Abstract This paper is concerned with the Q-particle də in Sinhala wh-questions and polar questions. Previous approaches propose a two-legged semantic dependency: (i) lower leg projects set of alternatives (ii) upper forms choice function dependency. The contribution present two-fold. First, it presents novel empirical data on complex questions islands that pose serious problem for this archite...

Most linguistic theories since Chomsky (1973) have hypothesized that longdistance dependencies crossing multiple clauses are mediated by intermediate structures. This paper provides a new source of evidence for the existence of such intermediate structures: reading times during online sentence comprehension. The experiment presented here compares reading times for two structures involving the l...

Search engine queries are often very short and usually lack explicit semantic structure or indication of intent. Recog­ nizing in tent is receiving increased atten tion since it enables a search engine to trigger a dedicated answer and presen­ ta tion module. This way search engines increasingly move from a docum ent ranking system to an answer facility. In this study we investigate whether it ...

Transparent free relatives (TFRs) are constituents involving a WH-gap dependency in which the phrase that is predicated of the gap associated with what, not the wh-phrase itself, functions as the syntactic and semantic ‘nucleus.’ Previous analyses have either treated TFRs as a construction radically different from ordinary FRs, utilizing such mechanisms as parenthetical placement or grafts, or ...

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants processed case-unambiguous German subject and object WH-questions with either a long or a short distance between the WH-filler and its gap. A sustained left anterior negativity was observed for object questions with long filler-gap distance but not for short object questions. This negativity was modulated by individual diffe...

the present study investigates azari-turkish wh-words within the framework of minimalism. the analysis of wh-in-situ data shows that [+q] &ki;/kïparticle are syntactically in complementary distribution in azari-turkish. when a wh-word is bound by [+q] in c-position, it is interpreted as interrogative element. if, on the other hand, the wh-word is bound by ki/kïparticle which appears in c-positi...

We describe a new method to convert English constituent trees using the Penn Treebank annotation style into dependency trees. The new format was inspired by annotation practices used in other dependency treebanks with the intention to produce a better interface to further semantic processing than existing methods. In particular, we used a richer set of edge labels and introduced links to handle...

Dependency grammar has a long tradition in syntactic theory, dating back to at least Tesnière’s work from the thirties.1 Recently, it has gained renewed attention as empirical methods in parsing are discovering the importance of relations between words (see, e.g., (Collins, 1997)), which is what dependency grammars model explicitly do, but context-free phrasestructure grammars do not. One probl...