causative constructions play an important role in the mental and linguistic system of human beings. the methodology that is used in this paper for studying causative constructions in persian is the combination of the morphology-based approach and song’s model (1996, 2001). emphasizing the causer np and the causee np, we draw the semantic map of the causer np (based on the animacy hierarchy). in...

The syntax of these constructions has received a lot of attention in recent years (den Dikken 1995, 1998, Español-Echevarría 1996, Hulk & Tellier 1999ab, Doetjes 1997). However, very little work has concentrated on the relation between both constructions. Milner (1978) had already observed that quantitative and qualitative constructions share the same syntactic structure (see also Ruwet 1982). ...

This paper deals with three copular constructions in French that take bare nominals as a predicative complement (attribut du sujet). From a lexical point of view, these constructions, which are typical of colloquial French, are very open frames. After a detailed analysis of the syntactic and semantic properties of these constructions, I will examine them in the light of a more theoretical quest...

The syntactic structure of a sentence is usually a strong predictor of its meaning: Each argument noun phrase (i.e., Subject and Object) should map onto exactly one thematic role (i.e., Agent and Patient, respectively). Some constructions, however, are exceptions to this pattern. This paper investigates how the syntactic structure of an utterance contributes to its construal, using ditransitive...

in this article, the causative alternation in persian is discussed. first, it is shown that persian anticausative verbs involve a cause component and an implicit external argument. second, we claim that causative alternation arises when a single change-of-state verb invokes more than one semantic frame (fillmore, 1985): causative frame and anticausative frame. these semantic frames are the resu...

Usage-based theories of syntax predict that words and syntactic constructions are probabilistically interconnected. If this is true, then words that occur in similar distributions of syntactic constructions should prime each other. These effects should be fine-grained; even small differences between the syntactic distributions of pairs of words of the same grammatical category should cause vari...

A computer grammar is described which includes most of the English relative-clause constructions. It is written in the form of a left-to-right phrase-structure grammar with discontinuous constituents and subscripts, which carry such syntactic restrictions as number and verb government category. The motivation for the hierarchy of syntactic choices and for the use of discontinuous constituents i...

This paper describes a method for determining syntactic structure in coordinate constructions. It is based on the information taken from semantic similarities, selectional restrictions, and some other linguistic cues. We discuss the role the information plays in resolving ambiguities that appear in coordinate constructions, describe the means of acquiring the necessary information automatically...

One of the best known claims about human communication is that people's behaviour and language use converge during conversation. It has been proposed that these patterns can be explained by automatic, cross-person priming. A key test case is structural priming: does exposure to one syntactic structure, in production or comprehension, make reuse of that structure (by the same or another speaker)...