Syntactic and semantic complexities of English partitive constructions have given us many troubles in understanding English NP structures. The paper begins with the classification of partitive NPs into two types based on agreement factors and claims that enriched information on lexical entries can provide feasible generalizations for such constructions while capturing their syntactic and semant...

To produce good utterances from non-trivial inputs a natural language generator should consider many words in parallel, which raises the question of how to handle syntax in a parallel generator. If a generator is incremental and centered on the task of word choice, then the role of syntax is merely to help evaluate the appropriateness of words. One way to do this is to represent syntactic knowl...

This paper describes a cognitively plausible mechanism for systematically handling complex syntactic constructions within a semantic parser. More specifically, we show how these constructions are handled without a global syntactic grammar or syntactic parse tree representations and without sacrificing the benefits of semantically-oriented parsing. We evaluate the psychological validity of our a...

This paper describes three-participant 'give' constructions in ten Papuan languages of the Timor-Alor-Pantar (TAP) family. Generally lacking a class of simple ditransitive root verbs, TAP languages express 'give' events by means of biclausal constructions ('take X then give Y'), serial verb constructions ('take X give Y'), or particle-verb constructions originating in serial verb constructions....

This is the first part of a two-part article that reviews a number of the current debates regarding raising and control constructions. The issues addressed in this part include the syntactic attributes governing their distribution; the characterization of the relevant silent elements; the empirical properties which may distinguish/unify the two classes of constructions (on either syntactic or s...

Recent work on grammatical constructions in English (Lakoff 1987, Goldberg 1995, Kay & Fillmore 1999, Fillmore, Kay & O’Connor 1988) has provided strong evidence that the meaning of an utterance is not always derivable from its lexical parts and that the semantics of a sentence is partly comprised of meaning ascribed to syntactic constructions. Lacking in most of these accounts, however, is a d...