Analyzes the distribution of information in so-called "synonymous" sentences in the context of a semantic perspective. (AM)

Presents clues for determining whether "short passives," passive sentences from which the "by"-phrase has been deleted, are actually passive or stative. The clues include intensifiers, the verb "seems," contrasts, present tense, past tense, progressive aspect, and confirmation by examples. (CB)

Examines the idiomatic meaning carried in a sentence through the syntactic idiom. The infinitive of negative result is used to examine the understanding of the meaning carried in a sentence by its syntactic structure. (GLR)

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…

It is proposed that declarative sentences used in ordinary speech deliver regular, patterned suggestions. The reader or auditor is invited to infer that the utterance is coherent, pertinent, feasible, true, and believed by the speaker and that the speaker could have ascertained its truth. (41 references) (MSE)

Provides evidence that sentence processing does not make use of grammatical theories with empty categories. A linguistic account is provided of unbounded dependencies that do not use empty categories and can serve as the basis of a processing model. It is concluded that empty categories are not psychologically real. (28 references) (JL)

Describes how two conversants can jointly produce a single syntactic unit, such as a sentence, discussing the types of sentences achieved through joint production, the single utterance construction format, syntax for conversation, interactionally relevant features of talk, and the resources needed to complete an utterance-in-progress. (37…

Shows how the subject pronoun in a cleft sentence together with the cleft clause function pragmatically as a discontinuous definite description. Presents a new syntactic analysis of clefts, which treats the cleft clause as an extraposed complement of the cleft subject pronoun, adjoined to the clefted constituent. (Author/VWL)

This article introduces a modification of the sentence completion task that acquaints students with various types of informational text structures (e.g., cause-effect, compare-contrast) and challenges their higher order reading and writing skills. When the individual sentences comprising an expository paragraph are intermingled with unrelated…

The current study examines whether young and older adults have similar preferences for animate-subject and active sentences, and for using the order of activation of a verb's arguments to determine sentence structure. Ninety-six participants produced sentences in response to three-word stimuli that included a verb and two nouns differing in…

We report 3 experiments that examined younger and older adults' reliance on "good-enough" interpretations for garden-path sentences (e.g., "While Anna dressed the baby played in the crib") as indicated by their responding "Yes" to questions probing the initial, syntactically unlicensed interpretation (e.g., "Did Anna dress the baby?"). The…

A word-by-word human sentence processing complexity metric is presented. This metric formalizes the intuition that comprehenders have more trouble on words contributing larger amounts of information about the syntactic structure of the sentence as a whole. The formalization is in terms of the conditional entropy of grammatical continuations, given…

In two experiments, we explore how recent experience with particular syntactic constructions affects the strength of the structural priming observed for those constructions. The results suggest that (1) the strength of structural priming observed for double object and prepositional object constructions is affected by the relative frequency with…

This paper investigates how people resolve syntactic category ambiguities when comprehending sentences. It is proposed that people combine: (a) context-dependent syntactic expectations (top-down statistical information) and (b) context-independent lexical-category frequencies of words (bottom-up statistical information) in order to resolve…

This study examines sentence-level language abilities of amnesic H.M. to test competing theoretical conceptions of relations between language and memory. We present 11 new sources of experimental evidence indicating deficits in H.M's comprehension and production of non-cliche sentences. Contrary to recent claims that H.M.'s comprehension is…