When patients visit primary-care physicians, they frequently have more than one concern. Patients' first concerns are solicited by physicians at the beginnings of encounters. A challenge to health care is how to get patients' additional concerns raised as topics of discussion. If patients' additional concerns are addressed, it tends to occur at the end of encounters. Using the methodology of co...

This paper presents a method for extracting multi-word collocations (MWCs) from text corpora, which is based on the previous extraction of syntactically bound collocation bigrams. We describe an iterative word linking procedure which relies on a syntactic criterion and aims at building up arbitrarily long expressions that represent multi-word collocation candidates. We propose several measures ...

Methemoglobinemia is a potential negative side effect associated with the use of benzocaine for topical anesthesia. A healthy patient admitted for an outpatient orthopedic procedure developed the clinical symptomatology of methemoglobinemia after topicalization of the airway with benzocaine. The patient subsequently responded to appropriate treatment and was fit for discharge the same day. Meth...

We present a proposal for the structure of noun phrases in Synchronous TreeAdjoining Grammar (STAG) syntax and semantics that permits an elegant and uniform analysis of a variety of phenomena, including quantifier scope and extraction phenomena such as wh-questions with both moved and in-place wh-words, pied-piping, stranding of prepositions, and topicalization. The tight coupling between synta...

All permutations of a two level embedding sentence in Turkish is analyzed, in order to develop an LTAG grammar that can account for Turkish long distance dependencies. The fact that Turkish allows only long distance topicalization and extraposition is shown to be connected to a condition-the coherence condition-that draws the boundary between the acceptable and inacceptable permutations of the ...

This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in the speech of one German-speaking child aged 2;0 to 5;0. The earliest relative clauses we found in the data occur in topicalization constructions that are only a little different from simple sentences: they contain a single proposition, express the actor prior to other participants, assert new information and often occur with main-c...

Incomplete category fronting in German has been argued to involve movement of a constituent containing a trace (Thiersch 1985; Webelhuth and den Besten 1987; G. Müller 1996). In this paper, we show that the two kinds of examples used as key evidence for such remnant movement, partial-VP and “partial-NP” topicalization, do not motivate an unbounded dependency theory complex enough to license fro...

This paper defends the thesis that in German all sentential arguments occurring in sentenceinitial position have undergone obligatory left dislocation. This implies that the Vorfeld is unable to be occupied by sentential arguments. The resumptive pronoun that immediately follows the left-dislocated phrase may be deleted in accordance with the conditions on Topic Drop that hold for German (cf. O...