Creating Surprise in Complex Predication

Creating Surprise in Complex Predication

In many languages, the verbs take and go may combine with another predicate to yield an inceptive reading, where the onset of the event denoted by the main predicate is in some sense focalized. Some of these cases have a touch of surprise, unexpectedness, or suddenness to them. Using data mainly from Swedish, this paper seeks to identify the components that are responsible for this surprise rea...

Identifying Urdu Complex Predication via Bigram Extraction

A problem that crops up repeatedly in shallow and deep syntactic parsing approaches to South Asian languages like Urdu/Hindi is the proper treatment of complex predications. Problems for the NLP of complex predications are posed by their productiveness and the ill understood nature of the range of their combinatorial possibilities. This paper presents an investigation into whether fine-grained ...

Predication 1 Predication

Predication

Plural Predication

My thesis consists of three self-contained but interconnected papers. In the first one, 'Word and Objects', I assume that it is possible to quantify over absolutely everything, and show that certain English sentences containing collective predicates resist paraphrase in first-order languages and even in first-order languages enriched with plural quantifiers. To capture such sentences I develop ...