The present paper investigates the issue of focus types and the ending situations in Chinese declarative and interrogative intonations. Differing only in focus of each, 5 statement sentences and 5 interrogative sentences with the same words and the same syntax in Chinese are designed for the experiment. A male Standard Chinese speaker reads them in random order three times. The results show tha...

Abstract This paper presents CINTIL-QATreebank, a treebank composed of Portuguese sentences that can be used to support the development of Question Answering systems. To create this treebank, we use declarative sentences from the pre-existing CINTIL-Treebank and manually transform their syntactic structure into a non-declarative sentence. Our corpus includes two clause types: interrogative and ...

Throughout the history of Icelandic, invariant particles, which do not inflect for semantic or syntactic features antecedent, are typical markers relative clauses (Þráinsson 2007). Another, putatively foreign strategy—relativization with interrogative–relative pronouns—is archaic in Modern but is frequent between sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a period featuring high degree literary transl...

Within the tradition of generative grammar, filler-gap constructions and especially island constraints (Ross 1967) have played a crucial role in shaping the grammar and in arguing for a rich system of innate constraints that are specific to language. The existence of island phenomena has given rise to such principles as `Subjacency' (1), `Superiority' (2) (commonly recast as `Attract Closest') ...

This article explores the properties of interrogative/focus particle li in Bulgarian, in the larger context of the clitic system of that language as well as from the perspective of how li and other clitics behave in related Slavic languages. A highly derivational model of grammar is assumed, with Minimalist syntax and Distributed Morphology. As an alternative to scattered deletion, prosodically...

Attitude verbs fall in different categories depending on the kind of complements which they can embed. In English, a verb like know takes both declarative and interrogative complements. By contrast, believe takes only declarative complements and wonder takes only interrogative complements. The present paper examines the hypothesis, originally put forward by Hintikka 1975, that the only verbs th...

OF THE THESIS Alternative disjunctions in Egyptian Arabic by Lauren Danae Winans Master of Arts in Linguistics University of California, Los Angeles, 2011 Professor Jessica Rett, Chair Languages such as Chinese (Li and Thomson (1981)), Finnish (Haspelmath (2007)), Basque (Saltarelli (1988)), and Malagasy (Keenan, p.c.), among others, have been described as having two disjunctive lexical items w...