In the Bayesian framework, a language learner should seek a grammar that explains observed data well and is also a priori probable. This paper proposes such a measure of prior probability. Indeed it develops a full statistical framework for lexicalized syntax. The learner’s job is to discover the system of probabilistic transformations (often called lexical redundancy rules) that underlies the ...

Embick (2004) has recently challenged the widely held view that English resultative participles (or adjectival passives) are formed in the lexicon while (verbal) passives are built syntactically (a proposal originally formalized in Wasow 1977; see also Bresnan 1982, Levin and Rappaport 1986, and many others). Instead, Embick argues for a syntactic analysis to explain why only certain arguments ...

Hierarchical structure with nested nonlocal dependencies is a key feature of human language and can be identified theoretically in most pieces of tonal music. However, previous studies have argued against the perception of such structures in music. Here, we show processing of nonlocal dependencies in music. We presented chorales by J. S. Bach and modified versions in which the hierarchical stru...

The brain has been shown to honor the fundamental linguistic difference between semantic and syntactic information. Here we demonstrate that it even further indicates the necessity to distinguish between two differential syntactic processes: that is to say between the processing of phrase structure information necessary to build up syntactic structures on-line and verb argument structure inform...

According to the Menzerath-Altmann law, there is a relation between the size of the whole and the mean size of its parts. The validity of the law was demonstrated on relations between several language units, e.g., the longer a word, the shorter the syllables the word consists of. In this paper it is shown that the law is valid also in syntactic dependency structure in Czech. In particular, long...

The paper presents a study on the portability of statistical syntactic knowledge in the framework of the structured language model (SLM). We investigate the impact of porting SLM statistics from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) to the Air Travel Information System (ATIS) domain. We compare this approach to applying the Microsoft rule-based parser (NLPwin) for the ATIS data and to using a small amo...

We propose a semantically motivated linguistic representation called Language-Neutral Syntax (LNS), which is scalable in three important respects. First, though information stored in LNS is directly related to the surface tree, it is abstract enough to normalize many surface variations both within and across languages. Second, LNS is adaptable to new applications, in that any application that r...

The role of prosody in adults’ acquisition of a miniature artificial language was examined in three experiments. In Experiment 1, learners heard and repeated prerecorded sentences of the language, and simultaneously saw corresponding referents, but did not see any printed words. Learners received four study-test trials. Half the learners heard a ‘‘single word’’ presentation, in which each of th...

This paper presents a methodology for using the argument structure of sentences, as encoded by the PropBank project, to develop clusters of verbs with similar meaning and usage. These clusters can be favorably compared to the classes developed by the VerbNet project. The most interesting cases are those where the clustering methodology suggests new members for VerbNet classes which will then be...

Mirror Theory is a syntactic framework developed in (Brody, 1997), where it is offered as a consequence of eliminating purported redundancies in Chomsky’s minimalism (Chomsky, 1995). A fundamental feature of Mirror Theory is its requirement that the syntactic head-complement relation mirror certain morphological relations (such as constituency). This requirement constrains the types of syntacti...