Questions tagged [anaphora]
The anaphora tag has no usage guidance.
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Is "I gave a hundred dollars to my father, and she did so to her father" grammatical?
Is the following sentence grammatically correct?
I gave a hundred dollars to my father, and she did so to her father.
To me it sounds perfectly fine. According to the unscientific method of asking ...
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"They told each other they had better leave" [reciprocity and distributivity]
Following the lead of Higginbotham (1985), Andrew Barss (1986) notes that examples like (1) are ambiguous.
(1a) They told each other they had better leave
(1b) John and Bill told each other they had ...
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In the example, who do the pronouns she and her refer to?
Page 277 of Beyond the Segment: Stress, Rhythm and Intonation reads
Jane said she’d been delighted long enough and Margaret offended her.
The nuclear stress rule tells us that nuclear stress falls ...
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Rules for coreference resolution
I'm trying to understand how English tracks a subject between sentences. I believe the term is known as Coreference Resolution.
I'm wondering if there's a base set of rules which can define ...
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A question regardig anaphoric reference to time
I have a simple question regarding anaphoric reference to time.
ex) How is the weather in New York next Monday?
and for the next sentence I want to make an anaphoric reference to Monday.
say the ...
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What's the underlying grammatical structure of this sentence with three instances of "it" and two of "being"?
I just encountered the following sentence in The Oxford Guide to Style (p. 161) and could not figure out its structure:
Since it⁽¹⁾ is being presented as a direct quotation it⁽²⁾ is treated as one, ...
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What does "their" refer to in this sentence?
I'm having a hard time with this sentence:
Professional bodies will monitor, and if necessary, discipline members who do not adhere to their ethical principles.
Does 'their' refer to the members ...
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Is it correct to use "his or her" after "Neither Jake nor Janet..."?
Is the following sentence grammatically correct:
"Neither Jake nor Janet brought his or her homework to class."
I understand that it has recently become acceptable to use a singular they for ...
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Can "they" be used without an explicit antecedent noun phrase in a sentence like this?
Can I say "His wife is named Jane, and they have two sons," or do I have to say "he has two sons" instead of "they have"? My paragraph was about the man, so is it wrong to say "they have" instead of "...
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I want to lnow what is the antecedent of the pronoun “it” in the following context?
the source
It’s the third time since 2015 that such a collision has been observed via an instrument called LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory), which consists of a pair of ...
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What object am I referring to in this sentence?
I apologize if my question is too basic, my English is a little rusty and I have always had trouble with this concept:
Consider the following sentence:
Once I finished the project, I found that ...
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Which pronoun should be used to refer to"young figure": "it" or "her"?
In my writing group, one man wrote this sentence in an except we critiqued:
John stood for a moment and watched the lithe, young figure make her way down the street.
I suggested it should read "...
Tracie Breiter
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What explains the differing levels of acceptability of 'that' in the following examples?
Consider the following exchanges:
[1Q]: Is E̲x̲x̲o̲n̲ your parent company?.................. [1A]: Yes, t̲h̲a̲t̲ is our parent company.
[2Q]:...
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Is "those" used as an anaphor or a deictic?
The following is from an essay titled "'DOUBLE SUFFERING' WHEN WOMEN TARGETED NOT ONLY FOR GENDER BUT ALSO FOR RELIGION":
A year ago, a special conference focusing on this issue heard how ...
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Inverse of an antecedent
An antecedent refers to an earlier noun to derive its meaning, for example,
Taylor likes his pizza hot.
Here, his derives its meaning from Taylor.
What is the anaphora or inverse of the ...
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