Recent experiments have confirmed earlier informal evidence that finite adjuncts are not islands categorically. Specifically, it has been shown necessarily for all dependency types (Sprouse et al. 2016), and the island status of an adjunct depends on type clause in question (Kush 2019; Müller Bondevik 2021; Nyvad 2022). The current study further explores these questions by testing three differe...

In most languages, most of the syntactic dependency relations found in any given sentence are projective: the word-word dependencies in the sentence do not cross each other. Some syntactic dependency relations, however, are non-projective: some of their word-word dependencies cross each other. Non-projective dependencies are both rarer and more computationally complex than projective dependenci...

In most languages, most of the syntactic dependency relations found in any given sentence are PROJECTIVE: the word–word dependencies in the sentence do not cross each other. Some syntactic dependency relations, however, are NON-PROJECTIVE: some of their word–word dependencies cross each other. Non-projective dependencies are both rarer and more computationally complex than projective dependenci...

The idea that the head of an expression determines the type of that expression is a deeply entrenched axiom of modern linguistics. It is the basis of X-Bar Theory and Dependency Grammar and a key notion underlying Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG). It has a long history dating back at least to Bloomfield’s notion of endocentric construct...

We present a case-study demonstrating the usefulness of Bayesian hierarchical mixture modelling for investigating cognitive processes. In sentence comprehension, it is widely assumed that the distance between linguistic co-dependents affects the latency of dependency resolution: the longer the distance, the longer the retrieval time (the distance-based account). An alternative theory, direct-ac...

Due to the complex nature of XML, finding classes of integrity constraints for XML data that are both expressive and practical is an important but challenging task. In this paper, we study a class of XML functional dependencies (called pXFDs) defined on the basis of tree homomorphism. We establish a semantic equivalence between the implications problems for pXFDs and for propositional Horn clau...

We investigate the problem of parsing conversational data of morphologically-rich languages such as Hindi where argument scrambling occurs frequently. We evaluate a state-of-the-art non-linear transitionbased parsing system on a new dataset containing 506 dependency trees for sentences from Bollywood (Hindi) movie scripts and Twitter posts of Hindi monolingual speakers. We show that a dependenc...

This contribution presents a dependency grammar (DG) analysis of the so-called descriptive and resultative V-de constructions in Mandarin Chinese (VDCs); it focuses, in particular, on the dependency analysis of the noun phrase that intervenes between the two predicates in a VDC. Two methods, namely chunking data collected from informants and two diagnostics specific to Chinese, i.e. bǎ and bèi ...

UCM-2 infers the words that are affected by negations by browsing dependency syntactic structures. It first makes use of an algorithm that detects negation cues, like no, not or nothing, and the words affected by them by traversing Minipar dependency structures. Second, the scope of these negation cues is computed by using a post-processing rulebased approach that takes into account the informa...

There has been little work on computational grammars for Amharic or other Ethio-Semitic languages and their use for parsing and generation. This paper introduces a grammar for a fragment of Amharic within the Extensible Dependency Grammar (XDG) framework of Debusmann. A language such as Amharic presents special challenges for the design of a dependency grammar because of the complex morphology ...