This paper reported an acoustic experiment examining the effect of topic structure and syntax on boundary pitch parameters. Simple discourses containing three sentences in Standard Chinese were constructed and the boundary between the first sentence and the second sentence of each discourse varied along the following parameters: (a) topic internal, clause, (b) topic shift, clause, (c) topic int...

This article examined whether semantic indeterminacy plays a role in comprehension of complex structures such as object relative clauses. Study 1 used a gated sentence completion task to assess which alternative interpretations are dominant as the relative clause unfolds; Study 2 compared reading times in object relative clauses containing different animacy configurations to unambiguous passive...

This article examined whether semantic indeterminacy plays a role in comprehension of complex structures such as object relative clauses. Study 1 used a gated sentence completion task to assess which alternative interpretations are dominant as the relative clause unfolds; Study 2 compared reading times in object relative clauses containing different animacy configurations to unambiguous passive...

The paper describes a rule-based system for tagging clause boundaries, implemented for annotating the Estonian Reference Corpus of the University of Tartu, a collection of written texts containing ca 245 million running words and available for querying via Keeleveeb language portal. The system needs information about parts of speech and grammatical categories coded in the word-forms, i.e. it ta...

We study the relative best-case performance of DPLL-based structure-aware SAT solvers in terms of the power of the underlying proof systems. The systems result from (i) varying the style of branching and (ii) enforcing dynamic restrictions on the decision heuristics. Considering DPLL both with and without clause learning, we present a relative efficiency hierarchy for refinements of DPLL result...

We conducted a large-scale corpus analysis indicating that pronominal object relative clauses are significantly more frequent than pronominal subject relative clauses when the embedded pronoun is personal. This difference was reversed when impersonal pronouns constituted the embedded noun phrase. This pattern of distribution provides a suitable framework for testing the role of experience in se...

1 I would like to thank the following people for enormously helpful discussion on many aspects of these constructions: In diverse languages considered separately, each for itself and in its own functioning, the analysis of the relative clause shows a formal structure ordered by a certain function that is not always visible. The problem is to uncover that function. This can be arrived at by obse...

Children aged 8 through 11 (N = 250) were given a word-by-word sentence task in both the visual and auditory modes. The sentences included an object relative clause, a subject relative clause, or a conjoined verb phrase. Each sentence was followed by a true-false question, testing the subject of either the first or second verb. Participants were also given two memory span measures: digit span a...

Syntactic structure has been considered an integral component of agreement computation in language production. In agreement error studies, clause-boundedness (Bock & Cutting, 1992) and hierarchical feature-passing (Franck, Vigliocco, & Nicol, 2002) predict that local nouns within clausal modifiers should produce fewer errors than do those within phrasal modifiers due to structural differences; ...

Existing semantic theories of appositive relative clauses (ARCs) assume that ARCs contribute asserted but not at-issue content (Böer & Lycan [4], Bach [3], Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet [5], Potts [13], AnderBois et al. [2], Murray [12]). In this paper I demonstrate that the information status of ARCs depends on their linear position in the clause: clause-medial ARCs are not at-issue whereas clau...