Examines possible syntactical and intonational patterns which characterize the question in French. (RL)

Syntactic attempts to account for preferred adjective order are rejected in favor of hypotheses integrating semantic and syntactic aspects of the phenomenon in a psycholinguistic framework. (Author/FWB)

The results of the experiment reported here indicate that changes in meaning are more often recognized than changes in wording in concrete sentences but that the reverse is true in the case of abstract sentences. (Author/FWB)

Discusses notion of restriction/nonrestriction as a pervasive deep structure feature of English; and the categorization of a given clause, phrase, or word as restrictive or nonrestrictive depends more on lexis or the user's understanding than syntax. (Author/BK)

Shows how particular features of language are exploited for purpose of humor and reveals the general persuasiveness of incongruity as an element of humor. Features include polysemy, syntactic structures and meaning, deep and surface structure, hyperbole and metaphor, speech patterns, problems of communication, and connectors or linking words. (BK)

Presents the results of running four spellcheckers over samples of text containing the types of spelling errors made by dyslexics. Describes the ways in which they differ from more conventional misspellings that spellcheckers are designed to deal with and concludes that spellcheckers need to use syntactic and contextual information to improve…

Semantic and syntactic contributions to processing of mass and count nouns were assessed by examining the performance of a patient suffering from a pure semantic deficit. Semantic and syntactic processing was evaluated on grammaticality judgement and sentence-picture matching tasks, respectively, where each task involved mass and count readings of…

A sentence anagram task was used to examine the right cerebral hemispheres's role in core grammatical functioning at the syntactic level. The test consisted of two subsets of stimuli involving empty categories: (a) those that required the empty category to be filled, and (b) those that allowed the category to remain empty. Three hypotheses were…

We describe an experiment that investigated the failure to license polarity items in German using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). The results reveal distinct processing reflexes associated with failure to license positive polarity items in comparison to failure to license negative polarity items. Failure to license both negative and…

This paper presents an analysis of the pragmatic use of concessive constructions in business letter discourse. In linguistics concession has been analyzed primarily within concessive clauses which have been widely studied, either alone or compared with other syntactic categories such as adversative, causal or conditional clauses. The term…

Because the appearance of the passive construction varies cross linguistically, differences exist in the interlanguage (IL) passives attempted by learners of English. One such difference is the widely studied IL pseudo passive, as in "*new cars must keep inside" produced by Chinese speakers. The belief that this is a reflection of L1 language…

This paper presents the results of a longitudinal examination of syntactic skills, starting at the age of emergence of simple sentences and continuing through the emergence of complex sentences. We ask whether there is systematic variability among children from different socioeconomic backgrounds in the early stages of sentence production. The…

Two Finnish language comprehension experiments are presented which suggest that the referential properties of pronouns and demonstratives cannot be reduced straightforwardly to the salience level of the antecedent. The findings, from a sentence completion study and visual world eye-tracking study, reveal an asymmetry in which features of the…

Previous research has shown that during syntactic priming activities, L1 speakers produce more target structures when they are prompted by a lexical item that occurred in their interlocutor's previous utterance. This preliminary study investigated whether L2 speakers are similarly influenced by lexical items during syntactic priming activities.…

This study investigated whether the semantic similarity and grammatical class of distracter words affects the naming of pictured actions (verbs) in Japanese. Three experiments used the picture-word interference paradigm with participants naming picturable actions while ignoring distracters. In all three experiments, we manipulated the semantic…