate for that to refer to things. In contrast, who has an advantage over that because the former originally refers only to person.

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Implementation of Pronoun Readings in English: A Categorial Grammar Approach.

  • Lee, Yong-Hun
    • Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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    • v.1 no.4
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    • pp.609-627
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    • 2001
  • Pronouns are frequently used in English, and their resolution is important to capture meaning of sentences. This paper provides a computational implementation for pronoun readings in English, based on Chierchia's (1988) Binding Theory in Categorial Grammar. A CCG-like system is newly devised for implementing his ideas, where syntactic phenomena are represented by the functor-argument relations of categories. This relation triggers resolution algorithms, and reflexives and pronominals are resolved succinctly. In sum, this paper gives an efficient resolution algorithm for English pronouns within Categorial Grammar.

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Using Corpora for Studying English Grammar

  • Kwon, Heok-Seung
    • Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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    • v.4 no.1
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    • pp.61-81
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    • 2004
  • This paper will look at some grammatical phenomena which will illustrate some of the questions that can be addressed with a corpus-based approach. We will use this approach to investigate the following subjects in English grammar: number ambiguity, subject-verb concord, concord with measure expressions, and (reflexive) pronoun choice in coordinated noun phrases. We will emphasize the distinctive features of the corpus-based approach, particularly its strengths in investigating language use, as opposed to traditional descriptions or prescriptions of structure in English grammar. This paper will show that a corpus-based approach has made it possible to conduct new kinds of investigations into grammar in use and to expand the scope of earlier investigations. Native speakers rarely have accurate information about frequency of use. A large representative corpus (i.e., The British National Corpus) is one of the most reliable sources of frequency information. It is important to base an analysis of language on real data rather than intuition. Any description of grammar is more complete and accurate if it is based on a body of real data.

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A Denotational Analysis of Anaphora in Attitude Contexts

  • Yeom, Jae-Il
    • Language and Information
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    • v.8 no.2
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    • pp.47-72
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    • 2004
  • In general, it is assumed that a pronoun refers to the same individual as the referent of its antecedent. However, when a pronoun and its antecedent are in different information or belief states, the two may not refer to the same individual. Then a question arises what a pronoun refers to. In this paper, two cases are considered. When a pronoun occurs in an attitude context, one case is where its antecedent occurs in a belief context, and the other is where the antecedent occurs in the main context. I propose that a pronoun refers to an individual concept which links two different subjects in two different contexts, and that the selection of a proper individual concept is restricted by the discourse. So a pronoun can be used felicitously only when there is a unique individual concept supported by the individual concept introduced by the discourse and which can link two subjects in two different contexts.

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An Optimal Distinction of Reflexives and Logophors

  • Choi, Ki-Sook
    • Language and Information
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    • v.4 no.1
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    • pp.83-96
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    • 2000
  • In thihs paper, I investigate the different usage of a reflexive-anaphor or logophor. Some African languages which have a morphologically independent set of logophors give a clue to this dichotomy. English which does not have morphologically independent logophors employs a reflexive-self form to be used as a logophor. However, the logophors in English occur in restricted environments. On the other hand, Korean is freer than English in that it allows areflexive to be interchanged with a logophor. With this assumption, I deal with the binding in Optimality Theory. I set up the constraints-MAXlog,ana,MINlog,ana, and Ølog,ana. With these constraints, the binding in various languages are explained through constraint ranking. In addition, the long-distance binding in English is dealt with properly of we assume the dichotomy and constraint-ranking in Optimality Theory. Furthermore, this gives an explanation to reflexive and pronoun alternation in English. Also, I borrow from phonology the idea of Obligatory Contour Principle to explain the similar phenomenon in syntax. I compare English with Korean in dealing with the possessive reflexive with the recourse to The Emergence of the Unmarked Pronoun Bresnan 1997. Fnmally, the reconstruction phenomenon is accounted for with the same device.

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Cross-speaker anaphora in dynamic semantics

  • Yeom, Jae-Il
    • Language and Information
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    • v.14 no.2
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    • pp.103-129
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    • 2010
  • In this paper, I show that anaphora across speakers shows both dynamic and static sides. To capture them all formally, I will adopt semantics based on the assumption that variables range over individual concepts that connect epistemic alternatives. As information increases, a variable can take a different range of possible individual concepts. This is captured by the notion of virtual individual (= vi), a set of individual concepts which are indistinguishable in an information state. The use of a pronoun involves two information states, one for the antecedent, which is always part of the common ground, and the other for the pronoun. Information increase changes vis for variables in the common ground. A pronoun can be used felicitously if there is a unique virtual individual in the information state for the antecedent which does not split in two or more distinctive virtual individuals in the information state for the pronoun. The felicity condition for cross-speaker anaphora can be satisfied in declaratives involving modality, interrogatives and imperatives in a rather less demanding way, because in these cases the utterance does not necessarily require non-trivial personal information for proper use of a pronoun.

