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Predictive Processing (PP) is an increasingly influential neurocognitive-computational framework. PP research has so far focused predominantly on lower level perceptual, motor, and various psychological phenomena. But PP seems to face a "scale-up challenge": How can it be extended to conceptual thought, language, and other higher cognitive competencies? Compositionality, arguably a central feature of conceptual thought, cannot easily be accounted for in PP because it is not couched in terms of classical symbol processing. I argue, using the example of language, that there is no strong reason to think that PP cannot be scaled up to higher cognition. I suggest that the tacitly assumed common-sense conception of language as Generative Grammar ("folk linguistics") and its notion of composition leads to the scale-up concerns. Fodor's Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) plays the role of a cognitive computational paradigm for folk linguistics. Therefore, we do not take LOTH as facing problems with higher cognition, at least with regard to compositionality. But PP can plausibly play the role of a cognitive-computational paradigm for an alternative conception of language, namely Construction Grammar. If Construction Grammar is a plausible alternative to folk linguistics, then PP is not in a worse position than LOTH. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The artificial grammar learning paradigm is a classic method of investigating the influence of universal constraints on shaping learning biases on language acquisition. While this method has been used extensively by linguists to test theoretical claims in generative grammar, one of the most prevalent frameworks in language acquisition, several studies have questioned whether artificial grammar learning reflects language acquisition enough to allow us to use it to draw inferences about the validity of universal constraints, particularly those arising from phonetic naturalness. The current study tests whether artificial grammar learning shows the effect of one robust phonetic naturalness constraint: the restriction on nasal harmony patterns arising from the sonority hierarchy. Nasal harmony is of particular interest because it is one of the few types of harmony that occurs between consonants and vowels, which is an under-researched topic. The results, contrary to the skeptical concerns, showed that participants (n = 120) could learn an artificial grammar involving a natural pattern, but could not learn one corresponding to an arbitrary/phonetically unmotivated pattern in the same way or to the same degree. This study contributes epistemic support to the large body of work using artificial grammar experiments to test phonological operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this note is to offer a critical review of the contrastive analysis hypothesis within the field of second language acquisition. The notions of interlanguage, universal grammar and mental grammar are discussed. Transfer is redefined as the output of underlying rules in the grammar of a second language. Through Jackendoff’s notion of a mental grammar we reconcile the contribution of structural and generative grammar to the understanding of the phenomenon of transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What Boeckx finds most compelling about generative linguistics is the earliest results pertaining to the Chomsky hierarchy, the necessity to posit forms of nested and crossing dependencies, and the consensus that 'natural languages are both strongly and weakly mildly context-sensitive' (14). His new book is a reference to Chomsky (1975), I Reflections on Language. i We might expect that his next book will explore ' I Paleoanthropological Aspects of the Theory of Syntax i ', although Boeckx never explicitly renounces his earlier minimalist work - but it seems implicit. Boeckx, Cedric, (Conceptual Foundations of Language Science 6). Boeckx's previous book was entitled I Elementary Syntactic Structures i (Boeckx 2014), a reference to Chomsky (1957). [Extracted from the article]

The paper aims to compare musical language with verbal language, creating a new perspective on music and natural language. The three categories of linguistics, phonology, syntax and semantics are analyzed. Bernstein highlights the analogies between the linguistic categories and music, researching the same three components of linguistics in music. The possibility of applying the transformational grammar procedures to the musical text is studied. In the second part of the paper, the authors investigate the method of analysis based on harmony and counterpoint, differentiating several structural levels conceived by the theoretical musician H. Schenker. Schenkerian analyzes are a relatively recent appearance in the field of musical analysis, which proposes as an innovation in the field of musical analysis the structural vision of musical discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a general summary of some of the current issues in the field of Generative Grammar, the study of the human Faculty of Language. We review some key ideas this approach to language has put forward and pursued, focusing on the basic properties of language and its interactions with other systems. We also point at some of the possibilities that a biological approach to language offers to build bridges between Linguistics and other scientific disciplines. Throughout the paper we take into consideration the advantages that incorporating some of these ideas would have in Secondary Education, -not only for the potentially intrinsic value of linguistic knowledge, but also for the impact of this approach on more general skills like observing, describing and comparing data, reasoning, providing arguments and counterarguments, formulating generalizations, analyzing, summarizing or inferring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studying language from its syntactic and semantic aspects do not always reflect a good understanding of this complex phenomenon. Language use plays a very crucial role in reforming Language as a particular human activity that depends on a set of important faculties, not only innate ones as Chomsky noted, since Language is not a system of sentences we say but it is a set of acts we do to understand, reform, shape, represent and interpret our