The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, I show that although Mandarin is an articleless language, its nominal expressions involve structures larger than a Noun Phrase (NP). I argue that two distinct projections, Demonstrative Phrase (DemP) and Unit Phrase (UnitP), should be identified in the structure above NP. Second, based on the proposal, I show that various ambiguous expressions, in f...

This article addresses the issue of selection restrictions for noun phrase specifiers. Danish data is presented which shows that definiteness plays an important role in this respect. It is pointed out that an analysis is required in which the specifier, when present, leaves a mark on the projected phrase. This is achieved by assuming that specifiers are syntactic heads of noun phrase constructi...

This paper pre,'Jents a model-theoretic semantics for directional modifiers in English. The semantic theory presupposed for the analysis is that of Montague Grammar (cf. Montague 1970, 1973) which makes it possible to develop a strongly compositional treatment of directional modifiers, Such a treatment has significant computational advantages over case-based treatments of directional modifiers ...

Adjectival modification, particularly by expressions that have been treated as higherorder modifiers in the formal semantics tradition, raises interesting challenges for semantic composition in distributional semantic models. We contrast three types of adjectival modifiers – intersectively used color terms (as in white towel, clearly first-order), subsectively used color terms (white wine, whic...

This paper argues that the two-layer modification of noun phrases as proposed in Larson & Takahashi (2004), Del Gobbo (2005), and Hsieh (2005) cannot account for the distribution of the order of stage-level and individual-level relatives in Mandarin. Alternatively, it is suggested that I-level relatives must occur closer to the head nouns than S-level relatives because I-level modifiers are arg...

Aspect extraction identifies relevant features of an entity from a textual description and is typically targeted to product reviews, and other types of short text, as an enabling task for, e.g., opinion mining and information retrieval. Current aspect extraction methods mostly focus on aspect terms, often neglecting associated modifiers or embedding them in the aspect terms without proper disti...

Development of noun phrase structure and use is analyzed as an important facet of syntactic acquisition from middle childhood to adolescence. Noun phrases occurring in narrative and expository texts produced in both speech and writing by 96 native speakers of English and Hebrew were identified and examined by a set of specially devised criteria including length in words, syntactic depth, abstra...

We argue for that taking into account semantic relations between words in the text can improve information retrieval performance. We implemented the process of information retrieval with simplified Conceptual Graphlike structures and compare the results with those of the vector space model. Our semantic representation, combined with a small simplification of the vector space model, gives better...

OBJECTIVE We investigate the use of adjectival modification as a way of assessing the systematic use of linguistic phenomena to represent similar lexical or semantic features in the constituent terms of a vocabulary. METHODS Terms consisting of one or more adjectival modifiers followed by a head noun are selected from disease and procedure terms in SNOMED. Frequently co-occurring adjectival m...