We present a sample of 34 spectroscopically confirmed BzK-selected ∼ 1011 M⊙ quiescent galaxies (pBzK) in the COSMOS field. The targets were initially observed with VIMOS on the VLT to facilitate the calibration of the photometric redshifts of massive galaxies at z & 1.5. Here we describe the reduction and analysis of the data, and the spectrophotometric properties of these pBzK galaxies. In pa...

In contrast, a state-of-the-art natural language generation (NLG) system would likely be able to produce only one of them, modulo variations introduced by, for example, passivization, topicalization, or pronominalization. The problem is not simply to choose among paraphrases, but to be able to produce them to start with. In this book, an extended version of his dissertation, Stede provides the ...

In the tradition of transformational grammar, the term ‘(grammatical) construction’ has been a theoretical taboo at least since the 1980s. It was then that Chomsky argued that transformations like ‘passive’ and ‘raising’, common in earlier versions of transformational grammar, should be eliminated in favor of general conditions on structures that would allow a single operation – ‘Move NP’ – to ...

This paper sketches a particular aspect of the active/passive distinction and tries to attribute all syntactic properties of these modes to the behavior of a single functional projection. The paper is organized in two parts. Part I is devoted to a discussion of the voice distinction in Toba Batak. It is argued that a correct syntactic description of the data involves movement of the subject in ...

To explain the phenomenon that certain English verbs resist passivization (e.g., *£5 was cost by the book), Pinker (1989) proposed a semantic constraint on the passive in the adult grammar: The greater the extent to which a verb denotes an action where a patient is affected or acted upon, the greater the extent to which it is compatible with the passive. However, a number of comprehension and p...

Passive constructions are examined cross-linguistically (English, German and Chinese) in an exploration of factors that contribute to their relative acceptability. Passives are universally dispreferred to their active counterparts. We describe a methodology for empirical analysis of factors that modulate differences in acceptability between passive and active variants of the same propositional ...

The subtitle of Huddleston (1971) reads A syntactic study based on an analysis of scientific texts; this volume thus represents the first carefully designed and substantial corpus of scientific English. In this paper I re-examine a selection of his findings based on the science and engineering half of Hyland's corpus of 240 research articles. Features selected were variation in the passivizatio...

The acquisition of the passive in English poses a learnability problem. Most transitive verbs have passive forms (e.g., k i c k / w a s k i c k e d b y ) , tempting the child to form a productive rule of passivization deriving passive participles from active forms. However, some verbs cannot be passivized (e.g. c o s t / * w a s c o s t b y ) . Given that children do not receive negative eviden...

This paper studies the syntactic properties of two Chinese function words ba and bei from a Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) perspective. It is proposed that they be identified as multi-valence prepositions or co-verbs that share the argument-taking characteristic of verbs and play the role of syntactic head (vs. semantic head) in organizing a sentence and determining the unexpressed grammatica...

We present a sample of 34 spectroscopically confirmed BzK-selected ∼1011 M quiescent galaxies (pBzK) in the COSMOS field. The targets were initially observed with VIMOS on the VLT to facilitate the calibration of the photometric redshifts of massive galaxies at z & 1.5. Here we describe the reduction and analysis of the data, and the spectrophotometric properties of these pBzK galaxies. In part...