world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of factual incorrectness in machine-generated abstractive summarization has received widespread attention in the past few years. Although large-scale neural models show excellent capability in generating fluent and coherent summaries, they still struggle with factual inconsistency, in which the named entity incorrectness is the most frequent and notable one, especially for the character-based languages, such as Chinese. Since abstractive summaries are mostly generated character by character in Chinese, the problem of hallucinated entities is more severe than that of other word-based languages. In this paper, we propose CC-Gens, a novel approach for Correctness Checking based on a Generative negative sampling strategy. Considering that the problem is due to the uncertain nature of the language generation process, we leverage fine-tuned generative language models, i.e., UniLMv2 and mT5, to generate summaries with incorrect entities, thereby constructing a synthetic binary classification dataset for the factuality discriminative model. We propose three strategies: Entity Sampling, Sequence Sampling, and Cloze Sampling, to generate summaries with incorrect entities. With such strategies, the negative samples are much more similar in nature to the output of the neural summarization model. We then train a BERT-based discriminator to identify factually incorrect machine-generated summaries with entity errors based on these generative negative samples. We further propose a novel PU learning algorithm to improve the performance of our approach by iteratively training the discriminator to select high confident negative samples from the unlabeled model generated summaries to replace the former artificially constructed ones. By generating multiple candidate summaries and selecting the one with the highest factual correctness score among them, our approach can significantly reduce the probability that an output summary contains factual errors. According to a comprehensive evaluation, the CC-Gens we proposed outperforms previous works in identifying faithless summaries as well as providing faithful ones. [Display omitted] • Named entity error ratio in Chinese abstractive summaries is as high as 58.1%. • We propose generative negative sampling strategies for training the discriminator. • We apply PU learning to improve performance by selecting high-confident samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses V3-patterns with a sentence-initial adverbial clause in Standard Dutch (StD) and West-Flemish (WF), which appear to violate the V2 restriction which normally regulates word order in these languages. V3- patterns occur in both languages; they can be interpreted as complying with the V2 constraint provided they are analyzed as the result of merging a regular root clause with V2 order with an extra-sentential adverbial clause. The paper shows that the distribution of V3-patterns is slightly wider in WF than in StD: StD requires that the root clause which combines with the extra-sentential constituent either exhibits subject-verb inversion (XP-V-S) or, in the case of subject initial V2 clauses, that the subject has a distinguished informationstructural status such as contrastive focus/topic; WF allows V3-structures more freely, regardless of whether they display subject-verb inversion and regardless of the informational-structural status of the subject. The analysis takes as its point of departure the earlier claim that V2-languages can be symmetric in the sense that the finite verb always leaves the TP domain and occupies the highest head position in the root clause, the complementizer position C in the traditional generative analysis, or asymmetric in the sense that the position of the finite verb varies in that it occupies the C-position when the root clause exhibits subject-verb inversion or a lower TP internal tense position (T) in root clauses without inversion. The hypothesis is that V3-patterns with a sentenceinitial adverbial clause are only possible if the initial adverbial clause attains a local relation with the finite verb, and that this requires the finite verb to be in the (higher) C-position. By assuming that StD is an asymmetric V2-language while WF is a symmetric V2-language the variation with respect to the distribution of V3-patterns in these languages can be captured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that there is no narrow syntax, and that the language faculty merely consists of the semantic and phonological components, and linking between these and other systems. It follows as a logical consequence from the latest works of Chomsky (2007 et seq.) and Hauser et al. (2002) who argue that narrow syntax consists of as few features as possible, ideally only recursive embedding and mapping to the interfaces, and Nordström (2014) who shows that the language faculty cannot involve recursive embedding if one wants it to be able to handle discrete infinity, but must merely be a discrete combinatorial system. As such, it shares features with many other mental processes, such as tool making, and, this paper argues, should not be seen as a separate module. The discrete combinatorial processes, as argued here, take place in the semantic and phonological components, which are linked by an axonal pathway. The paper further shows that other potential features of narrow syntax, namely word order, agreement and case (Pinker and Jackendoff 2005; Chomsky 2000 et seq.) can also perfectly well be located within the semantic and phonological components, dispensing with so-called uninterpretable features and leading to the ultimate conclusion that there is no narrow syntax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a methodology for the automatic extraction of specialized Arabic, English and French verbs of the field of computing. Since nominal terms are predominant in terminology, our interest is to explore to what extent verbs can also be part of a terminological analysis. Hence, our objective is to verify how an existing extraction tool will perform when it comes to specialized verbs in a given specialized domain. Furthermore, we want to investigate any particularities that a language can represent regarding verbal terms from the automatic extraction perspective. Our choice to operate on three different languages reflects our desire to see whether the chosen tool can perform better on one