Children (aged five-to-six and nine-to-ten years) and adults rated the acceptability of well-formed sentences and argument-structure overgeneralization errors involving the prepositional-object and double-object dative constructions (e.g. "Marge pulled the box to Homer/*Marge pulled Homer the box"). In support of the entrenchment hypothesis, a…

Examines the constraints on depictive predicates and their interpretation within the aspectual structure theory of structural representation of aspect. This model allows a simple expression of the relation between the depictive adjunct predicate and its host by means of a parallel-structures analysis. (Author/VWL)

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…

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)

Critiques Aoun and Li's (1993) syntactic analysis of quantifier-scope interpretations in English, Chinese, and Japanese, showing serious theoretical problems with their results and proposing a quantifier-scope analysis that avoids those problems. The proposed expert system considers several important considerations and arrives at a composite…

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…

Examines parallelisms between surface structure and logical structure and why those parallelisms do not extend farther than they do. If syntactic deep structures are identified with logical structures, an appropriate cyclic principle guarantees that cyclic rules will apply so that large-scale parallelisms exist between surface syntactic structures…

One important function of the imperfective aspect in Modern Greek is to indicate indefinite repetition; when a modal element is present, however, the perfective may be selected instead. (Author/CFM)

Using a particular sentence type--an exclamative construction referred to as "Nominal Extraposition" (NE)--this article outlines a formal model in which grammatical description includes the description of use conditions on form-meaning pairs. The article suggests that the relationship between NE and like exclamatives can be represented in an…

Maintains that Edwin Williams has not properly appreciated or presented the central theses of "Indices and Identity" (I&I). The article also states that criticisms of particular analyses offered are consistently off the mark. This discussion note is presented as a clarification of the issues presented. The central concern in I&I is with the nature…

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…

Argues that WH-Movement in American Sign Language (ASL) is a leftward specifier of CP. Also argues that the occurrence of rightward WH-elements derives from independently motivated syntactic and discourse factors leading to the appearance of WH-elements in a sentence- or discourse-final positions--not by rightward WH-movement. This analysis…

An account of the phenomena that transformational syntax handled by means of "raising" is formulated in the context of cognitive grammar. Raising is analyzed as a special case of the metonymy that relational expressions exhibit in regard to their choice of overtly coded arguments. The transparency of these constructions is explained. (83…

Tested two hypotheses about how English-speaking children learn to avoid making argument structure errors such as "don't giggle me." Ninety-six children were introduced to two nonce verbs, one as a transitive verb and one as an intransitive verb. Found empirical support for the constraining role of verb classes and preemption, but only for…

Points out that "pro"-drop languages have restrictions on the reference of "pro" not found with the overt pronomials of non-"pro"-drop languages. Notes that while the overt pronouns of non-"pro"-drop languages may take clausal antecedents, "pro" may not take these elements as linguistic antecedents. (24 references) (Author/CK)