The Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978) maintains that there are two types of intransitive verbs: unergative, where the grammatical subject is the Agent and the verb describes an activity (laugh, run) and unaccusative, where the grammatical subject is the Theme and the verb describes an achievement, accomplishment or state (open, arrive, exist). Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995) argued tha...

Subject ellipsis is not typically considered to be a common occurrence in English, although it has been studied within certain genres of text, including personal diaries. The current paper explores English subject ellipsis in a diary corpus that has been constructed from online weblogs (blogs). The pronouns I and it were found to be the most frequently omitted subjects and their identities were...

Typological work has demonstrated that there are constraints on word order variation. For example, auxiliary verbs tend to precede content verbs in VO languages (Dryer 1992). Further, typologically recurrent structural preferences are reflected in language change. In this paper, we present agent-based modeling work that suggests that Filtered Learning Models (e.g. Kirby 1999) can capture the em...

The words people use in their daily lives can reveal important aspects of their social and psychological worlds. With advances in computer technology, text analysis allows researchers to reliably and quickly assess features of what people say as well as subtleties in their linguistic styles. Following a brief review of several text analysis programs, we summarize some of the evidence that links...

The status of children’s acquisition of grammatical categories and in particular of auxiliaries continues to be debated. On the one hand, a number of corpus studies suggest that auxiliaries and similar categories are absent early on (e.g., Wijnen 1996/1997, Schlyter 2003). On the other hand, experimental studies indicate that syntactic competence for functional categories is available to toddle...

The Computerized Propositional Idea Density Rater (CPIDR, pronounced "spider") is a computer program that determines the propositional idea density (P-density) of an English text automatically on the basis of part-of-speech tags. The key idea is that propositions correspond roughly to verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. After tagging the parts of speech using MontyLingua...

Classic observations in the field of the neuropsychology of language have established that brain injury can result in the specific disruption of the ability to use words from the closed class (e.g., determiners, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, etc.) while the production of words from the open class is preserved (e.g., nouns, verbs, etc.). In this study, we report the case of a French native spea...

This contribution provides a historical overview of the analysis of function words in surface syntactic dependency hierarchies. Starting with Tesnière (1959), the overview progresses through some prominent voices in the history of DG (Mel'čuk 1958, 1963, Hays 1964, Matthews 1981, Schubert 1987, Maxwell and Schubert 1989, Hudson 1976, 1984, etc.). The overview establishes that the analysis of pr...

This study was an analytical account of EFL postgraduate learners’ use of verbs in citing other scholars in their own writing. Particular interest was differing extents of these verbs as categorised by Myer (1997), namely verbs representing statement of scholarly writing, verbs communicating knowledge of scholarly writing, and verbs denoting cognition of scholarly writing, each of which has sub...

The aim of this paper is to compare the behaviour of Polish and Romance pronominal clitics in tense auxiliary constructions and to account for Polish facts. First, we present the system of Polish auxiliaries, briefly comparing it to Romance. Then, we discuss clitic climbing (CC), the phenomenon well-known in Romance. We contrast Polish CC with CC in Italian and French. Finally, we present a for...