Focuses on gender-related variation in the ellipsis of the nominative particle "ga" and the topic market "wa" in Japanese. (Author/VWL)

Discusses statistical word indexing for Japanese information-retrieval systems and proposes a new method that uses statistics about characters to evaluate a bi-gram's likelihood of being a word boundary. Describes a new segmentation strategy that extracts some overlapping segments and results in higher retrieval effectiveness. (Author/LRW)

Shows that the German "perfekt" has a uniform temporal meaning that results systematically from the interaction of its three components--finiteness marking, auxiliary, and past participle--and that the two readings are the consequence of a structural ambiguity. This analysis also predicts the properties of other participle constructions, in…

Shows that there are at least two types of gapping in natural languages: canonical gapping and LPD. Argues that Chinese has some gapping sentences that result from ATB movement from V to "v." Data from Chinese affirm Johnson's (1994) theory of gapping that gapping occurs in those languages only with verb movement. (Author/VWL)

Examines Ga/No conversion in Japanese under the Move F theory of movement (Chomsky, 1995). Building on Miyagawa's (1993) analysis, argues that a genitive phrase raises out of a prenominal gapless clause in either overt or covert syntax. (Author/VWL)

Accounts for the observation that in a broad range of genetically unrelated languages two classes of direct objects are found that are based on their semantic and syntactic properties. Specifically, splits are found in case marking, object position, and the ability of the object to trigger verb agreement. Proposes that this split in object…

Examines the relationship between the polysemic structure of main verbs and their light counterparts. Suggests that light verbs are systematically related to their heavy counterparts in retaining the force-dynamic properties of the heavy sense, but that the conceptual domain in which that force-dynamic structure applies shifts from the physical to…

To determine whether triage--which determines the probable revisability of a structure--is a feature of human parsing, its scope must be established. This study compares four hypotheses about how much work triage can do. Identifies empirical predictions that differentiate diagnosis with triage from simple basic diagnosis. What little evidence…

Presents evidence based on experimental data from Western European languages that there is orderly variation in the choice of perfective auxiliary with transitive verbs. Specifically, auxiliary selection is sensitive to a hierarchy of aspectual/thematic verb types: some verbs require a given auxiliary categorically; others allow both auxiliaries…

This commentary on a research study by Santiago et al. (2000) suggests that a reanalysis of the data that takes word length into account leads to a conclusion that is the opposite of what the study found. (Author/VWL)

Responds to a commentary written in response a research study conducted by the author (Santiago et al., 2000) that suggests that a reanalysis of the data on syllable structure effects that takes word length into account leads to a conclusion that is the opposite of what the study found. (Author/VWL)

The authors report 2 experiments that compare the recall of long and short words in pure and mixed lists. In pure lists, long words were much more poorly remembered than short words. In mixed lists, this word-length effect was abolished and both the long and short words were recalled as well as short words in pure lists. These findings contradict…

We examined how verb factivity influences the ability of readers to detect and resolve the mismatch of receiving false referents in relation to true referents in discourse contexts. Factive verbs (e.g., know), but not nonfactive verbs (believe), entail the truth of their complements. Recent research by Singer [Singer, M. (2006). Verification of…

We present two ERP studies on the processing of word order variations in Japanese, a language that is suited to shedding further light on the implications of word order freedom for neurocognitive approaches to sentence comprehension. Experiment 1 used auditory presentation and revealed that initial accusative objects elicit increased processing…

The objective of this investigation was to analyze rhetorical strategies of Alice Walker in four narratives, namely, "The Color Purple, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and Now Is the Time To Open Your Heart". As such, this study helps to expand the body of investigation relating linguistics to literature and medium…