This paper compares two reduction principles in child language, Tense/Agreement Omission (Schütze 1997, Wexler 1998) and Root Peripheral Truncation (Rizzi 1994, 2001). The paper argues that the empirical content of these proposals as well as their partial overlap follows from an inherent hierarchy of acquisition steps of the kind predicted in Jakobson (1942). The empirical support for this rein...

This paper presents a corpus-based investigation of the use of zero pronouns in Hindi. After establishing that the antecedents of these null arguments cannot be recovered syntactically (Rizzi, 1982; Jaeggli & Safir, 1989), I propose an account in terms of "Centering Theory" (Grosz et al., 1995). Given the Hindi-specific centering constraints proposed in Prasad & Strube (2000), I argue that the ...

Even though many programming languages support a distinguished null or nil value for pointer or reference types to indicate that a pointer or reference currently does not refer to any object, none of these languages supports null values as a general concept for all types of the language. This inability to explicitly express a null or missing value raises several questions when defining the sema...

Cross-linguistically, control complement clauses have been reported to allow overt pronominal subjects displaying the diagnostic properties of obligatory (‘Overt PRO’; see Livitz (2011) and reference therein). Building on Gómez (2017), we extend empirical range PRO phenomena para finality adjunct in (Colombian) Spanish. We show that controlled subject para-infinitives ―be it null or PRO― has sa...

In this paper, we describe the design and integration of a three level cascaded non-deterministic finite state model of Turkish compounding into Turkish PAPPI, a comprehensive syntactic parser in the principles-andparameters(P&P) framework. Our approach is to handle compounding as an intermediate stage between morphological analysis and syntactic parsing. We discuss how the compounding machine ...