A controversial issue in neuro- and psycholinguistics is whether regular past-tense forms of verbs are stored lexically or generated productively by the application of abstract combinatorial schemas, for example affixation rules. The success or failure of models in accounting for this particular issue can be used to draw more general conclusions about cognition and the degree to which abstract,...

As the number of learners of English is constantly growing, automatic error correction of ESL learners’ writing is an increasingly active area of research. However, most research has mainly focused on errors concerning articles and prepositions even though tense/aspect errors are also important. One of the main reasons why tense/aspect error correction is difficult is that the choice of tense/a...

this study compares and contrasts tense and inherent aspect in english and persian lan-guage from a semantic and syntactic point of view. the aspectual verb system in both english and persian are semantically interpreted alike. however, in persian a group of stative verbs are grammaticalized by the imperfective obligatory morpheme mi-, while in english all sta-tive verbs perfective. furthermore...

In this article we will explore the consequences of adopting recent proposals by Chomsky, according to which the syntactic derivation proceeds in terms of phases. The notion of phase – through the associated notion of spellout – allows for an insightful theory of the fact that syntactic constituents receive default phrase stress not across the board, but as a function of yet-to-be-explicated co...

goal: this study aims at analyzing and categorizing different grammatical errors including morpho-syntactic and syntactic errors in written narratives of mentally retarded students in tehran. the frequencies of errors are compared among students in different grades. method: descriptive-analytic method has been used. a test consisted of four picture stories have been administered to 125 students...

A considerable number of studies have hitherto examined how native speakers and second language (hereafter L1 and L2, respectively) learners of English process English prepositional phrases. It is usually thought that both L1 and L2 speakers have a preference for verb phrase modification (e.g., The boy broke the old window with a ball of snow.) over noun phrase modification (e.g., The boy broke...

In this paper, we present a novel approach to enhance hierarchical phrase-based machine translation systems with linguistically motivated syntactic features. Rather than directly using treebank categories as in previous studies, we learn a set of linguistically-guided latent syntactic categories automatically from a source-side parsed, word-aligned parallel corpus, based on the hierarchical str...

There is a long tradition stretching back into the 19th century of implicitly assuming a relationship between language change and child language acquisition in the notion of “reanalysis”1. Recently, studies such as Yang (2000) have developed formal models of language acquisition and expanded them to model how new syntactic variants can arise among children and be maintained in adult speech comm...

This paper examines the view that parentheticals obligatorily form an intonational phrase and break up the intonational phrase of the matrix sentence into two intonational phrases. The analysis of spontaneous speech data of Hamburg German shows that neither do all parentheticals form a distinct intonational phrase nor do all parentheticals break up the intonational phrase of the matrix sentence...