language compared to the others. Moreover, given that Arabic is a morphologically rich and complex language, we consider investigating the results yielded by the extraction tool. The extractor used for our experiment is TermoStat (Drouin 2003). So far, our results show that the extraction of verbs of computing represents certain differences in terms of quality and particularities of these units in this specialized domain between the languages under question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to convey our thoughts using an infinite number of linguistic expressions is one of the hallmarks of human language. Understanding the nature of the psychological mechanisms and representations that give rise to this unique productivity is a fundamental goal for the cognitive sciences. A long-standing hypothesis is that single words and rules form the basic building blocks of linguistic productivity, with multiword sequences being treated as units only in peripheral cases such as idioms. The new millennium, however, has seen a shift toward construing multiword linguistic units not as linguistic rarities, but as important building blocks for language acquisition and processing. This shift-which originated within theoretical approaches that emphasize language learning and use-has far-reaching implications for theories of language representation, processing, and acquisition. Incorporating multiword units as integral building blocks blurs the distinction between grammar and lexicon; calls for models of production and comprehension that can accommodate and give rise to the effect of multiword information on processing; and highlights the importance of such units to learning. In this special topic, we bring together cutting-edge work on multiword sequences in theoretical linguistics, first-language acquisition, psycholinguistics, computational modeling, and second-language learning to present a comprehensive overview of the prominence and importance of such units in language, their possible role in explaining differences between first- and second-language learning, and the challenges the combined findings pose for theories of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the outcome of a Contrastive Analysis undertaken in order to account for some general principles governing the expression of time location in two apparently non cognate languages: English (Nigeria's official language) and ỤKWụANị, one of the indigenous languages of Nigeria. It focuses on the verb phrase component with temporal significance in signaling temporal sequences: temporal ordering previous, (past) simultaneous, (present) and subsequent (future) to given time reference. The linguistic framework adopted for analysis is Government and Binding (GB) Revised version of Transformational Generative Grammar which is premised on systems of principles of Universal Grammar. It explicates the possibilities and limits of rule interaction and functions in grammars. English syntactic strings and their ỤKWụANị translation equivalent provide the data for analysis. Aspects of grammatical convergence revealed in both languages show English Past signaled by {D1} and {li} in ỤKWụANị). Simultaneous and subsequent time marking in English is morphologically realized in relation to subject-verb concord whereas a T - marker "ne" is the simultaneity signal in ỤKWụANị. Subsequent time (Future) in English is M(AUX) "will"+ V and in Ukwuan M[VP] +V. It also shows that whereas in English, this is morphologically signaled, ỤKWụANị adds phonologically signal to the grammatical marker. Present and past tense structures in both languages are quite similar; resulting in significant congruent structures. Divergent as future time grammar may seem, our analysis also reveal quite similar patterns. There are indeed then meeting points for the two grammars in spite of geographical and cultural non contiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many questions one can ask about human language: its distinctive properties, neural representation, characteristic uses including use in communicative contexts, variation, growth in the individual, and origin. Every such inquiry is guided by some concept of what ‘language’ is. Sharpening the core question – what is language? – and paying close attention to the basic property of the language faculty and its biological foundations makes it clear how linguistics is firmly positioned within the cognitive sciences. Here we will show how recent developments in generative grammar, taking language as a computational cognitive mechanism seriously, allow us to address issues left unexplained in the increasingly popular surface-oriented approaches to language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Larson (1989) noted that rightward movement of a DP past a clausal adjunct can necessitate a parasitic gap inside that clausal adjunct. This paper argues that rightward DP-movement beyond certain adjunct clauses is movement beyond typical Heavy-NP Shift that is licensed by the need to bind the parasitic gap. I show that this correctly predicts a number of observations concerning the exceptional nature of the rightward movement involved. In particular, parasitic gaps are able to license rightward movement that is potentially unbounded and successive-cyclic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This response to Behme and Evans (2015) points out that understanding and correct representation of perspectives to be criticised is crucial for any kind of engagement. It then sequentially examines the points raised and tries to distinguish the content of the argument from its surrounding rhetoric. It concludes that there is a paucity of the former and an abundance of the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review article examines some of the claims recently made in a book and article by Vyvyan Evans, which argue that the generative approach to syntax is flawed. It exposes a number of misrepresentations, misunderstandings and mistakes in these works and argues that the general case has not been made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the framework of Generative Grammar, a standard (hypo)thesis has been that a (broad) wh-parameter may distinguish between two types of languages: those that front wh-elements (e.g., English) and those that realize them in situ (e.g., Chinese). Wh-fronting languages may also attest in situ arrangements, and