The relationship between prosodic structure and syntactic structure has remained a controversial and unresolved area, partly due to the lack of rich corpora of natural speech, and partly due to the complexity involved in both syntax and prosody. Chom-sky & Halle (1968, p. 372) state that " although there is a substantial literature on intonational and prosodic features in English, it is largely...

Abstract Manner/Result Complementarity (Rappaport Hovav & Levin 2010) has been argued to have consequences for argument realization: only manner verbs permit object deletion and non-selected objects. In contrast, result always co-appear with their object, because they are required express the undergoer of change that entail. We discuss new data involving in constructions where encoded by ve...

Syntactic priming studies demonstrate that exposure to a particular syntactic structure leads speakers to reproduce the same structure in subsequent utterances. Explanations for this phenomenon rely on either the retrieval of morphosyntactic features associated with the verb in the prime sentence or the preservation of the mapping between message and word sequences in the prime sentence. Two ex...

This paper shows that clausal possession in Isbukun Bunun, a Formosan language, involves two distinct structures with one single thematic interpretation. Although thematically identical, the are not derived via agreement/movement from underlying structure. To best capture (morpho)syntactic patterns within and beyond phenomenon, too-many-structures problem is analyzed as involving syntactic head...

This paper presents a syntactic description of a fragment of German that has been worked out within the machine translation project Eurotra. It represents the syntactic part of the German module of this multilingual translation system. The linguistic tool for the following analyses is the so-called CATframework. In the first two sections of this paper an introduction of the formalism and a ling...

The syntactic structure of a sentence is usually a strong predictor of its meaning: Each argument noun phrase (i.e., Subject and Object) should map onto exactly one thematic role (i.e., Agent and Patient, respectively). Some constructions, however, are exceptions to this pattern. This paper investigates how the syntactic structure of an utterance contributes to its construal, using ditransitive...

Current semantic parsing systems either largely ignore the syntactic structure of the natural language input or attempt to learn highly underconstrained, noisy syntactic representations. We present two new classes of features for statistical semantic parsing that utilize information about syntactic structure, extracted from a dependency parse of an utterance, to score semantic parses for that u...