Discusses the grammatical effect of inserting the pronouns, "ce" and "ca" in the position originally occupied by the subject noun. Suggests that this insertion can alter the interpretation of the syntax of the subject noun and explains this problem by discussing the inherent properties of pronouns and the properties resulting from their insertion…

Discusses ways in which sentences may be represented in a condensed form in graphic displays of a sentence dependency structure. A prototype of a text structure management system, TEXNET, is described; a quantitative evaluation of automatic abbreviation schemes is presented; full-text compression is discussed; and additional research is suggested.…

Analysis of the syntactic properties of Spanish prepositions, postpositions, and substantives supports the argument that a three-way categorical distinction exists among the three elements. (CB)

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…

A correspondence is shown between grammatical categories and grammatical functions in Chinese. Some syntactic properties distinguish finite verbs from nonfinite verbs, nominals from other categories, and verbs from other categories. (Contains seven references.) (LB)

Studied procedures used by French and English speakers to implement message packaging during sentence formulation. Results provide new evidence for similar and contrasting ways in which speakers of different languages respond to decisions about message packaging. (DR)

The Introduction sections of some Ph.D. dissertations were examined to determine the significance of verb form in reporting verbs like "find" or "show." When forms were classified in relation to sentence function, some correlation with tense was found, but there were also correlations between tense and voice and between these two and sentence…

Analysis of the distribution of punctors, a class of markers commonly classified as nervous tics, fillers, or signs of hesitation, in one corpus of French is presented. Some aspects of their conditioning are explained in terms of the interaction of etymological, discursive, syntactic, and social constraints. (Author/MSE)

Presents a discourse-functional account of English inversion, based on an examination of a large corpus of naturally occurring tokens. It is argued that inversion serves an information-packaging function and that felicitous inversion depends on the relative discourse-familiarity of the information represented by the preposed and postposed…

Investigates the effects of pragmatic principles on the acquisition of the binding of English reflexives by adult Turkish second language (L2) learners. Compares pragmatically-biased and pragmatically-neutral sentences to determine whether pragmatic bias towards a non-local antecedent overrides the parameter setting of English and causes learners…

Two experiments and two questionnaire studies investigated the processing of sluiced sentences among college student participants. Results show that, because the interpretation of a sluiced constituent takes place at the representational level of logical form (LF), implicit arguments are not made explicit at LF, but focus is important in the…

This study focuses on the question of whether structural analyses of verb-arguments are postponed until the head has been processed or initiated prior to the appearance of the verb. To explore this question in relation to a head-final language, a Japanese dative argument attachment ambiguity was examined in both a questionnaire study and a…

The study reported here was conducted in the Algonquian language of Odawa (a.k.a. Ottawa), with the goal of gaining new insight into the ways that conceptual accessibility affects human sentence production. The linguistic characteristics of Odawa are quite different from those found in the languages most often examined by psycholinguists. The data…

N400 is an event-related brain potential that indexes operations in semantic memory conceptual space, whether elicited by language or some other representation (e.g., drawings). Language models typically propose three stages: lexical access or orthographic- and phonological-level analysis; lexical selection or word-level meaning and associate…

A number of studies have shown that structural factors play a much larger role than the linear order of words during the production of grammatical agreement. These findings have been used as evidence for a stage in the production process at which hierarchical relations between constituents have been established (a necessary precursor to…