This thesis investigates the problem of induction through an examination of a particular set of constructions (those containing the verb have) and a particular syntactic analysis that unifies this set (an analysis according to which have is a complex verb). Two main questions are addressed. One asks what type of grammatical input is necessary to acquire a grammar containing a complex verb. The ...

We explored the impact of a degraded semantic system on lexical, morphological and syntactic complexity in language production. We analysed transcripts from connected speech samples from eight patients with semantic dementia (SD) and eight age-matched healthy speakers. The frequency distributions of nouns and verbs were compared for hand-scored data and data extracted using text-analysis softwa...

The paper describes an experimental model of syntactic structure generation starting from the limited fragment of semantics that deals with the quantitative values of object parameters. To present the input information the basic semantic units of four types are proposed:"object", "parameter", "function" and "constant". For the syntactic structure representation the system of syntactic component...

Objectives: Auditory perception or hearing ability is critical for children in acquisition of language and speech; hence hearing loss has different effects on individuals’ linguistic perception, and also on their functions. It seems that deaf people suffer from language and speech impairments such as in perception of complex linguistic constructions. This research was aimed to study the percept...

In this thesis, I investigate the question of how the units of a linguistic expression are linearly ordered in syntax. In particular, I examine interactions between locality conditions on movement and the mapping between syntax and phonology. I show that Cyclic Linearization of syntactic structure and constraints on domain-internal movement of multiple specifiers predict unique ordering restric...

This paper reports an on-line production study on how different levels of syntactic flexibility influence the production of locative resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese. Though previous studies show that having two available syntactic structures (flexible condition) facilitates language production and results in less errors and shorter reaction time than having only one possible synta...

We compare the performance of a transition-based parser in regards to different annotation schemes. We propose to convert some specific syntactic constructions observed in the universal dependency treebanks into a so-called more standard representation and to evaluate parsing performances over all the languages of the project. We show that the “standard” constructions do not lead systematically...

In this paper, we provide a well-founded description of Czech deverbal nouns in both nominal and verbal structures (light verb constructions), based on a complex interaction between the lexicon and the grammar. We show that light verb constructions result from a regular syntactic operation. We introduce two interlinked valency lexicons, NomVallex and VALLEX , demonstrating how to minimize the s...

The frequency of words and syntactic constructions has been observed to have a substantial effect on language processing. This begs the question of what causes certain constructions to be more or less frequent. A theory of grounding (Phillips, 2010) would suggest that cognitive limitations might cause languages to develop frequent constructions in such a way as to avoid processing costs. This p...

Syntactic change tends to affect constructions, but treebanks annotate lower-level structure: PCFG rules or dependency arcs. This paper extends prior work in native language identification, using Tree Substitution Grammars to discover constructions which can be tested for historical variability. In a case study comparing Classical and Medieval Latin, the system discovers several constructions c...