The morphosyntactic categories of tense, aspect and mood are traditionally considered to be properties of verbs. However, the morphological expression of these categories within the nominal system is attested across a range of languages. Drawing on data from a number of languages, we provide a preliminary sketch of the phenomenon of nominal tense with nominal scope that is, cases in which nomin...

Abstract A pronominal analysis of tense goes back to Partee (1973), motivated by a series proposed parallels between the interpretation tenses and that pronouns. This article revisits Partee's interpretive parallels, as well two more identified in Kratzer (1998), light subsequent developments work on both temporal relations The goal this is not argue for or against tense, but instead make clear...

We investigate the relationship between phonetic phrasing, tonal pattern and phrase structure in left peripherical sentence topic. Our corpus consists of three task-oriented Italian dialogues. The results of prosodic analysis show that topics are usually associated to the highest pitch values in the Tone Unit, regardless to their actual syntactic position. Syntactic analysis shows that, while t...

We describe a “distant annotation” method where we mark up the semantic tense, event type, and modality of Chinese events via a word-aligned parallel corpus. We first map Chinese verbs to their English counterparts via word alignment, and then annotate the resulting English text spans with coarse-grained categories for semantic tense, event type, and modality that we believe apply to both Engli...

This work reports on three human tense annotation experiments for Chinese verbs in Chinese-to-English translation scenarios. The results show that inter-annotator agreement increases as the context of the verb under the annotation becomes increasingly specified, i.e. as the context moves from the situation in which the target English sentence is unknown to the situation in which the target lexi...

First, we believe that the phrase structure used by many (if not most) linguistic theories is useful only in deriving the syntactic behavior of lexical heads (or classes of lexical heads) from more general principles(which is of course the goal of syntactic theory); once derived, the syntactic behavior can be expressed in simpler terms that can be easier to manipulate in a computational setting...

Combinatorial Categorial Grammar (CCG) supertags present phrase-based machine translation with an opportunity to access rich syntactic information at a word level. The challenge is incorporating this information into the translation process. Factored translation models allow the inclusion of supertags as a factor in the source or target language. We show that this results in an improvement in t...

This thesis investigates the expression of temporal reference – the location of eventualities (states and events) in time – in natural languages by looking at four languages: English, French, Italian and Romanian. It is suggested that temporal reference is determined at the discursive level through a large variety of linguistic and pragmatic means. Among the linguistic means there are the gramm...

An ERP experiment was conducted to explore semantic and syntactic processes as well as their interplay in Chinese sentence comprehension. Participants were auditorily presented with Chinese ba sentences, which were either correct, semantically incorrect, syntactically incorrect, or both semantically and syntactically incorrect. The syntactic violation, which was created by eliminating the objec...

The boundary between known and he is unsurprising, since it coincides with a syntactic boundary between a preposed adverbial phrase and the main clause. By contrast, the second prosodic constituent, he brought out departs dramatically from standard syntactic constituency; for the subject he has a tighter juncture with the following main verb (plus particle) than the latter does with its noun ph...