Previous work on predicate-argument structure analysis has focused largely on verbs and adjectives. However, to extract richer information from such a sentence as “His decision was right,” not only the predicate “was right” but also the noun “decision” need to be identi ed as an event denoting expression. Here, we call event denoting nouns event-nouns, which refer to events like “he decided som...

In three experiments, we investigated whether the production of subject-verb number agreement is affected by the phonological realization of grammatical information. Speakers repeated and completed German or Dutch noun phrases along the lines of The position against the demonstrations. We varied the number of the subject noun (position) and the local noun (demonstrations), as well as the number...

This paper focuses on the interpretation of what has been considered an expletive marker in grammar Greek nominal domain: plural number mass nouns. We present results experimental investigation nouns by native speakers this language, and we propose a speech act analysis according to which at time producing utterances that contain speaker performs two acts: assertion expressive (s)he publicly co...

Two subject-verb agreement error elicitation studies tested the hierarchical feature-passing account of agreement computation in production and three timing-based alternatives: linear distance to the head noun, semantic integration, and a combined effect of both (a scope of planning account). In Experiment 1, participants completed subject noun phrase (NP) stimuli consisting of a head NP follow...

Given the two sentences “this fake cat has a fluffy tail” and “this tabby cat has a fluffy tail”, only the second allows one to conclude that “there exists a cat that has a fluffy tail”. As is obvious to a native English speaker, the adjective (A) “fake” somehow modifies the noun (N) “cat” such that we conclude that it no longer belongs to the set of N (cats) by virtue of being A (fake). Lingui...

Two experiments investigated how readers comprehend noun phrase (NP) arguments and adjuncts. Previous research suggested that argument phrases are processed more quickly than adjunct phrases (Clifton, Speer, & Abney, 1991; Kennison, 1999; Schütze & Gibson, 1999; Speer & Clifton, 1998). The present experiments investigated whether the type of verb in the sentence context could influence how NP a...

The present research documents the American English usage frequencies for 136 verbs that occur with noun phrase and tensed sentence complements (e.g., accepted, noun phrase complement: The student knew the answer yesterday, tensed sentence complement: The student knew the answer was correct). This class of verbs has been the focus of numerous empirical studies investigating how syntactic ambigu...

The present study examines the dynamics of the kanji combinations that form common (or general) and proper nouns in Japanese. The following three results were obtained. First, the degree of distribution results from two similar processes which are based on a steady-state of birth-and-death processes with different birth and death rates, resulting in a positive negative binomial distribution wit...

In this paper I propose and formalize a theory of the mass-count distinction in which the denotations of count nouns are built from non-overlapping generators, while the denotations of mass nouns are built from overlapping generators. Counting is counting of generators, and it will follow that counting is only correct on count denotations. I will show that the theory allows two kinds of mass no...