Eventualities have been recognized as psychologically and linguistically relevant for more than 50 years. Psychologically, eventualities are complex bundles of information derived from our perceptions of the world. The question for linguists is how much of this complexity is reflected in our eventuality-denoting lexical entries and the…

Languages vary with respect to whether sentences with two negative elements give rise to double negation or negative concord meanings. We explore an influential hypothesis about what governs this variation: namely, that whether a language exhibits double negation or negative concord is partly determined by the phonological and syntactic nature of…

Research on agrammatism has revealed that the nature of linguistic impairment is systematic and interpretable. Non-canonical sentences are more impaired than those of canonical sentences. Previous studies on Japanese (Hiroshi et al. 2004; Chujo 1983; Tamaoka et al. 2003; Nakayama 1995) report that aphasic patients take longer Response Time (RT)…

When discussing focus particles, it has been common practice to rely on the dichotomy of inclusive vs. exclusive particles, "a la" Konig (1991). Inclusive focus particles are often further divided into scalar particles, such as "also", "too", and "either", and non-scalar particles, such as "even". In this thesis, I advance a comparative analysis…

This dissertation revisits subject island effects (Ross 1967, Chomsky 1973) cross-linguistically. Controlled acceptability judgment studies in German, English, Japanese and Serbian show that extraction out of specifiers is consistently degraded compared to extraction out of complements, indicating that the Condition on Extraction domains (CED,…

Rappaport Hovav and Levin [Rappaport Hovav, M., Levin, B., 1998. "Building verb meanings." In: Butt, M., Geuder, W. (Eds.), "The Projection of Arguments: Lexical and Compositional Factors." CSLI Publications, Stanford, pp. 97-134] contend that result verbs disallow object deletion because of their lexical semantic properties. Their point is that…

This paper uses paraphrastic analysis to clarify several concepts related to the syntax of the plural in English sentences. (CK)

Discusses theories of Chafe and Halliday and of Searles regarding idioms in English. The former two show that the division into "old" and "new" information determines English sentence structure. Chafe's definition of lexical and grammatical idioms makes possible prediction regarding their syntax and function. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Many recent models of language comprehension have stressed the role of distributional frequencies in determining the relative accessibility or ease of processing associated with a particular lexical item or sentence structure. However, there exist relatively few comprehensive analyses of structural frequencies, and little consideration has been…

A study was conducted to verify Karttunen's (1973) theoretical linguistic distinction between verbs that function as "plugs" and those that function as "holes." Plugs are defined as performative verbs that block off a sentence's presuppositions so that they are not necessarily part of the speaker's own beliefs. Holes, on the…

Critiques Aoun and Li's (1993) syntactic analysis of quantifier-scope interpretations in English, Chinese, and Japanese, showing serious theoretical problems with their results and proposing a quantifier-scope analysis that avoids those problems. The proposed expert system considers several important considerations and arrives at a composite…

An examination of the predicates "optional" and "obligatory" is made that suggests that they are far more appropriately viewed as derived rather than primitive notions, whose appropriate attributions follow in all cases from independent linguistic facts and principles of a much more general and more generally significant character. (Author/HP)

English has two classes of modal deference expressions that may be superordinate to performative verbs. Verbs representing the illocutionary force of a sentence are sometimes embedded in modal constructions whose function is auxiliary to the central illocutionary act. This phenomenon is discussed in this paper. (CK)

This volume is the fourth in a series of detailed reports on a working computer program for the syntactic analysis of English sentences into their component strings. The report (1) records the considerations involved in various decisions among alternative grammatical formulations and presents the word-subclasses, the linguistic strings, etc., for…

Using a particular sentence type--an exclamative construction referred to as "Nominal Extraposition" (NE)--this article outlines a formal model in which grammatical description includes the description of use conditions on form-meaning pairs. The article suggests that the relationship between NE and like exclamatives can be represented in an…