Pronominal Anaphor Resolution and the Underlying Cognitive Mechanism

Abstract

When people tend to refer to a previous mentioned discourse entity, they can use various types of anaphoric expressions, such as pronouns, definite noun phrases, proper names or expressions that are introduced by a lexical modifier or a comparative adjective. Among the different types of anaphoric expressions, pronoun is most common and frequently used which contains only a little information about the referent, while definite expressions contain much richer semantic information. As pronouns contain very little information on their own, they are always ambiguous. The cognitive mechanism that underlies the comprehension of pronouns, especially the ones with ambiguities, catches the interests of many researchers. Various tasks have been used to investigate this issue and the results did not go for the same direction. A combination of multiple research methods is needed for a better and deeper understanding of anaphora.