Recent work on grammatical constructions in English (Lakoff 1987, Goldberg 1995, Kay & Fillmore 1999, Fillmore, Kay & O’Connor 1988) has provided strong evidence that the meaning of an utterance is not always derivable from its lexical parts and that the semantics of a sentence is partly comprised of meaning ascribed to syntactic constructions. Lacking in most of these accounts, however, is a d...

Children are known to have problems in understanding Wh-movement constructions in which the object moves across an overt subject (as is the case in object-relatives, Wh-object questions, and topicalization). To test whether crossing dependencies are also problematic when no Wh-movement is involved and whether dependencies in which the subject crosses an object are also difficult, we test a cons...

Giant bulla; Pneumothorax; Anaesthesia management; Spontaneous breathing; Dexmedetomidine Abstract Lung bulla occupying more than 30% of hemithorax is described as giant bulla which is now treated surgically with positive outcomes. During intraoperative period, these patients are vulnerable to hyperinflation, hypoxia and hypercarbia due to significantly increased dead space and reduced function...

Research on Bare Noun Phrases (BNs) is focused English and have Carlson (1977) as its origin: the readings (generic or existential) of these nouns depend type predicate they occur with (Kind-, Individual- Stage-level).Most authors use Determiner Phrase, including number information, key to BNs may get. The D position contains non-checked features which, in European Portuguese (EP), are not chec...

The debate between hierarchical versus sequential structure in language acquisition has recently flared up again (cf. Frank, Bod & Christiansen 2012; Pesetsky 2013). Roughly, the nativist view on language endorses that human language acquisition is guided by innate rules that operate on hierarchical structures. The empiricist view assumes that language acquisition is the product of abstractions...

Speaking is the result of two processes: first, deciding what to say, and than, datarmining how that can ba said using a natural language, in this case English. The second is a linguistic process, which begins with intentional messages formed by the first process, adds audience and discourse information, and produces fluent, situationally appropriate English utterances as output. This note repo...

We read with interest the recent publication in JAMA by Lascarrou et al. [1] of video vs direct laryngoscopy for tracheal intubation in intensive care unit (ICU) patients. We are eager to raise an important issue absent from the discussion and its accompanying editorial [2]: the danger of administering drugs to facilitate intubation in hypoxemic and hypotensive patients which may induce apnea a...

While the debate between nativism and empiricism exists since several decades, surprisingly few common learning problems have been proposed for assessing the two opposing views. Most empiricist researchers have focused on a relatively small number of linguistic problems, such as Auxiliary Fronting or Anaphoric One. In the current paper we extend the number of common test cases to a much larger ...

It is widely accepted that linguistic high level information like information structure (focus-background-division, topicalization) influences accent placement and accent type (rising, falling, hat pattern etc.) in German. Previous research was concentrated on tonal patterns associated with focus and topic ([1],[2]). We will demonstrate that 1) sentence initial tonal variation and 2) syllable d...

The pairing of linguistic form to discourse function has been much discussed in the literature over the last several years. Prince (1996) phrases the question thusly: what is it exactly that discourse functions are associated with? Particular form-function pairings do not appear to be cross-linguistically universal; a given linguistic – that is, syntactic – form may be associated in different l...