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English-to-Korean Machine Translation and the Problem of Anaphora Resolution (영한기계번역과 대용어 조응문제에 대한 고찰)

  • Ruslan Mitkov
    • Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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    • 1994.06c
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    • pp.351-357
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    • 1994
  • At least two projects for English-to-Korean translation have been already in action for the last few years, but so far no attention has been paid to the problem of resolving pronominal reference and a default pronoun translation has been considered instead. In this paper we argue that pronous cannot be handled trivially in an English-to-Korean translation and one cannot bypass the task of resolving anaphoric reference if aiming at good and natural translation. In addition, we propose lexical transfer rules for English-to-Korean anaphor translation and outline an anaphora resolution model for an English-to-Korean MT system in operation.

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A Convergent Study on the Narration of Novel through Text-mining (소설 내러티브의 변화: 텍스트마이닝 기반 장르별 내러티브 분석)

  • Park, Jungsik;Park, Mi Sun
    • English & American cultural studies
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    • v.17 no.1
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    • pp.81-106
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    • 2017
  • Using recently emerging quantitative methods, this article provides a comparative study of the diachronic changes in the narrations of novel, history, and science from the early 18th-century to the 20th-century. To trace the narrative changes in different genres, this article discusses how text-mining methodology can be introduced in literary studies. We compared the traces of narrative in three genres—novel, history, and science—as a pilot study, with the three major grammatical elements of narrative: pronoun, subordinating conjunction, and action verbs in past tense. The results of data-mining show that the use of pronoun and action verb has increased in the genre of novel toward the $20^{th}$ century, while history and science has developed less story-like writing styles.

Interactions between Morpho-Syntax and Semantics in English Agreement

  • Kim, Jong-Bok
    • Language and Information
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    • v.7 no.1
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    • pp.55-68
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    • 2003
  • Most of the previous approaches to English agreement phenomena have relied upon only one component of the grammar (e.g., either syntax, or semantics, or pragmatics). This paper argues that interrelationships among different grammatical components play crucial roles in such phenomenon too (cf. Kathol 1999 and Hudson 1999). The paper proposes that, contrary to traditional wisdom, English determiner-noun agreement is morpho-syntactic whereas subject-verb and pronoun-antecedent agreement are reflections of index agreement (cf. Pollard and Sag 1994). The present hybrid analysis of English agreement shows the importance of the interaction of different components of the grammar in accounting for English agreement phenomena. In particular, once we allow morphology to tightly interact with the system of syntax, semantics, or even pragmatics, we could provide a solution to some puzzling English agreement phenomena. This allows a more principled theory of English agreement.

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Teaching Grammar for Spoken Korean to English-speaking Learners: Reported Speech Marker '-dae'. (영어권 학습자를 위한 한국어 구어 문법 교육 - 보고 표지 '-대'를 중심으로 -)

  • Kim, Young A;Cho, In Jung
    • Journal of Korean language education
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    • v.23 no.1
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    • pp.1-23
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    • 2012
  • The development of corpus in recent years has attracted increased research on spoken Korean. Nevertheless, these research outcomes are yet to be meaningfully and adequately reflected in Korean language textbooks. The reported speech marker '-dae' is one of these areas that need more attention. This study investigates whether or not in textbooks '-dae' is clearly explained to English-speaking learners to prevent confusion and misuse. Based on a contrastive analysis of Korean and English, this study argues three points: Firstly, '-dae' should be introduced to Korean learners as an independent sentence ender rather than a contracted form of '-dago hae'. Secondly, it is necessary to teach English-speaking learners that '-dae' is not equivalent to the English report speech form. It functions more or less as a third person marker in Korean. Learners should be informed that '-dae' is used for statements in English, if those statements were hearsay but the source of information does not need to be specified. This is a very distinctive difference between Korean and English and should be emphasized in class when 'dae' is taught. Thirdly, '-dae' should be introduced before indirect speech constructions, because it is mainly used in simple statements and the frequency of '-dae' is very high in spoken Korean.