Many analyses of initial coordination are based on the view that elements like either, both and neither are conjunctions. Such a view, however, leaves many questions unanswered with respect to the prosodic and syntactic structure of these constructions and their interpretation. This study argues that English either and its Dutch counterpart of are focus particles rather than conjunctions. This ...

We study the termination of rewriting modulo a set of equations in the Calculus of Algebraic Constructions, an extension of the Calculus of Constructions with functions and predicates defined by higher-order rewrite rules. In a previous work, we defined general syntactic conditions based on the notion of computable closure for ensuring the termination of the combination of rewriting and beta-re...

We present the main findings and preliminary results of an ongoing project aimed at developing a system for collocation extraction based on contextual morpho-syntactic properties. We explored two hybrid extraction methods: the first method applies languageindepedent statistical techniques followed by a linguistic filtering, while the second approach, available only for German, is based on a set...

Logic grammars are grammars expressible in predicate logic. Implemented in the programming language Prolog, logic grammar systems have proved to be a good basis for natural language processing. One of the most difficult constructions for natural language grammars to treat is coordination (construction with conjunctions like 'and'). This paper describes a logic grammar formalism, modifier struct...

This paper presents a systematic human evaluation of translations of English support verb constructions produced by a rule-based machine translation (RBMT) system (OpenLogos) and a statistical machine translation (SMT) system (Google Translate) for five languages: French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. We classify support verb constructions by means of their syntactic structure and se...

Speakers tend to reproduce syntactic structures that they have recently comprehended or produced. This structural or syntactic priming occurs despite differences in the particular conceptual or event roles expressed in prime and target sentences (Bock & Loebell, 1990). In two sentence recall studies, we used the tendency of speakers to paraphrase the finite complements of object-raising verbs a...

PURPOSE In this study, the authors sought to characterize the language phenotype of fragile X syndrome (FXS), focusing on the extent of impairment in receptive syntax, within-syndrome variability in those impairments in relation to gender, and the syndrome specificity of those impairments. METHOD The Test for Reception of Grammar, Version 2 ( Bishop, 2003), was used to examine the overall rec...

How children go about learning the general regularities that govern language, as well as keeping track of the exceptions to them, remains one of the challenging open questions in the cognitive science of language. Computational modeling is an important methodology in research aimed at addressing this issue. We must determine appropriate learning mechanisms that can grasp generalizations from ex...

A long-standing puzzle in the analysis of coordination is the so-called SGF coordination (Subject Gap in Finite/Fronted constructions) in German, first discussed by Höhle (1983a). The syntactic analysis of SGF constructions is challenging for any type of syntactic framework, as they seem to violate basic assumptions of accessibility or distribution in coordination constructions. SGF constructio...

In Chomsky's theory of grammar, syntactic representations are said to contain movement traces, i.e., syntactically active but phonetically null copies of displaced constituents. Correspondingly, traces have been claimed to form part of the processing of sentence structure by showing that at trace sites the parser reactivates a moved constituent. This view has been contested, however, by researc...