This paper discusses the difficulties in Chinese deep parsing, by comparing the accuracy of a Chinese HPSG parser to the accuracy of an English HPSG parser and the commonly used Chinese syntactic parsers. Analysis reveals that deep parsing for Chinese is more challenging than for English, due to the shortage of syntactic constraints of Chinese verbs, the widespread pro-drop, and the large distr...

For several languages, a preference for subject relative clauses over object relative clauses has been reported. However, Mak, Vonk, and Schriefers (2002) showed that there is no such preference for relative clauses with an animate subject and an inanimate object. A Dutch object relative clause as . . .de rots, die de wandelaars beklommen hebben. . . (‘the rock, that the hikers climbed’) did no...

A B S T R A C T This study investigates the production of Quechua relative clauses by Peruvian adults and children, aged 2;8–4;7. Quechua relative clauses may be internally-headed, externally-headed or headless. Previous studies (e.g., O'Grady, 2003), suggested two outcomes: children will have less difficulty producing subject-gap relative clauses than other types; and, compared with adults, ch...

Relative clauses have been implicated alternately as a strength and a weakness in the language of people with Williams Syndrome (WS). To clarify the facts, an elicited production test was administered to 10 people with WS (age 10 16 years), 10 typically developing children (age 4 7 years), and 12 typically developing adults. Nearly every WS participant successfully produced both subject gap (SG...

This study attempted to investigate the impact of teacher’s code-switching on the acquisition of a problematic grammatical structure, namely, object relative clauses, by intermediate EFL learners. Moreover, a secondary objective of the study was to determine the EFL learners’ attitudes and opinions regarding the effectiveness of teacher’s code-switching in their learning of a specific aspect of...