a tacit (hypo)thesis, tied to the one above, is that in situ configurations translate to echo questions, while fronting configurations are genuine (information-seeking) questions. Neat as this taxonomy might look like, more recently it has been shown that, in Modem Greek, which is a typically wh-fronting language, each wh-configuration may map to either meaning. On the assumption that syntax mediates between form and meaning, mapping the former to the latter, the question that the Modern Greek evidence raises is to what extent syntax regulates the form-meaning associations under consideration. In other words, the question is "how much" of the relevant semantics is registered in the corresponding syntactic structures. Capitalizing on already documented evidence from distribution, interpretation, and intonation, the present paper argues that syntax encodes certain aspects of the relevant semantics, and pans out a formal system that attributes other aspects of this semantics to a direct interaction between PF and LF, thereby recognizing the existence of this interface area. The theoretical import(ance) of this analysis (part of which is prefigured elsewhere) is that it revisits the standard organization of the Grammar, as viewed from a Minimalist perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] I discuss the question whether particular phonological units are innate or acquired. [•] I show that both markedness and faithfulness constraints can be acquired. [•] I integrate generative and usage-based approaches to language. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Although variation and heterogeneity are generally recognized as a characteristic of linguistic usage, they are hardly conceived as a fundamental dimension of grammar. Introducing a distinction between an exemplum linguistics and a datum linguistics, we show that the history of the language sciences, both conceptually and descriptively, is organized around opposing conceptions of what a linguistic fact is. While Generative Grammar and its practitioners are clearly examples of the first, corpus linguistics illustrates the second conception. The upsurge of datum linguistics and of usage based models since the beginning of the 21st century allows for a fundamental reassessment of the functional role of variation in language. We show that while the biolinguistic program rests on the negation of the sociocultural framing of the language faculty and denies any functional impact of communicational competence in shaping language and grammars, constructional approaches and usage-based linguistics make room for a Darwinian sociocultural conception. In such a conception, communication is a leading force in the emergence and stabilization of human linguistic competence, both diachronically and synchronically. In this approach, variation and heterogeneity are to be seen as core factors in shaping language. Thus, as argued some 50years ago by Weinreich, variation and heterogeneity are to be regarded as structurally functional, and as fundamental dimensions of language. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Built on the basis of the methods developed for Princeton WordNet and EuroWordNet, Arabic WordNet (AWN) has been an interesting project which combines WordNet structure compliance with Arabic particularities. In this paper, some AWN shortcomings related to coverage and usability are addressed. The use of AWN in question/answering (Q/A) helped us to deeply evaluate the resource from an experience-based perspective. Accordingly, an enrichment of AWN was built by semi-automatically extending its content. Indeed, existing approaches and/or resources developed for other languages were adapted and used for AWN. The experiments conducted in Arabic Q/A have shown an improvement of both AWN coverage as well as usability. Concerning coverage, a great amount of named entities extracted from YAGO were connected with corresponding AWN synsets. Also, a significant number of new verbs and nouns (including Broken Plural forms) were added. In terms of usability, thanks to the use of AWN, the performance for the AWN-based Q/A application registered an overall improvement with respect to the following three measures: accuracy (+9.27 % improvement), mean reciprocal rank (+3.6 improvement) and number of answered questions (+12.79 % improvement). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: With the crystallization of the “generative enterprise” half a century ago, two concepts became salient: the initial state and final states of the language faculty, respectively, UG (the genetic component) and I-languages. Since then inquiry has gained far greater scope and depth. It has also led to sharpening of fundamental principles of language. At first, descriptive adequacy appeared to require rich and complex assumptions about UG. A primary goal has always been to overcome this deficiency. Core properties of concern have included compositionality, order, projection (labeling), and displacement. Early work assigned the first three to phrase structure rules and the last to the transformational component. Simplification of computational procedures suggests that compositionality and displacement (along with the “copy theory”) fall together while order may be a reflex of sensorimotor externalization, conclusions that have far-reaching consequences. As for labeling, minimal computation restricts options to the few that have considerable empirical support. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

