This paper describes three-participant 'give' constructions in ten Papuan languages of the Timor-Alor-Pantar (TAP) family. Generally lacking a class of simple ditransitive root verbs, TAP languages express 'give' events by means of biclausal constructions ('take X then give Y'), serial verb constructions ('take X give Y'), or particle-verb constructions originating in serial verb constructions....

Many analyses of initial coordination are based on the view that elements like either, both and neither are conjunctions. Such a view, however, leaves many questions unanswered with respect to the prosodic and syntactic structure of these constructions and their interpretation. This study argues that English either and its Dutch counterpart of are focus particles rather than conjunctions. This ...

This is the first part of a two-part article that reviews a number of the current debates regarding raising and control constructions. The issues addressed in this part include the syntactic attributes governing their distribution; the characterization of the relevant silent elements; the empirical properties which may distinguish/unify the two classes of constructions (on either syntactic or s...

Recent work on grammatical constructions in English (Lakoff 1987, Goldberg 1995, Kay & Fillmore 1999, Fillmore, Kay & O’Connor 1988) has provided strong evidence that the meaning of an utterance is not always derivable from its lexical parts and that the semantics of a sentence is partly comprised of meaning ascribed to syntactic constructions. Lacking in most of these accounts, however, is a d...

We explored the impact of a degraded semantic system on lexical, morphological and syntactic complexity in language production. We analysed transcripts from connected speech samples from eight patients with semantic dementia (SD) and eight age-matched healthy speakers. The frequency distributions of nouns and verbs were compared for hand-scored data and data extracted using text-analysis softwa...

Methods of text compression in Navy messages are not limited to sentence fragments and the omissions of function words such as the copula be. Text compression is also exhibited within ~grammatieal" sentences and is identified within noun phrases in Navy messages. Mechanisms of text compression include increased frequency of complex noun sequences and also increased usage of nominalizations. Sem...

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...