The Acquisition of Reference and Anaphora Resolution
Project description
Referring to entities is a fundamental issue in communication. To refer to persons and things in the world, speakers can opt for different kinds of referential expressions (e.g. proper names, noun phrases, apposition, overt and null pronouns, etc.). Next to this production part, there is also a receptive side of communication, since listeners have to be able to select the correct referent in line with the speaker’s intention. When acquiring, processing and resolving reference, several parameters are involved, such as the information status (topic/focus), the syntactic position of the referent and antecedent, the accessibility of the referent, the presence of potential or competing antecedents, the distance between the referential expression and its antecedent, etc. An aspect of particular interest can be the contrast between pro-drop (e.g. Spanish) and non-pro-drop languages (e.g. English) and how language learners with one background perform in a different language.
In sum, this topic addresses reference and anaphora resolution from a corpus based and/or experimental approach and with native speakers’ discourse and/or language learners’ oral or written productions.
An Vande Casteele belongs to the research group “Centre for Linguistics”, a leading centre for research on multilingualism and second language teaching. She welcomes researchers interested in this field to discuss ideas for the submission of a research proposal.
About the research Group
Centre for Linguistics (CLIN)
CLIN is part of the Linguistics and Literary Studies department (LIST) within the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy. The main objective of CLIN is to promote research in theoretical and applied linguistics and the application of this research in the wider society. Research at CLIN addresses a broad spectrum of issues related to the structure, use, learning and teaching, impairment, historical development, and the social and political contexts of languages. Recent work includes studies on morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, sociohistorical linguistics, bilingualism and bilingual education, aphasia, childhood speech and language disorders, second language acquisition, and methodology and practice in language teaching. Applications of research at CLIN include consultancy for private and public organisations in the areas of language and education policy, curriculum design, language teaching material development, language assessment, speech pathology, and natural language processing. Furthermore, the research centre hosts the Werkgroep Over Taal (WOT), a platform for the collaborative interchange of knowledge via presentations and workshops by international (guest-)speakers covering a wide variety of linguistic topics.