. 'GSGM' builds no syntactic structures; rather, semantics and morphosyntax are both generative and run in parallel, and so have no need of mediating syntactic structure. In this environment, positing different modes of embedding for NPs and clauses, as in Williams 2003, affords new minimal accounts of movement, scope, agreement, and the bounds on them. Syntax/morphosyntax is instantiated as a single parameterized function ('Combine'). Combine derives both mirroring and nonmirroring structure, as any theory must, but in distinctive 'size-relative' patterns determined by its parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Chomskyan generative grammar has long been committed to the ‘double-interface’ assumption that the faculty of language (FL) serves two interfaces, PF and LF, and correlatively that expressions have phonological and semantic properties. The paper argues this gives rise to (a) a grounding problem for syntax – i.e. for the interpretable content of syntax – and (b) a problem for the assumption that FL is a generative computation. It is argued these problems are resolved if we think of syntax as grounded exclusively in semantic/conceptual properties. Since this implies that FL is phonology-free, it is argued that FL should not be distinguished from a generative computation describable as ‘the language of thought’ (LOT). The paper explores to what extent this (FL=LOT) thesis is consistent with Chomsky''s thinking. Chomsky''s recent work can be seen as pointing in that direction but it is not consistent with the double-interface assumption, which he continues to regard as conceptually necessary. In the light of discussion of the issues, the paper concludes with a speculation on the role of phonology in human cognition and its evolution. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper aims to propose a hierarchical, generative account of diatonic harmonic progressions and suggest a set of phrase-structure grammar rules. It argues that the structure of harmonic progressions exceeds the simplicity of the Markovian transition tables and proposes a set of rules to account for harmonic progressions with respect to key structure, functional and scale degree features as well as modulations. Harmonic structure is argued to be at least one subsystem in which Western tonal music exhibits recursion and hierarchical organization that may provide a link to overarching linguistic generative grammar on a structural and potentially cognitive level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I examine ditransitive verbs that can describe caused possession (e.g. give, throw, send) by looking at their lexical aspectual properties, a methodology that has proved fruitful for the exploration of (in)transitive verbs. I show that as a whole these ditransitives share a number of aspectual properties in common with (in)transitive verbs of change of state and motion, suggesting a single shared underlying analysis, which I outline in terms of the scalar analysis of change of Beavers (forthcoming b). However, a difficulty of such an analysis is that for many ditransitives, the putative result state (caused possession) is cancellable, which complicates how factors such as telicity are calculated on most models of aspect. To account for this, I show that all ditransitives nonetheless entail at least some non-cancellable result, though there is considerable micro-variation in what that result is. The result is an aspectually based classification of ditransitives quite similar to previously proposed classes of (in)transitives. I also show that the analysis I develop may shed some light on why certain classes of ditransitives only rarely participate in the dative alternation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author comments on the paper "Abstractions and Idealisations: The Construction of Modern Linguistics," by Martin Stokhof and Michiel van Lambalgen. It discusses the way modern linguistics constructs its proper objects, the scientific criteria for characterizing its success or failure and the role of naturalism. He argues that a broader view of modern linguistics calls for a reconsideration of the role of abstraction and idealization. Some aspects deemed essential for constituting the generativist approach including innateness hypothesis, explicit inaccessible rule view and distinction between competence and performance are proposed. He opposes the suggestion that physics make exclusive use of abstraction and that abstraction is the only useful research tool within a naturalist setting.

Studies testing the knowledge of syntactic properties have resulted in two potentially contrasting proposals in relation to third language acquisition (TLA); the Cumulative Enhancement Model (Flynn et al., 2004), which proposes that previously learned languages will positively affect the acquisition of a third language (L3); and the ‘second language (L2) status factor’ hypothesis (Bardel and Falk, 2007), which proposes that the primacy of the L2 can block the potential positive effects that may be transferable from the first language (L1). This article attempts to extend these hypotheses to the domain of morphosyntax, in relation to the TLA of the properties of grammatical number and gender concord marking on German attributive adjectives; these properties not present in the L1 of Japanese, or the L2 of English. Two further factors are of interest in the current study; first, the performance of the learners according to their L3 and their L2 proficiency levels, a variable not discussed in the above-mentioned studies; and, second, the role that the type of task has on the performance of these learners. Three groups of Japanese native speakers (matched for proficiency within each German group), but with differing English proficiencies, completed a carefully balanced gap-filling task, together with two oral elicitation tasks in the form of games; both of these elicited tokens of adjectival inflection. Initial results offer partial support for weaker versions of the two hypotheses mentioned above. However, neither of the L3 models tested can fully account for the results obtained, which are more consistent with a feature-based account of the organization of grammar in the domain of morphosyntax, such as that of Distributed Morphology (DM) (Halle and Marantz, 1993). DM is a model for language acquisition which — coupled with a view that the Subset Principle proposed by this account is not observed by non-primary language learners — has recently been proposed to explain the optionality observed in L2 learners’ production (Hawkins et al., 2006). The data presented here suggest that it could be extended to L3 learners’ production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the paper "Parameters in Minimalist Theory: The Case of Scandinavian," by Anders Holmberg. The authors negate the notion that parameters in minimalist theory (PMT) make the case for a deep parameter. They cite agreement differences as the cause of a variation between Insular Scandinavian (ISc) and Mainland Scandinavian (MSc) languages in terms of unvalued number (uNr) and unvalued person number (uPn). They note the discussion of the logical problem of language acquisition in Holmberg's paper. They stress the significance of PMT to the debate on the nature of parameters.

