This paper has three aims: (1) to generalize a computational account of the discourse process called CENTERING, (2) to apply this account to discourse processing in Japanese so that it can be used in computational systems for machine translation or language understanding, and (3) to provide some insights on the effect of syntactic factors in Japanese on discourse interpretation. We argue that w...

In this paper we look at the interpretation of Quantifier Phrases from the perspective of Symmetric Categorial Grammar. We show how the apparent mismatch between the syntactic and semantic behaviour of these expressions can be resolved in a typelogical system equipped with two Merge relations: one for syntactic units, and one for the evaluation contexts of the semantic values associated with th...

I show that sentences with two subordinate clauses may receive two syntactic analyses, and that each syntactic analysis may receive two semantic interpretations. Hence, I put forward an underspecified semantic representation such that each syntactic analysis receives only one underspecified interpretation.

Recent ERP studies report that implausible verb-argument combinations can elicit a centro-parietal P600 effect (e.g., "The hearty meal was devouring …"; Kim & Osterhout, 2005). Such eliciting conditions do not involve outright syntactic anomaly, deviating from previous reports of P600. Kim and Osterhout (2005) attributed such P600 effects to structural reprocessing that occurs when syntactic cu...

In Data-Oriented Parsing (DOP), an annotated language corpus is used as a stochastic grammar. The most probable analysis of a new input sentence is constructed by combining sub-analyses from the corpus in the most probable way. This approach has been succesfully used for syntactic analysis, using corpora with syntactic annotations such as the Penn Treebank. If a corpus with semantically annotat...

Through the manipulation of the syntactic cue of word order and the semantic cues of noun animacy and noun size order, this study explores how different cue strength affects a child’s interpretation of a sentence. Subjects included 36 children [Mean age=50.72 mo.; SD=7.3 mo.]. A sentence interpretation test was administered to participants who would choose the “doer” of the sentence. Significan...

This work formulates a grammar of English relativisation on the monostratal ruleto-rule design. Specification of a language model under this design is usually the interactive result of fixing a lexical categorisation and a notion of syntactic consequence (defined by specifying rules of formation). The language model is the closure of the lexicon under syntactic consequence. Our model however is...