This paper investigates complex anaphoric reference (i.e., when an anaphor refers to a propositionally structured referent). Complex anaphors (e.g., this process, this event) differ in their ontological feature setup, and the ontological type assigned to a referent can change due to the lexical meaning of the complex anaphor. Previous research has proposed that such changes have to comply with an ontological 'abstractness constraint' restricting the direction of ontological change. We present an event-related potential study that provides evidence that violations of the abstractness constraint result in processing costs. The data reveal that violating this constraint by shifting the referent towards a less abstract ontological type elicits an enhanced N400, while reduction of ontological features towards a more abstract type exerts no extra processing demands. The data indicate that the abstractness constraint affects real-time sentence comprehension and that different ontological types are implicationally related.
I present different types of ambiguity that occur in annotating and resolving the German anaphoric adverbial danach ("thereafter"). By means of two pilot studies it is shown that referential ambiguity (i.e. the anaphor has several plausible referents) and structual dissociation (i.e. different antecedents specify the same referent) cause bad inter-annotator agreement. Both phenomena can only be explored in detail as the annotation studies do not only concentrate on the textual but also on the referential level involved in anaphoric references. Thus, it can be shown that the competing referents in most referentially ambiguous cases are more or less temporally and conceptually related to each other and specify a similiar reference time for danach ("thereafter"). Moreover, the competing antecedents often textually overlap so that some structurally dissociated cases can be handled by stricter annotation guidelines. Thus, considering the textual and the referential dimensions of anaphoric reference provides further insights into the cognitive processing of sentential anaphors like danach ("thereafter").
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