Abstract The increasing importance of the Common European Framework Reference (CEFR) has led to research on linguistic characteristics its levels, as this would help application CEFR in design teaching materials, courses, and assessments. This study investigated whether levels can be distinguished with reference syntactic complexity (SC). 14- 17-year-old Finnish learners English (N=397) wrote t...

Having developed a Montague-like interpretation of a fragment of natural language, one may want to modify it in order to accomodate further linguistic phenomena. This may require radical changes in the semantic interpretation of syntactic categories. For instance, one may want to raise the semantic type assigned to the category of adverbial modifiers in order to account for quantified adverbial...

In their criticisms of traditional theories politeness, Watts et al. (2005 [1992]) and Eelen (2001) call for first-order approaches to (im)politeness. While ‘discursive approach’ has faced its own criticisms, one useful strand which emerged from this research is a focus on how (im)politeness evaluated discussed. However, compared other (im)politeness, such language received little attention. St...

1 Introduction We are concerned with surface-syntactic parsing of running text. Our main goal is to describe a syntactic analysis of sentences using dependency links that show the head-dependent relations between words. The new dependency parser 1 (Tapanainen and J~ir-vinen, 1997; J~rvinen and Tapanainen, 1997) belongs to a continuous effort to apply rule-based methods to natural languages. It ...

One of the best tools we have for probing the lexical semantics of adjectives is degree modification. Different degree modifiers impose different requirements on the adjectives they combine with, and the patterns these restrictions reveal can be used to establish a typology of adjectives. This line of research—pursued by Kennedy & McNally (2005), Rotstein & Winter (2004), and many others since—...

Relative clauses containing subject relative-pronouns are the prevalent type both across languages and in conversation, accounting for 65% of relative clauses in the American National Corpus (Reali and Christiansen 2007). This fact appears attributable to processing constraints, as per Hawkins 1999, 2004: subject extractions are the most local filler-gap dependency and therefore impose the leas...