Central and Western Basque (CWB) dialects have a verb focalization construction involving the dummy verb egin, which as a lexical verb is akin to English ‘make’ or ‘do.’ (Rebuschi 1984, Ortiz de Urbina 1989, Zuazo 1998, Etxepare and Ortiz de Urbina 2003). An example of this construction is given in (1), which Ortiz de Urbina (1989) gives as a felicitous answer to the question, “What happened to...

The aim of this paper is to compare the discourse structures proposed in RST, SDRT and dependency DAGs which extend the semantic level of MTT for discourses. The key question is the following: do these formalisms allow the representation of all the discourse structures which correspond to felicitous discourses and exclude those which correspond to infelicitous discourses? Hence the term of “str...

Interpretation of relative clauses sentences was investigated by having sixteen children between the ages of 3;5 and 4;6 act out sentences within four conditions that varied the number of potential referents for each noun within the sentence. No difference in interpretation accuracy was found between felicitous and infelicitous conditions or between biased and neutral conditions. This result ra...

The accessibility constraints imposed on anaphora by dynamic theories of discourse are too strong because they rule out many perfectly felicitous cases. Several attempts have been made by previous authors to rectify this situation using various tactics. This paper proposes a more viable approach that involves replacing Heim’s notion of familiarity with a generalized variant due to Roberts. This...

L IKE ALL GREAT HOUSES, the magnificent edifice of psychological constructs, erected by the master-architect Sigmund Freud has a resident ghost. This ghost is the spirit of verification. The imposing structure of psychoanalytic concepts has, of course, considerable internal consistency and coherence. This, otherwise felicitous circumstance however, further complicates the situation by frequentl...

Questions with plural definites (QPDs) can receive responses that take the form of a pair-list. Following Dayal (1992, 1996) and Krifka (1992), these are generally treated not as genuine pair-list answers, but pragmatically-motivated elaborations on underlyingly cumulative answers. I present new evidence against this view: answers be available even in absence corresponding felicitous answer. ar...