In this case study, we use conversational data from the Switchboard corpus to investigate the functional opposition between two pragmatically specialized constructions of English: Topicalization and Left Dislocation. Specifically, we use distributional trends in the Switchboard corpus to revise several conclusions reached by Prince (1981a, 1981b, 1997) concerning the function of Left Dislocatio...

We recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during the processing of unambiguous German sentences containing different types of filler-gap dependency. Both topicalization constructions and wh-questions were found to elicit a left-anterior negativity (LAN) prior to the processing of the subcategorizing verb, relative to a gap-free control condition. At the subcategorizing verb, sentences c...

This paper addresses the issue of Floating Quantifier phenomena in Hebrew, focusing on the case of the universal quantifier kol (‘all’) and proposes a new, non-derivational analysis in the LFG framework in which the floating and the non-floating quantifier constructions are treated separately. This is based on semantic evidence showing that the quantifiers in these constructions have non-identi...

The expressive power of regularity-preserving ε-free weighted linear multi bottom-up tree transducers is investigated. These models have very attractive theoretical and algorithmic properties, but their expressive power is not well understood especially in the weighted setting. It is proved that despite the restriction to preserve regularity their power still exceeds that of composition chains ...

The present study explored the on-line process of constructing filler-gap dependencies in Chinese topic structures. In a topic structure, extracting the topic from within a sentence is subject to locality constraints; for instance, gaps inside islands such as adverbial clauses are prohibited. Interestingly, similar to the parasitic gap (PG) construction in English, a gap in an adverbial clause ...

In this paper, based on Chinese data, I propose that the so called light verb construction can be subsumed under the analysis of internal topicalization, following the analysis of remnant movement. First, I argue that a light verb does assign theta-roles. Second, I argue that all the particular syntactic behaviors observed in Grimshaw and Mester (1988) the verbal noun cannot undergo topicalizat...