Search

The study of adjectival diathesis alternations lags behind the study of verbal diathesis and nominalization. This paper aims to diminish the gap by applying to the adjectival domain theoretical tools with proven success elsewhere. We focus on evaluative adjectives, which display a systematic alternation between a basic variant (John was rude) and a derived one (That was rude of John). The alternation brings about a cluster of syntactic and semantic changes - in the semantic type of the predicate, its valency and the mode of argument projection. We argue that the adjectival variants are related by the joint application of two operators: a lexical SATURATION operator (also seen in verbal passive) and a syntactic REIFICATION operator (also seen in nominalization). The analysis straightforwardly extends to similar alternations with Subject- and Object-Experiencer adjectives (proud, irritating). Among its important implications are (i) lexical saturation is not restricted to external arguments (internal ones may also be saturated), and (ii) ' referential ' (R) roles are not restricted to nominal predicates (adjectives may assign them as well). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Event-related potentials were used to investigate if there is a lexical bias effect in comprehension monitoring. The lexical bias effect in language production (the tendency of phonological errors to result in existing words rather than nonwords) has been attributed to an internal self-monitoring system, which uses the comprehension system, and which employs lexical status as a monitoring criterion. It has been suggested that we monitor language comprehension too, and that the P600 reflects comprehension monitoring processes. If both production and comprehension monitoring rely on the comprehension system it is plausible that both processes are very similar. Hence the lexical bias effect is expected in comprehension monitoring. We presented high-cloze sentences that could contain a correct word, a lexical error, or a nonlexical error. There was a larger N400 in the lexical error and the nonlexical error conditions compared with the correct word condition. Importantly, the P600 was the largest in the nonlexical error condition, intermediate in the lexical error condition, and the smallest in the correct condition. Apparently, the comprehension monitor is sensitive to lexicality, suggesting that production and comprehension monitoring use similar criteria for error detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sinclair’s grammatical work is notable for its strict reliance on performance data and its avoidance of psychological theorising. His argument rests on the observation that large corpora reveal a huge discrepancy between the predictions made by cognitive models of grammar and what actually happens in performance. This discrepancy cannot be explained away by appeal to encoding/processing deficiencies, but must be taken as reason to revise our view of grammar, especially by exploring its interdependence with lexis. In this he follows Halliday’s (1966) idea that every word has its own grammar. Sinclair’s 1991 paper on the word of (‘The meeting of lexis and grammar’) exemplifies his thinking in this area with particular energy and originality. Questioning the traditional classification of of as a preposition, he proposes a new, more semantically based, approach to the analysis of noun phrases traditionally said to contain postmodification of the head with an of-phrase, e.g. the horns of the bull. This chapter reviews Sinclair’s development as a grammarian, examines the arguments of the 1991 paper and suggests that while his work has been radically transformative in linguistics, it should not indefinitely avoid engaging with the problem of how best to represent what it is that we know when we say we know a language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The view of pattern grammar is that syntactic structures and lexical items are co-selected and that grammatical categories begin to align very closely with semantic distinctions. While this is certainly a valid position when analysing the phenomenon of collocation, it does not really solve the problem for open choice issues. Not all language use can be subsumed under the idiom principle. The noun hatred, for instance, can co-occur with any discourse object for which hatred can be expressed. It can also co-occur with other lexical items standing for various circumstantial aspects. The grammatical structure itself often does not tell us whether we find expressed the object of hatred or some circumstantial aspect, as these structures tend to have more than one reading. Lexicogrammar, or local grammar, is more than equating a syntactic structure with a semantic pattern. We have to be aware of the different functions or readings a given grammatical structure can have. The framework of valency/dependency grammar can help us to make the necessary distinctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the characteristics and syntactic behaviour of a peculiar construction in which what seem to be two finite complementisers are allowed to co-occur in specific subordinate clauses. As well as providing a detailed description of the structure in a number of Romance varieties, this research focuses on the different roles played by items belonging to the category traditionally labelled as COMP and on the status of the subjects found in the left periphery. Adopting the so-called split-CP hypothesis the proposed analysis argues for the expression of both discourse and inflectional features at the C level, overtly realised as distinct heads, and claims that there are both topicalised and focalised positions available to pre-verbal subjects in the left periphery, be they a DP or a quantified element. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper discusses the semantically parenthetical use of clause-embedding verbs such as see, hear, think, believe, discover and know. When embedding verbs are used in this way, the embedded clause carries the main point of the utterance, while the main clause serves some discourse function. Frequently, this function is evidential, with the parenthetical verb carrying information about the source and reliability of the embedded claim, or about the speaker's emotional orientation to it. Other functions of parenthetical uses of verbs are discussed. Particular attention is paid to the parenthetical uses of verbs which are standardly assumed to require their complements to be presupposed. It is demonstrated that when so used, these verbs are in no way presuppositional; that is, there is no presumption, or even pretense, that their complements have common ground status. It is further demonstrated that this loss of presuppositionality is not accompanied by a lack of commitment on the part of the speaker to the truth of the complement, as in the standard cases of non-presuppositional uses of these predicates. It is argued that this non-presuppositional use of factive verbs provides support for the (minority) view that presupposition is not a conventional property of lexical items. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Phonologically conditioned allomorphy is sometimes determined by universal marking conditions derived from low-ranked constraints, which is viewed as an effect of the emergence of the unmarked (TETU) in optimality theory. In this paper we present two case studies that make crucial use of allomorph selection as TETU but also of an additional property of the lexical representation of allomorphs, namely lexical ordering of allomorphs. The first case is the puzzling selection of definite marker in Haitian Creole (analyzed as an instance of anti-markedness in previous OT works), which yields to an appropriate analysis in terms of allomorph ordering. In the second case study, gender allomorph selection in Catalan, we propose a constraint Respect that ensures compliance with idiosyncratic lexical specifications, which further interacts with allomorph selection. