One of the central questions about conceptual combinations is what happens to constituent concepts that are combined into a complex concept. Different types of conceptual combinations have been distinguished: adjective– noun combinations, such as sour wine (see, e. In adjective–noun and noun– noun combinations, a considerable ambiguity may be present, in that a variety of relations can be impli...

Although both sentences in (1) and (2) contain a displaced element (e.g. the cat), the two structures differ as to the position of the gap inside the relative clause. In subject relative clauses such as (1), the position which the filler moves from is the syntactic subject of the relative clause (e.g. ‘the cat chases the mouse’). By contrast, in object relative clauses like (2), the filler is m...

In this paper I propose a new analysis of the English cleft in which the cleft clause is a restrictive relative clause adjoined to the clefted XP. I provide evidence showing that both ‘matching’ and ‘raising’ derivations are possible, that the initial it of clefts is not an expletive, and that the cleft clause undergoes obligatory extraposition to VP. Taken together, this evidence favours the p...

This article describes the construction and specificity of co-occurrence auxiliary unit “by example of”.  The relevance this research is substantiated by need for comprehensive description words. The object prepositional of” which belongs to group denominal relative clause. subject semantics of”, constructions it forms, peculiarities its co-occur...

This paper proposes a constraint-based, comprehensive analysis of the Internally-Headed Relative Clause (henceforth, IHRC) in Japanese which is able to accommodate the synchronic properties as well as the diachronic change that IHRC went through. Various types of syntactic analyses have been proposed to date to explain the peculiar traits of IHRC as it is today. Philological studies in Japanese...

There are two common ways to assign relative importance in spoken language: tonic prominence and thematization. The former is expressing the main points of information units in speech (Halliday, 1994), and the latter is putting an element at the beginning of a clause. This study explores how relative importance is realized in English and Persian. It also investigates how advanced Persian learne...