Is Passive Syntax Semantically Constrained? Evidence From Adult Grammaticality Judgment and Comprehension Studies

Is Passive Syntax Semantically Constrained? Evidence From Adult Grammaticality Judgment and Comprehension Studies

To explain the phenomenon that certain English verbs resist passivization (e.g., *£5 was cost by the book), Pinker (1989) proposed a semantic constraint on the passive in the adult grammar: The greater the extent to which a verb denotes an action where a patient is affected or acted upon, the greater the extent to which it is compatible with the passive. However, a number of comprehension and p...

Continuous Acceptability, Categorical Grammaticality, and Experimental Syntax

Syntax encodes information structure: Evidence from on-line reading comprehension

0749-596X/$ see front matter 2011 Elsevier Inc doi:10.1016/j.jml.2011.08.006 ⇑ Corresponding author. Address: University of Ro Box 270268, Rochester, NY 14627-0268, USA. Fax: + E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Brow Although sentences are thought to be generally easier to process when given information precedes new information, closer examination reveals that these preferences only manife...

The cerebellum and English grammatical morphology: evidence from production, comprehension, and grammaticality judgments.

Three neuropsychological experiments on a group of 16 cerebellar patients and 16 age- and education-matched controls investigated the effects of damage to the cerebellum on English grammatical morphology across production, comprehension, and grammaticality judgment tasks. In Experiment 1, participants described a series of pictures previously used in studies of cortical aphasic patients. The ce...

Semantically Constrained Condensed Detachment Is Incomplete Semantically Constrained Condensed Detachment Is Incomplete

In reporting on the theorem prover SCOTT (Slaney, SCOTT: A Semantically Guided Theorem Prover, Proc. IJCAI, 1993) we suggested semantic constraint as as an appropriate mechanism for guiding proof searches in propositional systems where the rule of inference is condensed detachment|a generalisation of Modus Ponens. Such constrained condensed detachment is closely analogous to semantic resolution...