This paper discusses constraints on grammaticalization, a primarily diachronic process through which lexical elements take on grammatical functions. In particular, it will argue that two constraints on this process, namely Persistence and Layering, explain the different distributional patterns of time-relationship adverbs in Japanese, Korean, English and German. Furthermore, it will suggest tha...

The acquisition of French object pronominal clitics was investigated from a crosslinguistic transfer and markedness perspective of parameterization. Native speakers of English (-clitics) and Spanish (+clitics) were provided with brief training in French lexical items and the cliticization of object pronouns followed by a grammaticality judgment task including both cliticized and non-pronominal ...

This paper presents LTAG semantics of focus and focus-sensitive quantifiers which adopts alternative semantics of focus (Rooth 1985 and subsequent work). It proposes that focused lexical items make its contribution at the level of elementary trees, so that each elementary tree is associated with two semantic representations: its ordinary semantic representation and its focus representation. Bas...

In this paper, we extend existing accounts of high and low readings in counterfactual donkey sentences (van Rooij 2006, Walker and Romero 2015) to indicative donkey sentences. First, we generalize the account to indicative donkey sentences featuring modals that employ ordering sources. Then, we turn to indicative donkey sentences with adverbs of quantification. We discuss the relationship betwe...

This paper reports on an ongoing research on temporal adverbs and deals with the problem of processing a family of Portuguese and Spanish compound temporal adverbs, in a contrastive approach, aiming at building finite state transducers to translate them from one language into the other. Because of the large number of combinations involved and their complexity, it is not easy to list them in ful...