Is Syntax Semantically Constrained? Evidence From a Grammaticality Judgment Study of Indonesian

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...

The Retreat from Locative Overgeneralisation Errors: A Novel Verb Grammaticality Judgment Study

Whilst some locative verbs alternate between the ground- and figure-locative constructions (e.g. Lisa sprayed the flowers with water/Lisa sprayed water onto the flowers), others are restricted to one construction or the other (e.g. *Lisa filled water into the cup/*Lisa poured the cup with water). The present study investigated two proposals for how learners (aged 5-6, 9-10 and adults) acquire t...

The Time Course of Grammaticality Judgment

-1INTRODUCTION Halfway through the twentieth century, linguistics underwent a major methodological shift, from distributional analysis of native-speaker speech (BloomÞeld, 1961), to the analysis of native-speaker intuitions about legal sentence types (Chomsky, 1957; for reviews, see Newmeyer, 1980; Sells, Shieber & Wasow, 1991). In most cases, the native speakers who furnish these intuitions ha...

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...

Continuous Acceptability, Categorical Grammaticality, and Experimental Syntax