We present LHIP, a system for incremental grammar development using an extended DCG formalism. The system uses a robust island-based parsing method controlled by user-defined performance thresholds.

The goal of this paper is to examine the use of definite articleswith proper names, both cross-linguistically and intra-linguistically and provide a morpho-syntactic analysis of it. The first question to consider is whether article absence or article presence is the default case. The second question is when and how the alternative arises. I will presuppose here that names in argument positions ...

The acquisition of definite articles has often been related to the acquisition of functional categories (see e.g. Radford, 1990; Clahsen, 1996; Penner & Weissenborn, 1996), since definite articles belong to the functional category (FC) D. Under this view, a problem that remains unsolved is why children pass through a stage in which they produce some definite articles, while at the same time the...

This study was conducted with the purpose of examining Persian speakers’ article acquisition and use with reference to Ionin, Ko and Wexler’s (2004) model, which is based on the prediction of Fluctuation Hypothesis (FH) that EFL learners of [-article] languages, like Persian, make erroneous article use in [+definite, -specific] and [-definite, +specific] contexts. From among the students of an ...

The two partitive constructions in (1) and (2) feature a definite determiner which does not force a presuppositional interpretation for the DP after de. That is, du pain and des crayons do not need to refer to a known amount of bread or to a known set of pencils. On the basis of this observation, the definite determiner appearing in (1) and (2) can be labeled as expletive. (Milner 1978), as wel...

As is well known, a metric on a manifold determines a unique symmetric connection for which the metric is parallel: the Levi-Civita connection. In this paper we investigate the inverse problem: to what extent is the metric of a Riemannian manifold determined by its LeviCivita connection? It is shown that for a generic Levi-Civita connection of a metric h there exists a set of positive semi-defi...