Our study looks at the effect of lexical frequency, lexical categories and phrase boundaries on syllable duration in Vietnamese. We use durational data to shed light on the status of some ambiguous lexical categories such as kinship terms and positional nouns, and to gather additional evidence on the behaviour of some verbs that have grammaticalized homophones. Our results show that high freque...

This paper describes the use of verb class memberships as a means of capturing generalizations about manner-of-motion verbs in Synchronous Tree Adjoining Grammars, STAGs, [20, 21, 22]. This approach allows STAGs, which are essentially transfer-based, to take advantage of the same types of generalizations which are generally thought of as wholly the domain of interlingua systems without giving u...

Since Perlmutter (1968, 1970) argued that English aspectual verbs are ambiguous between control and raising, the phenomenon has been argued or assumed to exist in a number of other languages, such as French (Lamiroy 1987, Ruwet 1991), German (Wurmbrand 2001), Greek (Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1999), Hebrew (Landau 2003), Italian (Rizzi 1982, Burzio 1986), Japanese (Shibatani 1973, 1978, Kuno 1...

Objectives: Nouns and verbs are the central conceptual linguistic units of language acquisition in all human languages. While the noun-bias hypothesis claims that nouns have a privilege in children’s lexical development across languages, studies on Mandarin and Korean and other languages have challenged this view. More recent cross-linguistic naming studies on children in German, Turkish,...

this is a longitudinal case study of two farsi-speaking children learning english: ‘bernard’ and ‘melissa’, who were 7;4 and 8;4 at the start of data collection. the research deals with the initial state and further development in the child second language (l2) acquisition of syntax regarding the presence or absence of copula as a functional category, as well as the role and degree of l1 influe...