It is well known that Australian languages make heavy use of nominal juxtaposition in a wide variety of functions, but there is little discussion in the theoretical literature of how such juxtapositions should be analysed. We discuss a range of data from Australian languages illustrating how multiple nominals share a single grammatical function within the clause. We argue that such constructions should be treated syntactically as set-valued grammatical functions in Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). Sets as values for functions are well-established in LFG and are used in the representation of adjuncts, and also in the representation of coordination. In many Australian languages, coordination is expressed asyndetically, that is, by nominal juxtaposition with no overt coordinator at all. We argue that the syntactic similarity of all juxtaposed constructions (ranging from coordination through a number of more appositional relations) motivates an analysis in which they are treated similarly in the syntax, but suitably distinguished in the semantics. We show how this can be achieved within LFG, providing a unified treatment of the syntax of juxtaposition in Australian languages and showing how the interface to the semantics can be quite straightforwardly defined in the modular LFG approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Denison distinguishes three main NP constructions with type nouns such as sort/kind/type of in Present-day English, namely the head, postdeterminer and qualifier constructions. The latter two developed from the binominal construction in which lexically full sort/kind/type is the head followed by a second noun designating a superordinate class. In the chronology he posits the postdeterminer construction as an early reanalysis of the binominal construction (c.1390 for all kind of and c.1550 for kind and sort of), whereas the qualifying constructions developed later from it (c.1580 for kind of and c.1710 for sort of), via the mediation of the postdeterminer construction. However, in recent synchronic corpus studies we have distinguished two additional NP constructions with type nouns, namely quantifier and descriptive modifier, on the basis of syntactic, semantic and collocational features. In the present article we consider the diachronic import of these newly distinguished constructions and argue that they are key pivots in the developmental paths that have led from the head construction to constructions in which the type noun is not the head. By thus refining Denison's proposed chronology, we argue that new constructions emerge as the result of complex interlocking paths in which the quantifier and descriptive modifier constructions pre-dated, and helped facilitate and entrench, the postdeterminer and qualifying constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Noam Chomsky’s most recent research paradigm, the Minimalist Program (MP), overtly proclaims continuity with earlier phases of transformational-generative linguistics. Despite its (limited) use of terminology from these earlier phases and its continued focus on many of the same issues with which Chomsky and his followers have always been concerned, at a conceptual level MP represents a dramatic break with earlier generative theories. MP adopts many of the assumptions and goals of the linguistic research projects that emerged before, alongside, and contrary to Chomsky’s own, the ones which have come in the linguistic literature to be called functionalism. While this shift has had significant consequences in linguistics, in part driving convergences between functionalist and formalist approaches, its consequences have yet to be fully realized in fields like philosophy and cognitive science that have based many foundational assumptions on just those aspects of generativism now challenged by Chomsky’s own theory. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study explores the foundation of lexical/semantic phoneme binding effects in verbal short-term memory (STM). The immediate serial recall of pure lists of words and nonwords was compared with the recall of mixed lists that had either a predictable, alternating structure (e.g., wnwnwn) or an unpredictable structure (i.e., the serial positions of the words/nonwords could not be known in advance). The study provides evidence for two separate mechanisms by which long-term linguistic knowledge contributes to STM. First, there was evidence for automatic lexical/semantic binding effects that were independent of knowledge of lexical status. The nonwords in both types of mixed list damaged word recall and encouraged the phonological elements of words to migrate. In both alternating and unpredictable mixed lists, the phonemes of words were more likely than the phonemes of nonwords to be recalled together as a coherent item, suggesting that lexical/semantic knowledge encourages the phonological elements of words to emerge together in immediate serial recall, even when lexical status is unknown. Secondly, there was evidence for “strategic redintegration”, which was dependent on prior knowledge of the lexical status of the items in mixed lists. When participants recalled items that they knew to be words in advance, they were able to use this knowledge to constrain their responses so that they were more likely to be lexically appropriate. These findings motivate modifications to current theories of the interaction between linguistic knowledge and verbal short-term memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Semantic accounts of verb pattern alternations often rely on observations about ‘verb disposition’: the preference of verbs with particular lexical semantic characteristics for one of two competing constructions is taken as a clue to the semantic differences between the two constructions. For instance, it has been observed with regard to the English dative alternation that verbs of refusal such as deny and refuse are perfectly acceptable in the ditransitive construction but much less so in the so-called prepositional dative construction with to (compare They refused the convict a last cigarette with ? They refused a last cigarette to the convict); and this contrast has been presented as evidence for the hypothesis that the prepositional dative highlights the actual movement of the theme toward the receiver (e.g. [Goldberg, A.E., 1992. The inherent semantics of argument structure: the case of the English ditransitive. Cognitive Linguistics 3, 37–74]). This paper discusses the merit of verb disposition as evidence for semantic hypotheses about alternating constructions and presents the results of a corpus-based study of verb disposition in the Dutch dative alternation. On the basis of [Gries, S., Stefanowitsch, A., 2004. Extending Collostructional Analysis: a corpus-based perspective on alternations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9, 97–129] method of ‘distinctive collexeme analysis’, the alternating verbs with a statistically significant preference for the Dutch ditransitive are separated from those with a statistically significant preference for the prepositional dative in a corpus of contemporary Dutch newspaper language. The results of this test provide the basis for a number of empirically valid generalizations about the semantic parameters driving the dative alternation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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]

