This paper looks at how corpus data was used to design an Italian as an L2 language learning programme and how it was evaluated by students. The study focuses on the acquisition of Italian verb-noun collocations by Chinese native students attending a ten month long Italian language course before enrolling at an Italian university. It describes how…

Many syntactic and semantic studies have focused on the distribution of closed-class lexical noun phrases (NPs) such as "her, herself, and each other." Recent work has demonstrated that many other NPs are also referentially dependent. A model-theoretic semantic analysis of a number of such referentially dependent NPs is presented. These…

This paper focuses on tonal alternations in the Urhobo noun phrase. Urhobo is an Edoid language spoken extensively in Delta State, Nigeria. The language has two basic tones, high and low, plus a phenomenon of downstep, both automatic and non-automatic. The noun phrases examined include the noun + noun associative construction, the noun + relative…

Noun phrases are often used in academic writing to express the abstract character of the topics discussed. Nouns, especially nominalizations, make it possible to express complicated ideas in a condensed and compact manner, whereas the corresponding verbs make texts easier to understand and more dynamic. In this paper, a case study is presented…

A simplified pattern of noun formation is outlined that can assist the German teacher in helping students understand constituent relationships in long or obscure German nouns, providing an overview of significant patterns that covers a relatively complete noun system. First, significant patterns in nouns outside the process of formation, and…

This paper discusses the phonology-syntax interface in Akan, a language spoken in Ghana and the Cote d'Ivoire, describing a medium of exchange between phonology and syntax. Studies in lexical phonology have distinguished two levels in phonology--lexical and post-lexical--based on how and where phonological rules apply, although some phonological…

This includes a contrastive study of English and Chinese noun phrases, verbal phrases, and word order and discusses common mistakes made by English speakers learning Chinese. Mistakes often made by English speakers due to differences between the two languages are divided into three categories: the first is mistakes in word order where the English…

Structures in which nouns modify nouns have raised questions about the form and functioning of generative grammars. By applying and extending Jackendoff's X-bar theory of phrase structure, the syntactic properties of two types of pre-noun modifiers, adjectives and nouns, can be examined. X-bar analysis correctly predicts many features of noun-noun…

A number of studies on the order of adjectives in the English noun phrase are reviewed. Analysis of the studies and examples used in them indicates that almost any order of adjective seems to be possible depending on the intended meaning of the speaker or the situation in which the speaker frames an utterance. To see if in fact the ordering of…

This paper examines semantic constraints governing the occurrence of interjections with various other types of grammatical phenomena. Four interjections, "oh,""ah,""say," and "well," which typically occur embedded in sentences, are discussed in terms of their semantic properties and possible contexts. It is…

The paper proposes, on the basis of a study of relative clauses and WH-interrogative constructions, to reflect the time-oriented character of the sentence by replacing neutral expressions like "#" with explicit time references like "beginning" and "end." These boundaries are to be universally associated with all…

The noun phrase of the Norwegian dialect of the multilingual village of Skibotn, in northern Norway, is analyzed. Attention is focused on the possible influence of two other languages, Finnish, an imported language, and Sami, the original language of the area, in the development of three different clusters of features characteristic of nominal…

Points of similarity and contrast between English and Modern Standard Arabic in relativization are examined. It is concluded that while the relativization process is essentially the same in both languages, they differ with respect to the relative pronoun, the agreement of the relative pronoun with its antecedent, and the appearance of the…

In the surface structure of Chinese nominal modifiers (quantifiers, determiners, adjectives, measure phrase, relative clause, etc.) may occur either before or after a modified noun. In most of the transformational studies of Chinese syntax (e.g. Cheng 1966; Hashimoto 1966; Mei 1972; Tai 1973; Teng 1974), it has been assumed that such NP's have the…

Semantic noun classes in Emai, an Edoid language of Nigeria, are examined with respect to a process of Reference Point Marking (RPM) in order to explore the relationship between discourse and lexical semantics. Across pre- and post-verbal positions subcategorized by verbs like "rere" ("to be far"), these classes are shown to…