Previous researches indicated that the performance of automatic prosodic boundary labeling benefited from syntactic phrase information for Mandarin. However, the influence of other syntactic features such as dependency has not been studied in-depth yet, especially on large scale corpus. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of rich syntactic features for Mandarin phrase boundary prediction. Bo...

We examined the effects of syntactic (tense) violations occurring on regularly versus irregularly inflected verbs using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Participants read sentences in which the main verb varied in terms of regularity (regular vs. irregular), frequency (high vs. low), and grammaticality (tense violation vs. no tense violation). For regular verbs, we found a reliable N400 e...

The aim of this paper is to compare the behaviour of Polish and Romance pronominal clitics in tense auxiliary constructions and to account for Polish facts. First, we present the system of Polish auxiliaries, briefly comparing it to Romance. Then, we discuss clitic climbing (CC), the phenomenon well-known in Romance. We contrast Polish CC with CC in Italian and French. Finally, we present a for...

In German, word-initial lax fricatives may be produced with substantially reduced glottal vibration after voiceless obstruents. This assimilation occurs more frequently and to a larger extent across prosodic word boundaries than across phrase boundaries. Assimilatory devoicing makes the fricatives more similar to their tense counterparts and could thus hinder word recognition. The present study...

This paper discusses how predicate-initial (VOS) order in Malagasy is derived, and the implications of this derivation for general theories of word order. Malagasy clauses are comprised of a predicate phrase followed by a constituent here called the TRIGGER, which occupies the specifier of an A’-position (provisionally labelled TopP). I argue against an analysis where TopP projects its specifie...

Utterances are comprised of words belonging to various syntactic classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.). The arrangement of these words follows precise syntactic rules, specified in the Grammar of the language. Words are organized into syntactic constituents, and syntactic constituents are organized into a hierarchical tree-like syntactic structure. For example, in the utterance "the little g...

Three age groups were tested for their understanding of present and past tense in the auxiliaries will and did, copula be, and progressive be. Children saw scenarios or pictures and responded to an experimenter’s “show-me” requests based on the tense— non-past or past—of the verb in the request. For two groups (sixty-four 2and sixty-four 3-year-olds), some children also heard temporal adverbs. ...

– Yes: Huang (1982), Li (1985), Tang (1990), Tang (2000), Lin (2012) (among others) – syntactic evidence from control constructions, distribution of auxiliaries and aspect; Sybesma (2007) — adverbial distribution. – No: Hu et al. (2001) – no tense morphology, syntactic evidence from control constructions; Smith and Erbaugh (2005); Lin (2006; 2010) – semantic evidence (aspect + temporal interpre...