This paper focuses on how phrasal prosody and function words may interact during early language acquisition. Experimental results show that infants have access to intermediate prosodic phrases (phonological phrases) during the first year of life, and use these to constrain lexical segmentation. These same intermediate prosodic phrases are used by adults to constrain on-line syntactic analysis. ...

We present a new approach to language learning which is based on the following idea: if a language learner does not know which phrase-structure trees should be assigned to initial sentences, s/he allows (implicitly) for all possible trees and lets linguistic experience decide which is the ‘best’ tree for each sentence. The best tree is obtained by maximizing ‘structural analogy’ between a sente...

In order to identify the basic properties of PoRs and the theoretical questions that follow, consider the German active-passive pair in (3a, b) involving the reflexive use of the verb ‘waschen’ (to wash). As in ordinary passives, the lexical verb in (3b) appears as passive participle and the passive auxiliary werden (to become) is used. The external argument disappears (but it can reappear in a...

Several approaches have been proposed for the automatic acquisition of multiword expressions from corpora. However, there is no agreement about which of them presents the best cost-benefit ratio, as they have been evaluated on distinct datasets and/or languages. To address this issue, we investigate these techniques analysing the following dimensions: expression type (compound nouns, phrasal ve...

The resulting denominal verb (dv) has the full syntactic and morphological distribution of any verb in West Greenlandic. It also retains some of the properties of the incorporated nominal (in), which has led some researchers to analyze this construction as a kind of ni and to argue that it represents a structural mismatch between syntax and morphology. In this paper, I will present an alternati...

This paper describes an original hybrid system that extracts multiword unit candidates from part-of-speech tagged corpora. While classical hybrid systems manually define local part-ofspeech patterns that lead to the identification of well-known multiword units (mainly compound nouns), our solution automatically identifies relevant syntactical patterns from the corpus. Word statistics are then c...

Due to the ever growing amount of publications about protein-protein interactions, information extraction from text is increasingly recognized as one of crucial technologies in bioinformatics. This paper presents a Protein Interaction Extraction System using a Link Grammar Parser from biomedical abstracts (PIELG). PIELG uses linkage given by the Link Grammar Parser to start a case based analysi...

Several approaches have been proposed for the automatic acquisition of multiword expressions from corpora. However, there is no agreement about which of them presents the best cost-benefit ratio, as they have been evaluated on distinct datasets and/or languages. To address this issue, we investigate these techniques analysing the following dimensions: expression type (compound nouns, phrasal ve...

In the recent past, the important role played by multiword expressions in the language has been recognized by the natural language processing community. Simply put, a multiword expression (MWE) is a word collocation that exhibits markedly peculiar linguistic behaviour in terms of lexicalization, syntax or semantics. Among others, ubiquitous compound nouns, idioms and phrasal verbs fall into thi...

We investigated the lexicalization of syntactic knowledge in two reading experiments, one using a moving window paradigm and one measuring eye movements. Our study was motivated by Spivey-Knowlton and Sedivy’s (1995) finding that verb class, and by implication frequency information, determined how easily a prepositional phrase (PP) was attached to a verb phrase (VP) or to a direct object noun p...