This dissertation examines the syntax and argument structure of non-verbal predicates (focusing primarily on adjectives) in Tagalog. Drawing on evidence from a variety of construction types (including Comparative, Existential, and Ellipsis constructions among others), I argue against the claim that adjectives differ from verbs in their ability to project an internal theme argument (Pesetsky 198...

Deverbal nouns exhibit both nominal and verbal syntactic behaviour: they operate as concrete nouns, but also participate in verbal constructions where they require arguments and accept aspectual modification. We first describe the phenomenon and discuss theoretical analyses proposed in the literature, and then propose a methodology for applying the theoretical results to parsing of nominal phra...

Realtime sentence comprehension is an incremental process, involving the rapid establishment of a syntactic representation and dependencies over that representation. This requires previously encountered linguistic material to be retrieved from memory. Following much recent work, we assume a content-addressable retrieval mechanism: constituent encodings are retrieved based on their inherent feat...

Agreement computation is one of the pillars of language comprehension. In this fMRI study, we investigated the neuro-cognitive processes of agreement associated with number feature covariance in subject-verb agreement and determiner-noun concord in Spanish by creating mismatches (ella/*ellas corre, she/*they dances vs. el/*los anillo, thesg/*thepl ring). The results evidenced the engagement of ...

In (1-a), the complement of before/after is an expression denoting a time, while it denotes an event in (1-b). Before and after can also take clausal complements, as in (1-c). Finally, (1-d) illustrates that what looks superficially like a DP denoting an individual can also serve as complement. The literature on before and after has focused on cases like (1-b) and (1-c) (Pratt and Francez, 2001...

There are well-known word order correlations between clauses and DPs, with clausal VS(O) order correlating with nominal NS(O) order, and, less strongly, with NA order. Of the 53 V1 languages listed in Hawkins (1983) for example, 51 have NG word order, and 38 NA order. These correlations can be illustrated for Kisongo Maasai, an Eastern Nilotic language with strict VSO word order, and (Dem) N (N...

Grammar rules for Clausal Coordinate Ellipsis (CCE) are based nearly exclusively on linguistic judgments (intuitions). For German, the extent to which grammar rules based on this type of empirical evidence generate all and only CCE structures that populate text corpora, has only been explored with the TIGER treebank of written newspaper text. How well these rules fit spoken German is unknown. I...

Present-day sentence generators are often incapable of producing a wide variety of wellformed elliptical versions of coordinated clauses, in particular, of combined elliptical phenomena (Gapping, Forward and Backward Conjunction Reduction, etc.). The applicability of the various types of clausal coordinate ellipsis (CCE) presupposes detailed comparisons of the syntactic properties of the coordi...

The focus of this paper is the derivation and interpretation of comparative deletion (CD) in English. Comparative deletion constructions include comparatives in which the comparative clause (the complement of than or as, henceforth the ‘c-clause’) contains some clausal material, but is “missing” an adjectival, adverbial or nominal constituent, as illustrated by (1)-(3), (4)-(5), and (6)-(7), re...

(1B), the fragment construction and (1B’), the null argument construction, seem to have the same interpretation. In this paper we argue that the sources of interpretation given in (1BB’) are fundamentally distinct. We propose that fragments are analyzed as an instance of clausal ellipsis while null arguments are analyzed as an instance of null pronoun pro; hence, the former is surface anaphora ...