Argues that in an unmarked sentence the verbs will be stressed, and that in determining patterns of sentence stress the vital consideration should be the speaker's point of view. (AM)

Discusses the automatic construction of abstracts from the texts of documents. Automatic sentence extraction is examined, including syntactic criteria and semantic relational criteria; textual cohesion is discussed, including the recognition of anaphors and noun phrases; text structure is addressed; and the concept of abstract-frames is described.…

Develops Chomsky's proposal that the theoretical status of D-structure should be nullified in favor of alternation between Merger and Chain Formation, arguing that Merger has priority over Chain Formation in building A'-dependencies. Establishes a cross-linguistic correlation between wh-questions and quantification, discussing Chinese, Japanese,…

In a recent paper [Lidz, J., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L. (2003). Understanding how input matters: Verb learning and the footprint of universal grammar. "Cognition," 87, 151-178], we provided cross-linguistic evidence in favor of the following linked assertions: (i) Verb argument structure is a correlate of verb meaning; (ii) However, argument…

Examines some of the early uses of instrumental nouns unaccompanied by prepositions and considers the various meanings they conveyed, in order to show the kinds of changes they have undergone. A number of nominal forms have been adverbialized, and some have been replaced by prepositional phrases or other grammatical constructions. (SL)

Discusses the construction "Sentence + no + Noun" in contemporary Japanese. (AM)

Li's work, which expands the government binding (GB) literature on Chinese linguistics and contributes to understanding constituency and word order, is described. Important issues are noted, empirical or theory-neutral criticisms of Li's accounts are raised, and alternative solutions are offered. (21 references) (LB)

Reports four experiments examining subject-verb agreement errors in Spanish and English. Discusses cross-linguistic differences within the framework of the computational model of grammatical encoding proposed by Kempen and Hoenkamp. Suggests that languages differ in the extent to which the selection of the verb is controlled by features on the…