Wh-dependencies are known to be formed rapidly in real-time comprehension. The parser posits the location of gap sites in advance of the bottom-up evidence for missing constituents, and must therefore have a means of deciding when and where to project dependencies. Previous studies have observed that the parser avoids building ungrammatical wh-dependencies, for example, by restricting the search for gap sites from island domains. This paper tests the stronger claim that constraints are not merely respected, but that grammatical knowledge actively prompts the construction of some representations in advance of the input. Three self-paced reading experiments examined patterns of wh-dependency formation in multiple-dependency constructions: obligatory across-the-board (ATB) extraction from coordinated verb phrases, and from optional parasitic gaps in post-verbal adjunct clauses. The key finding is that comprehenders immediately enforce the requirement for extraction from coordinates, and hence actively search for multiple gap sites within a coordinate VP; but they do not search for post-verbal parasitic gaps. This difference cannot be attributed to relative differences in acceptability, as comprehenders rated both of these multiple-gap constructions equally highly, nor can it be explained by general parsing incentives to develop maximal incremental interpretations of partial strings. More plausibly, the difference reflects the deployment of detailed grammatical knowledge in a parser that is motivated to satisfy structural licensing requirements in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses varieties of German with respect to noun pluralisation, with a focus on the status of final plural schwa as in Fisch-e ‘fish, pl.’. By analysing the much-discussed plural morphology of Standard German by means of both prosodic as well as morphological principles, it is argued that final schwa in plural nouns of Standard German is not, as generally assumed, an inflectional suffix. As an alternative, an optimality-theoretic constraint-based analysis of final schwa in plurals leads to the proposal that this segment in noun plurals of Standard German arises as an inserted vowel, which is in turn the result of a specific constraint interaction. In the second part of this paper, related noun plurals are studied in a sample of diverse non-standard dialects of German. Morphological and prosodic constraints, through the well-known mechanism of differences in constraint-ranking in Optimality Theory, derive the (non-)appearance of word-final plural schwas in these dialects which are minimally different from Standard German and from each other. The constraints will include those which refer to properties of whole paradigms of word forms, not just to phonological properties of individual words. As an overall descriptive result, a micro-typology of plural formation in varieties of German emerges, and the prosodic phonology of German is demonstrated to play a crucial role in the formation of word forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most familiar syntactic frameworks recognize the category 'phrase', and are built around phrase structure relationships. However, the Word Grammar dependency model does not acknowledge the category 'phrase' as a primitive in the grammar; instead, all relationships are word-based, with phrases having no syntactic status. Here, I investigate the theoretical validity of the notion 'phrase' by examining the phenomenon in Welsh known as syntactic soft mutation, contrasting a phrase-based account with a dependency account. I conclude that an empirically adequate analysis of syntactic soft mutation must make reference to phrases as a category, thus ruling out the dependency account. A further theoretical question concerns the role played in the grammar by syntactically present but phonetically unrealized elements, including empty categories such as wh-traces and unrealized material in ellipsis. Syntactic soft mutation proves an interesting testing ground in these contexts, but the data again fail to support the dependency account. The conclusion is that a phrase-based account of the mutation is better motivated and empirically more accurate than the alternative dependency account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agreement lies at the heart of sentence structure in that it usually codifies the formal link between the subject and the predicate. In a way, although not strictly necessary, agreement tends to be what signals that a clause has been created. However, linguists and psycholinguists disagree as to whether this core process is essentially a semantic or a syntactic phenomenon, and there is evidence that suggests that it may be both things at the same time. suggests that in morphologically impoverished languages like English, low frequency of agreement operations makes for a weak morphosyntactic component that is unable to keep semantic interference at bay, at least in production (where meaning comes first). In his completion study, he manages to show that the strong morphosyntactic defences of German do seem to encapsulate number agreement from non-formal forces. In this paper, I examine the psycholinguistic literature on the processing of agreement in English and Spanish in search of fine-grained evidence for encapsulation in all the relevant domains (NP, clausal, supra-clausal). The different grounding of the features of gender and number is also analysed and evidence for their differentiality in the first cycles of processing is ruled out. In general, Berg's hypothesis is confirmed by existing processing measures (Spanish patterns like German due to its rich morphology), but the fine picture of agreement operations in English and Spanish is also sensitive to the different domains tested and to whether production or comprehension is taken into account. Finally, it is argued that gender classes and the agreement systems based on them constitute a major generative device when constructing the clause. This is because gender is less semantically grounded than number and therefore easier to recruit for phrasal packaging, as this merely requires the co-variance of form. