The Acquisition and Processing of Reference and Anaphora Resolution - Brussel - 05/05/2020 - 06/05/2020.

Theme of the conference
Referring to entities is a fundamental aspect of languages; it allows to refer to things and people in the world. Speakers can opt for different referential expressions (e.g. overt and null pronouns, noun phrases, proper names, etc.) to indicate a particular entity in discourse and listeners have to be able to select the correct referent according to the speaker’s intention. This is often known as anaphora resolution. The theme of the conference is to address hte acquisition and the processing of reference and anaphora resolution. When acquiring, processing and resolving reference, several factors are involved, such as information status (topic, focus), the syntactic position of the antecedent, the accessibility of the referent, the number of potential or competing antecedents, the distance between the referential expression and its antecedent, etc. So, the aim of the conference is to gain insight into the different mechanisms that shape anaphora resolution in across languages.