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In de Haan & van Esch (2004, 2005) we outline a research project designed to study the development of writing skills in English and Spanish as foreign languages, based on theories developed, for instance, in Shaw & Liu (1998) and Connor & Mbaye (2002). This project entails collecting essays written by Dutch-speaking students of English (EFL writing) and Dutch-speaking students of Spanish (SFL writing) at one-year intervals, in order to study the development of their writing skills, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The essays are written on a single prompt, taken from Grant & Ginther (2000), asking the students to select their preferred source of news and give specific reasons to support their preference. Students' proficiency level is established on the basis of holistic teacher ratings. A first general analysis of the essays has been carried out with WordSmith Tools. Moreover, the texts have been computer-tagged with Biber's tagger (Biber, 1988; 1995). An initial analysis of relevant text features (Polio, 2001) has provided overwhelming evidence of the relationship between a number of basic linguistic features and proficiency level (de Haan & van Esch, 2004; 2005). In the current article we present the results of more detailed analyses of the EFL material collected from the first cohort of students in two consecutive years, 2002 and 2003, and discuss a number of salient linguistic features of students' writing skills development. We first discuss the development of general features such as essay length, word length and type/token ratio. Then we move on to discuss how the use of specific lexical features (cf Biber, 1995; Grant & Ginther, 2000) has developed over one year in the three proficiency level groups that we have distinguished. While the development of the general features over one year is shown to correspond logically to what can be assumed to be increased proficiency, the figures for the specific lexical features studied do not all point unambiguously in the same direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I address the role of words in meaning-construction. My starting point is the observation that the ‘meanings’ associated with words are protean in nature. That is, the semantic values associated with words are flexible, open-ended and highly dependent on the utterance context in which they are embedded. In attempting to provide an account of meaning-construction that coheres with this observation I develop a cognitively-realistic theory of lexical representation and a programmatic theory of lexical concept integration. My fundamental claim is that there is a basic distinction between lexical concepts, and meaning. While lexical concepts constitute the semantic units conventionally associated with linguistic forms, and form an integral part of a language user's individual mental grammar, meaning is a property of situated usage-events, rather than words. That is, meaning is not a function of language per se, but arises from language use. I present an account of lexical concepts and the conceptual knowledge structures, cognitive models, with respect to which they are relativised. I also situate this theory within a usage-based account. I then develop a theory of lexical concept integration which serves to provide an account of how lexical concepts are combined in service of situated meaning-construction. As the constructs lexical concept and cognitive model are central to the theory of lexical representation and meaning-construction I present, I refer to the approach developed here as the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models, or LCCM Theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses general questions about the organization of grammar via a detailed discussion of a small, but well-explored, area of English: the contraction of want to to wanna. It distinguishes three general approaches to the analysis of wanna: a phonological rule, lexicalization, or a derivational rule. Each approach has a different set of strengths, but they all have weaknesses as well. The article then offers a new analysis in terms of REALIZATION, which combines the strengths of all the previous analyses. This analysis, which is based on the theory of word grammar, accounts not only for all the well-known syntactic and morphological constraints on this contraction, but also for a fact that has not been noted before: that, for some speakers, the last vowel alternates in just the same idiosyncratic way as that of to, which suggests strongly that in some sense wanna contains to as well as want. For these (but not all) speakers, the proposed analysis recognizes two words (sublexemes of WANT and TOinf) at the level of syntax and a single form ({wanna}, containing variants of {want} and {to}) at the level of form; the relations between these words and forms, and between the forms and their phonological realizations, are defined by a declarative network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes and explores a natural language processing- (NLP) based strategy to address out-of-dictionary and vocabulary mismatch problems in query translation based English–Chinese Cross-Language Information Retrieval (EC-CLIR). The strategy, named the LKB approach, is to construct a lexical knowledge base (LKB) and to use it for query translation. In this article, the author describes the LKB construction process, which customizes available translation resources based on the document collection of the EC-CLIR system. The evaluation shows that the LKB approach is very promising. It consistently increased the percentage of correct translations and decreased the percentage of missing translations in addition to effectively detecting the vocabulary gap between the document collection and the translation resource of the system. The comparative analysis of the top EC-CLIR results using the LKB and two other translation resources demonstrates that the LKB approach has produced significant improvement in EC-CLIR performance compared to performance using the original translation resource without customization. It has also achieved the same level of performance as a sophisticated machine translation system. The study concludes that the LKB approach has the potential to be an empirical model for developing real-world CLIR systems. Linguistic knowledge and NLP techniques, if appropriately used, can improve the effectiveness of English–Chinese cross-language information retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gray & Atkinson's (2003) application of quantitative phylogenetic methods to Dyen, Kruskal & Black's (1992) Indo-European database produced controversial divergence time estimates. Here we test the robustness of these results using an alternative data set of ancient Indo-European languages. We employ two very different stochastic models of lexical evolution – Gray & Atkinson's (2003) finite-sites model and a stochastic-Dollo model of word evolution introduced by Nicholls & Gray (in press). Results of this analysis support the findings of Gray & Atkinson (2003). We also tested the ability of both methods to reconstruct phylogeny and divergence times accurately from synthetic data. The methods performed well under a range of scenarios, including widespread and localized borrowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]