A common view of finiteness, particularly prevalent in the transformational grammar traditions, associates it with the marking of tense/aspect/mood and subject agreement on verbs. However, since nominal predicates as well as verbal predicates may be temporally located (e.g. ex-soldier, former friend, future President), there is no reason in principle why nominal predicates might not bear TAM ma...

in recent decades, “figurative language” has gained the interest of a large number of russian linguists as a source of lexical enrichment. persian and russian manifest, are more or less, a different image of a movement. nevertheless, these verbs share a number of linguistic features, although they belong to two diverse languages. due to the high frequency in the function of movement verbs in th...

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, I show that although Mandarin is an articleless language, its nominal expressions involve structures larger than a Noun Phrase (NP). I argue that two distinct projections, Demonstrative Phrase (DemP) and Unit Phrase (UnitP), should be identified in the structure above NP. Second, based on the proposal, I show that various ambiguous expressions, in f...

This paper investigates novel evidence from Russian Verb-Stranding Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VVPE), and argues for its use as a probe into the syntactic structure of morphophonologically inseparable but morphosyntactically complex verbs. The first step is to distinguish internal argument drop from VVPE, because they appear identical on the surface. I present novel evidence that Russian internal arg...

A novel analysis of aspectual verbs is proposed according to which aspectual verbs are heads of functional projections rather than main verbs taking clausal complements. As a case study, four Japanese aspectual verbs are analyzed: those that express inception (hajime‘begin’), continuation (tsuzuke‘continue’), and termination (oe‘finish’, and owar‘end’). Employing data from previous studies, Jap...

This paper describes an ongoing collaborative project, between Japanese and U.S. universities, that aims to build, analyze and use comparable learner corpora in an attempt to promote discourse-level proficiency in foreign language learning contexts. The focus is placed on discourse coherence created by reference to nominal and clausal entities. The corpus analysis results, within the framework ...

Our main objective will be to construct a fully compositional representation of nominal anaphora in discourse. The proposed representation is not dependent on the remote ascription (i.e. done outside the formal representation) of syntactic indexes, which identify anaphoric links. A formal language of variable free logic is introduced. It is based on dynamic semantics paradigm and is a variant o...