Discussion of information filtering in information retrieval systems introduces a method for defining filters for structured text where the text structure is originally defined by a grammar consisting of a set of productions. Use of a template that is created interactively from the grammar is explained, and a prototype implementation is described.…

A discussion, in the form of an animated letter exchange, argues that, contrary to most current grammatical descriptions, the German particle "bis" should not be viewed as a preposition governing the accusative case. Rather, it is demonstrated that "bis" most often occurs as a proclitic adverb. (16 references) (JTC)

A brief overview is presented of previous theoretical treatments of the verb-preposition construction, concentrating on three Government Binding Theory treatments. Arguments are outlined that support a different analysis of this type of construction. (24 references) (Author/VWL)

Argues that what have been called rising diphthongs in Frisian can be shown to be glide-vowel sequences of which the glide forms part of the syllable onset tather than being part of the nucleus. This argument is supported by an analysis of the phenomena of breaking. (Author/VWL)

Argues that the imperative construction in English can be given a fairly orthodox syntactic representation assuming current principles in Government Binding Theory. A number of reasons are provided for claiming that the imperative construction contains a case-marked subject. (23 references) (Author/VWL)

Based on Hsieh's theory, this paper studies the historical aspect of verb copying in Chinese. Discussed are the theory of interaction, contemporary structure of a grammar, function and structure of verb copying, and analogy as both a type of interaction and a mechanism for creating various patterns of verb copying. (37 references) (LB)

Mester and Ito's evidence for the phonological theory of Restricted Underspecification (RU) is refuted. Attention is focused on reduplicated forms; and it is concluded that, if there is only a rough and sporadic sound-syllable meaning association with palatization, the argument for RU is untenable. (12 references) (LB)

Describes the interaction between disjunct constituents and sentential structures and argues for an extension of the theoretical apparatus intially postulated in autosegmental phonology to represent complex syntactic structures containing disjunct constituents with a number of independent phrase markers that intersect at the linear axis. (66…

Argues against Edward Sapir's pronouncement that English has no infixes by pointing to the insertion of certain interjections into other words (fan-damn-tastic, abso-bloody-lutely) and the morpheme "ma" in vaguely definable words such as thingamabob and whatchamacallit. Possible etymologies of such vaguely defined words are also…

Investigates deverbal nominalization involving the suffix "kake" in Japanese. Argues that kake nominalization induces two different meanings, the halfway and the inception reading, and different constraints are called for depending on these two meanings. (Author/VWL)

Investigates the distribution of existential polarity wh-phrases (EPWs) in Chinese that behave like negative polarity items, examining the distribution of Chinese EPWs and arguing that using EPWs is felicitous if the local propositions in which they appear do not entail existence of a referent satisfying the EPW description. The paper considers…

Explores categorization of verbs according to lexical aspectual meaning. Any type of categorization confronts a difficulty in suffixing "-teiru" to the verb "you-" because the "-teiru" suffixation actually yields a verb phrase to ambiguity. Suggests that the difficulty can be resolved by taking into account the…

Discusses indexing methods in Korean text retrieval and proposes a new indexing method based on n-grams which can handle compound nouns effectively without dictionaries and complex linguistic knowledge. Experimental results show that n-gram-based indexing is considerably faster than morpheme-based indexing, and also provides better retrieval…

Develops an argument for a pied-piping approach to the apparent absence of island effects in Japanese, along the lines of Nishigauchi (1986, 1990). Investigates the nature of pied-piping, developing a theory that accounts for the fact that wh-islands cannot be pied-piped. (Author/VWL)

Presents evidence that argument structure is not a semantic but a syntactic level of representation. Evidence is based on the distinction between primary and secondary objects found in languages such as Chichewa. Concludes that because argument structure must express the distinction between primary and secondary objects, it follows that argument…