E-learning systems are transforming the educational sector and making education more affordable and accessible. Recently, many e-learning systems have been equipped with advanced technologies that facilitate the roles of educators and increase the efficiency of teaching and learning. One such technology is Automatic Essay Grading (AEG) or…

Ellipsis plays a key role in the understanding of the relationship between what is uttered and what is understood. In elliptical utterances, less is said than is understood. How is it that a mere fragment of a sentence can be understood as something more? This dissertation explores the syntax of one type of elliptical phenomena, Stripping. A…

We still know surprisingly little about how grammatical structures are selected for use in sentence production. A major debate concerns whether structural selection is competitive or noncompetitive. Competitive accounts propose that alternative structures or structural components actively suppress one another's activation until one option reaches…

This paper aims at giving an analysis of certain syntactic peculiarities of reciprocal pronouns within verbs of psychological state, commonly known as psych-verbs. The analysis reveal that psych-verbs constructions have a peculiar property in that the binding conditions of reciprocal pronouns are satisfied in Experiencer-Subject (ES) psychverbs…

The purpose of this dissertation is to offer a multifaceted overview of stand-alone literature reviews. These texts, literature reviews published unattached to research articles, have existed for centuries but remained largely unstudied by linguists. Thus, the goal of this project is to present these reviews' situational, grammatical, and…

This dissertation is a typological study of verb-final languages, the purpose of which is to examine various grammatical phenomena in verb-final languages to discover whether there are correlations between the final position of the verb and other aspects of grammar. It examines how finality of the verb interacts with argument coding in simple…

The studies regarding information structure and its distribution in sentences are traced back to works of Prague School linguists such as Mathesius in 1920s. Recently, the issue of information structure has been dealt with by functionalists. In Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), information structure constitutes one of the main components of…

Current theories of binding cannot provide a uniform account for many facts associated with the distribution of anaphors, such as long-distance binding effects and the subject-orientation of monomorphemic anaphors. Further, traditional binding theory is incompatible with minimalist assumptions. In this dissertation I propose an analysis of…

The current paper attempts to account for the formation of English middle sentences. Discussing a set of previous analyses on the construction under investigation we show, following the assumptions of Oosten(1986) and Iwata(1999), that English middle constructions should be divided into two types: generic middle constructions and non-generic…

Presents a structural definition of the basic sentence unit, and suggests some guidelines for teaching this material. This concept of "X-word Grammar" has proven to be very helpful to students encountering difficulty with the concept of a sentence. (SL)

Grammatical theories that rely exclusively on the categorical nature of constituents to determine their syntactic behavior encounter problems when dealing with cleft construction. The ungrammaticality of such constructions is indeed syntactic in nature and can be shown to derive from a general principle of universal grammar (UG), restricting the…

This paper examines the role of movable adverbs in Mandarin Chinese. In terms of their position within a sentence, most Mandarin adverbs can be classified as movable or non-movable. While identification of either class may be based on their semantic categories or on the number of syllables, the motivation for placing a movable adverb in front of…

The continuation of articles on the passive voice appearing in the "Grammaire vivante" section of the periodical. The production of the passive sentence is considered under two headings: the simple verb and the complex verbal group. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

This installment of the series on the passive considers the subject and the object of the verb under the following headings: part of speech, circumstantial objects and the relationship between clauses and sentences. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

This article presents evidence supporting the syntactic nature of adjunct extraction in English and other languages, including the coextensiveness of adjunct and argument extraction and their parallelism with respect to strong/weak crossover effects. Also discussed is the challenge that binding domain effects pose for accounts of adjunct…