This paper investigates the strength of the local attachment preference in syntactic ambiguity resolution, based on a study of a novel ambiguity for which the predictions of local attachment contrast with the predictions of a wide range of other ambiguity resolution principles. In sentences of the form “Because Rose praised the recipe I made...” we show that the ambiguous clause “I made“ is pre...

The Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) was released to the public in 2008 and remains the largest corpus of manually annotated discourse relations — both relations that are signaled explicitly (e.g., by a coordinating or subordinating conjunction, or by a discourse adverbial or other construction) and ones that otherwise appear implicit. The Penn Discourse TreeBank also diverges from other discours...

Portuguese -mente ending adverbs constitute a large, morphologically homogenous, but syntactically and semantically diverse lexical set. When coordinated, the first adverb loses the adverbial suffix and takes the shape of the base adjective, in the feminine-singular form. This raises the issue of its partof-speech (POS) classification (adverb or adjective?), but especially its adequate parsing,...

Recent studies have shown that speakers and writers use linguistic devices to signal a shift of topic in their discourse. The present paper considers the comprehension function of one of these segmentation markers, namely a temporal adverbial, by studying its role in a well-established boundary effect: Reading time for the first sentence of a new discourse unit is longer than reading time for t...

In recent times, in Slavic linguistics, great attention is paid to the bound disjointed compounds that are on border between word and phraseologism mostly called equivalents of word. Scholars have studied semantics, form expression, some aspects functional-stylistic features these units text materials different functional styles, but, at same time, no comprehensive research into functioning int...

Introduction It is commonly held that the frequent syntagm consisting of the infinitive construct with l mæd – the so-called liqt l – because of the prefixed preposition  has “a strong value for the direction, the aim, the purpose of an action”, as in Gen 31:19 “now Laban had gone to shear his sheep” (J-M § 124l). At the same time many grammars recognize that in the liqtol syntagm the prepos...