This book combines theoretical and experimental aspects of the establishment of dependency. It provides an account of dependency relations by focusing on the representation and interpretation of referentially dependent elements, particularly regular reflexives, logophors, and pronouns. First, the establishment of dependency is discussed within a model of syntax—discourse correspondences that predicts an economy-based dependency hierarchy contingent on the level of representation at which the dependency is formed as well as the internal structure of the dependent element and its antecedent. Secondly, the model's predictions are substantiated by a series of experimental studies (conducted in English and Dutch) providing evidence from three sources of online sentence comprehension: reaction time studies, Broca's aphasia patient studies, and event-related brain potential studies. The findings show that dependencies are established at distinct levels of linguistic encoding (i.e. syntax or discourse) determined by the presence or absence of coargumenthood and the representation of the dependency-forming elements.

This book combines theoretical and experimental aspects of the establishment of dependency. It provides an account of dependency relations by focusing on the representation and interpretation of referentially dependent elements, particularly regular reflexives, logophors, and pronouns. First, the establishment of dependency is discussed within a model of syntax—discourse correspondences that predicts an economy-based dependency hierarchy contingent on the level of representation at which the dependency is formed as well as the internal structure of the dependent element and its antecedent. Secondly, the model’s predictions are substantiated by a series of experimental studies (conducted in English and Dutch) providing evidence from three sources of online sentence comprehension: reaction time studies, Broca’s aphasia patient studies, and event-related brain potential studies. The findings show that dependencies are established at distinct levels of linguistic encoding (i.e. syntax or discourse) determined by the presence or absence of coargumenthood and the representation of the dependency-forming elements.

In this book, I address several issues of child linguistic development from the perspective of the syntax -discourse interface. Traditionally, language acquisition research has focused on the development of one of the linguistic modules, e.g. acquisition of syntax, morphology or phonology. While this approach can be viewed as fruitful in some cases, there is a number of linguistic phenomena whose explanation depends on the interaction of different modules and, therefore, different domains of linguistic knowledge. A typical example is pronominal anaphora: It can be shown that to correctly use pronominal elements, normal adult speakers must possess both syntactic and pragmatic knowledge, and that these kinds of knowledge must interact with each other. With regard to the language acquisition process, such phenomena suggest a somewhat different approach to the language acquisition research. Indeed, if some experimental studies show that children make errors in the construction under investigation, it will be necessary to consider these results from the point of view of the interaction of the different domains of linguistic knowledge involved in their interpretation. In other words, if this particular construction requires the integration of, for example, syntactic and discourse-based knowledge, children's errors may, in principle, be due to their lack of the former, the latter, or both kinds of knowledge, and cannot be taken as direct evidence for the "underdeveloped" status of just one of them.

This survey explores interactions between syntax and discourse, through a case study of patterns of extraction from coordinate structures. The theoretical breadth of the volume makes it the most complete account of extraction from coordinate structures to date: at first glance, it appears to be a syntactic matter, but the survey raises theoretical and empirical questions not just for syntax, but also across semantics, pragmatics, and discourse structure. Rather than promoting a single analysis, Daniel Altshuler and Robert Truswell outline reasonable hypotheses that allow theoretical conclusions to be deducted from empirical facts. The theoretical conclusions show that coordinate structures have the potential to discriminate between current syntactic theories, and to inform work on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. In many cases, however, the necessary empirical work has not yet been carried out, and too much of the literature revolves around the same handful of primarily English examples. The volume offers a starting point for further research on extraction from coordinate structures, particularly in understudied languages, and provides a guide to how to tease out the theoretical implications of empirical findings.

Until recently, little attention has been paid within syntax to components of discourse meaning that go beyond information structure and fall into the domain of non-at-issue meaning operating at the level of illocutionary force. To approach this domain, many of the contributions of this volume deal with the syntax of discourse particles. However, the issue of how to account for discourse particles within a more explicit map of the illocutionary domain is a good starting point for considering further phenomena related to the syntax of speech acts. By focusing on speech-act related particles and/or meaning domains, this volume makes a new contribution to the field, as existing collections either do not offer a comparatively narrow focus on particles or are not limited to syntax-oriented approaches. The primary audience of this volume are researchers and graduate students interested in state-of-the-art approaches to the syntax-discourse interface within the cartographic approach to syntax.

Anaphora processing is a central topic in the study of natural language and has long been the object of research in a wide range of disciplines. The correct interpretation of anaphora has also become increasingly important for real-world natural language processing applications, including machine translation, automatic abstracting, information extraction and question answering. This volume provides a unique overview of the processing of anaphora from a multi- and inter-disciplinary angle. It will be of interest and practical use to readers from fields as diverse as theoretical linguistics, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, computer science, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, human language technology, psycholinguistics, cognitive science and translation studies. The readership includes but is not limited to university lecturers, researchers, postgraduate and senior undergraduate students.