German particle verbs: Compositionality at the syntax-semantics interface

The Syntax/Semantics Interface: Compositionality Issues

Deconstructing the German Verb Particle Nach at the Syntax - Semantics Interface

German particle verbs have been a source of confusion and disagreement in both syntax and semantics. This is shown by the considerable variety of approaches to particle verb constructions (see Dehé et al. 2002 for an overview). The major challenges are the argument structure of particle verbs and the role that particles play in determining them, especially in those cases where the argument stru...

The Syntax - Semantics Interface of Czech Verbs in the Valency

In this paper, alternation based model of the valency lexicon of Czech verbs, VALLEX, is described. Two types of alternations (changes in valency frames of verbs) are distinguished on the basis of used linguistic means: (i) grammaticalized alternations and (ii) lexicalized alternations. Both grammaticalized and lexicalized alternations are either conversive, or non-conversive. While grammatical...

Exclamative Clauses: At the Syntax–Semantics Interface

One central issue in the theory of clause types is whether force is represented in the syntax. Based on data from English, Italian, and Paduan, we examine this question focusing on a less well-studied clause type, exclamatives. We argue that there is no particular element in syntax responsible for introducing force. Rather, there are two fundamental syntactic components which identify a clause ...

Bayesian Learning at the Syntax-Semantics Interface

Given a small number of examples of sceneutterance pairs of a novel verb, language learners can learn its syntactic and semantic features. Syntactic and semantic bootstrapping hypotheses both rely on cross-situational observation to hone in on the ambiguity present in a single observation. In this paper, we cast the distributional evidence from scenes and syntax in a unified Bayesian probablist...