Rappaport Hovav and Levin [Rappaport Hovav, M., Levin, B., 1998. "Building verb meanings." In: Butt, M., Geuder, W. (Eds.), "The Projection of Arguments: Lexical and Compositional Factors." CSLI Publications, Stanford, pp. 97-134] contend that result verbs disallow object deletion because of their lexical semantic properties. Their point is that…

A notable difference between signed and spoken languages is the use of nonmanual linguistic signals that co-occur with the production of signs. These nonmanual signals involve primarily the face and upper torso and are an important feature of American Sign Language (ASL). They include grammatical markers that indicate syntactic categories such as…

The domain of inquiry by literacy researchers has expanded greatly over the past generation. Literacy researchers now address out-of-school literacies, multimodal texts, literacy across the curriculum and other important issues. Research on literacy development has become even more important in the high stakes assessment environments in today's…

Evidence from 3 experiments reveals interference effects from structural relationships that are inconsistent with any grammatical parse of the perceived input. Processing disruption was observed when items occurring between a head and a dependent overlapped with either (or both) syntactic or semantic features of the dependent. Effects of syntactic…

We examine the inflectional productions of seven Catalan, seven Galician, and seven Spanish speaking agrammatic subjects in an elicitation and a sentence repetition task and consider them in the light of the Tree Pruning Hypothesis (TPH). The results show relatively spared subject person/number agreement with the verb and impaired tense marking…

This paper presents an empirical study of how different "wh"-words behave in English speakers' L2 Chinese "wh"-questions. Our results indicate that L2 Chinese "wh"-questions are specified by the Chinese "wh" -particle ne and that there is neither variability nor L1 transfer in this aspect of L2 grammars as no "wh"-movement is found in English…

This article investigates the L2 acquisition of clausal syntax in postpuberty learners of German and Swedish regarding V2, VP headedness, and verb particle constructions. The learner data are tested against L2 theories according to which lower structural projections (VP) are acquired before higher functional projections (IP, CP), VP syntax is…

This paper focuses on the temporal and modal meanings associated with root infinitives (RIs) and other non-finite clauses in several typologically diverse languages--English, Russian, Greek and Dutch. I discuss the role that event structure, aspect, and modality play in the interpretation of these clauses. The basic hypothesis is that in the…

Discusses a study of the mood system in Italian, using the systemic functional model as a theoretical framework. In particular, the study focuses on subject ellipsis and explains the two conditions in which the subject must be explicitly expressed in Italian clauses. (CFM)

This article is a reply to Kuno et al. 1999, which claims that a structural approach to scope should be replaced by an expert system. (Author/VWL)

Addresses "ziji," notorious long-distance reflexive in Chinese, which can take antecedent infinitively far away. Argues that theories concerned with anaphoric properties should be formed and evaluated on basis of following observations: no barriers can block anaphoric relation; and subjects of any clauses containing reflexive are its…

Attempts to provide a precise definition for topic and to derive most of the properties of topic from this definition. The main assumption is that the topic-comment construction is a syntactic device employed to fulfill certain discourse functions. (Author/VWL)

Analysis of the cofunctional relationship between common nouns and adjectives in English is examined in terms of the principle of semantic copredication. It is proposed that a formalized semantic metalanguage system can be constructed to demonstrate that some English adjectives behave like common nouns. Numerous examples are provided throughout…

Discussion of information filtering in information retrieval systems introduces a method for defining filters for structured text where the text structure is originally defined by a grammar consisting of a set of productions. Use of a template that is created interactively from the grammar is explained, and a prototype implementation is described.…

Based on Hsieh's theory, this paper studies the historical aspect of verb copying in Chinese. Discussed are the theory of interaction, contemporary structure of a grammar, function and structure of verb copying, and analogy as both a type of interaction and a mechanism for creating various patterns of verb copying. (37 references) (LB)