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In languages like English, bare nominals are only used in special constructions, and they come with special meaning effects. This paper applies bidirectional Optimality Theory to explain why unmarked (articleless) forms have unmarked (stereotypical) meanings. The syntactic unmarkedness of bare nominals is embedded in a constraint-based typology of number, article use and referentiality. The semantic unmarkedness of the stereotypical interpretation falls out of the strongest meaning hypothesis. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Term-based summarization assumes that it is possible to determine the importance of a sentence on the basis of the words it contains. To achieve this, words are weighted using term-weighting measures which in turn are used to weight the sentences. This article presents a comparative evaluation of summaries produced using different term-weighting measures and different combinations of parameters which are used to calculate these measures. Comparative evaluation of summaries produced reveals that in many cases simple methods such as term frequency can produce informative summaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the acquisition of the focus particle auch 'also' by German-learning children. We report data from spontaneous and elicited production of utterances with the focus particle auch by 1- to 4-year-olds complementing earlier findings of a delayed production of the unaccented auch compared to the accented one. But in contrast to previous studies showing that children have problems interpreting sentences with accented and unaccented auch, we found indications for adult-like comprehension in an eye-tracking experiment by children from 3 years on. These results reflect early availability of adult-like linguistic competence with respect to both auch-variants which does not always lead to adult-like performance. This variation in children's performance across tasks is considered to be due to additional modality and task specific constraints. Development in this area thus reflects not a change in underlying knowledge, but rather a change in the constraints on its behavioral manifestation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A selective review is presented of empirical evidence from different languages concerning phonological development and reading development in children. It is demonstrated that the development of reading depends on phonological awareness in all languages so far studied. However, because languages vary in syllable structure and in the consistency with which phonology is represented by the orthography, there are developmental differences in the grain size of lexical representations and in the reading strategies that develop across languages. It is argued that these cross-language data can be explained by a psycholinguistic grain size theory of reading and its development, as proposed by Ziegler and Goswami. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on opaque Latin vowel deletion and its relevance to the actual theoretical debate of dealing with opacity in OT. Besides derivational OT, three parallel OT approaches to deal with opacity in OT are discussed: Sympathy Theory (McCarthy 1999 and 2003), Comparative Markedness (McCarthy 2002) and OT with Candidate Chains (McCarthy 2007). It is argued that Sympathy Theory, for principled reasons, is unable to deal with opaque Latin vowel deletion. The main reason is that the opacity in this case crucially depends on the prosody and not on faithfulness. Comparative Markedness can account for opaque syncope by splitting up the constraints -σ and - in new (NParse-σ and NFT-BIN) and old (OPARSE-σ and OFT-BIN) constraints. However, the ranking necessary to deal with the cases of opaque deletion leads to incorrect outputs in cases of transparent deletion. Finally, OT with Candidate Chains will be shown to allow for a more restrictive and more principled account of opaque syncope than a serial, level OT approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the systematic description of the most productive particle, which has been used in English phrasal verb construction "up" and aims to possibly highlight all possible ambiguity. Accordingly, the particle "up" appears to be used most of the time, as an intensifier or as an aspect marker, which is said to have changed the activity into one of accomplishment and has the chance to be deleted in almost 40% of the cases being scrutinized. It is being concluded that the subcategorization refinements would help mitigate ambiguity that involves English phrasal verbs and that some uncertainty still remains, when the ambiguity involves subject commutation.

Using corpus data derived from recordings of spontaneous conversations, the article examines the acquisition and use of various types of extended lexical units involving the path morpheme out. Data from children acquiring British English is compared with material from the COLT corpus of teenage English and with adult conversational data from the British National Corpus and some of the changes in usage that occur during development are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to develop a representation of control that does not require a PRO-subject. I first analyse obligatory control using a de-compositional analysis of θ-roles, according to which θ-roles are divided into two selectional requirements. The resulting theory makes the same predictions as one based on PRO, yet avoids dependence on this ill-defined empty category. I then concentrate on Icelandic, tackling agreement phenomena in infinitival clauses. Again no PRO is necessary to cater for the data, which receive a uniform account using the mechanism outlined in the first half of the paper. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]