The prosody of utterances containing one focused constituent is well investigated in German. However, little is known about the realisation of multiple contrastive accents in double-focus contexts. The present study addresses syntactic and rhythmic factors affecting the occurrence of multiple contrastive accents. In particular, we compare the prosodic marking of double-focused argument-predicat...

Studies on syntactic priming strongly suggest that bilinguals can store a single integrated representation of constructions that are similar in both languages (e.g., Spanish and English passives; R. J. Hartsuiker, M. J. Pickering, & E. Veltkamp, 2004). However, they may store 2 separate representations of constructions that involve different word orders (e.g., German and English passives; H. Lo...

A current trend in syntactic theory explores of the use of multiple dominance structures in the analysis of right-node raising and across-the-board movement, as well as in the formal description of movement. One effect of the introduction of multiple dominance structures is the complication of the mapping of syntactic structure to strings of terminals, as the multiply dominated element has synt...

Abstract We respond to Rodríguez Arrizabalaga’s recent claim that Spanish shows genuine cases of strong resultative constructions, e.g. Juan apuñaló a Tomás hasta la muerte ‘John stabbed Tom death’, argued be equivalent the English construction with PP death . This is theoretically relevant as it challenges verb-framed behavior respect Talmy’s typology. Adopting constructivist view argument str...

Competence-based theories of island effects play a central role in generative grammar, yet the graded nature of many syntactic islands (Deane 1991; Kluender 1992) has never been properly accounted for. Indeed, syntactic accounts of island effects have persisted in spite of a wealth of data suggesting that island effects are not categorical in nature and that non-structural manipulations (i.e. o...

The problems of access – retrieving linguistic structure from some mental grammar – and disambiguation – choosing among these structures to correctly parse ambiguous linguistic input – are fundamental to language understanding. The literature abounds with psychological results on lexical access, the access of idioms, syntactic rule access, parsing preferences, syntactic disambiguation, and the ...

The problems of access-retrieving linguistic structure from some mental grammor -and disomblguatlon-choosing among these structures to correctly parse ambiguous linguistic input-are fundamental to language understanding. The literature abounds with psychological results on lexical access, the access of idioms, syntactic rule access, parsing preferences, syntactic disombiguation, and the process...

In this paper we report an eye-tracking experiment designed to investigate syntactic and phonological parallelism effects in comprehension. Eye-movements were recorded while participants read sentences that contained particle verb constructions. Each experimental item included a coordinated verb phrase (VP), whose two conjuncts either exhibited parallel syntactic forms in terms of particle plac...

The paper examines the development of theory valence French verb from L. Tesnière to present day, elucidates relationship between distribution and valence, reveals conditions for realizing potential in context modern artistic prose works, characteristic syntactic constructions realization non-valent, univalent, divalent, trivalent tetravalent verbs. purpose article is outline reasons regulariti...

This paper aims at offering a global picture of the subtype of comparative constructions known as ‘multi-headed comparatives’ (from the fact that they exhibit more than one comparative operator in semantic interdependence). As a prerequisite to the fulfilment of his goal, an attempt will be made to clarify the scope of the notion ‘comparative construction’ and to draw a general typology of such...