A proposal is presented for the representation of pragmatic information and for its use in decisions relating to syntactic choice. A \split discourse model" is used to represent information from the context of a discourse, and this representation is then related to the level of syntactic choice by means of \low level illocutionary acts". The alternative syntactic constructions are assumed to fo...

This research investigates the effects of syntactic, semantic, and morphophonemic similarity in the processing of center-embedding constructions in Japanese and Korean. Six Japanese experiments study the effects of syntactic and semantic similarity, while one Korean experiment deals with the effects of syntactic and morphophonemic similarity. The results from these experiments support the view ...

In this paper, I offer a Radical Constructon Grammar analysis of some aspects of countability in English. Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 1999, 2000, 2001, MS) shares with other construction grammars the assumption that all grammatical knowledge can be represented uniformly as a network of constructions, where ‘construction’ is taken to describe form-meaning pairings of grammatical structur...

One of the criteria generally applied in distinguishing lexical processes from syntactic ones is compositionality: the standard assumption is that syntactic processes have transparent (compositional) semantics while word-formation is semantically opaque. In this paper I will argue that this assumption is false: certain processes which are generally held to be syntactic are compositional only to...

While the choice of morphological markers is lexically determined and highly idiosyncratic – fahren/Fahrt (drive/drive) vs. erklären/Erklärung (explain/explanation)-, syntactic combination follows general rules: the verb assigns nominative and accusative case to the subject and direct object, the derived noun systematically requires genitive case for both complements. These observations exhaust...

Serial Verb Constructions have obvious implications for both descriptive and theoretical linguists (e.g., Newmayer, 2004; Aikhenvald & Dixon 2006; Haspelmath 2016). One fundamental question is whether the criteria of are universal (Déchaine 1993; Newmayer Muysken Veenstra 2006) or language-specific (Stewart 2001). This paper aims to investigate this debate by examining data from Saudi Arabi...

Speakers frequently have a choice among multiple ways of expressing one and the same thought. When choosing between syntactic constructions for expressing a given meaning, speakers are sensitive to probabilistic tendencies for syntactic, semantic or contextual properties of an utterance to favor one construction or another. Taken together, such tendencies may align to make one construction over...

This paper explores the information structure of VP-anaphora constructions in English, Spanish, and German. The goal is to provide an initial account of the syntactic and prosodic licensing mechanisms of VP-anaphora and to suggest some theoretical consequences for the syntactic representation of the different types of focus and topic. Recent studies (e.g. Rooth 1992b; Tomioka 1995; Fox 1998) ha...

Recent debates on Japanese clausal comparatives have yielded several competing theories of their syntax and semantics with different implications for the issue of crosslinguistic variation in comparative constructions. This paper offers a novel syntactic account of Japanese clausal comparatives. It claims that despite their appearance, Japanese clausal comparatives in fact involve a nominal str...

Copula constructions are problematic in the syntax of most languages. The paper describes three different dependency syntactic methods for handling copula constructions: function head, content head and complex label analysis. Furthermore, we also propose a POS-based approach to copula detection. We evaluate the impact of these approaches in computational parsing, in two parsing experiments for ...