In parsing, a phrase is more likely to be associated with an adjacent word than to a non-adjacent one. Instances of adjacency violation pose a challenge to researchers but also an opportunity to better understand how people process sentences and to improve parsing algorithms by, for example, suggesting new features that can be used in machine learning. We report corpus counts and reading-time d...

Many languages have morphological devices to turn a noun into an adjective. Often this morphology is genuinely derivational in that it adds a semantic predicate such as ‘havingN’ (proprietive), ‘lacking-N’ (caritive’), ‘similar-to-N’ (similitudinal) and so on. In other cases the denominal adjective expresses some vaguely defined notion of possession as in Russian Ivan-ovo (detstvo) ‘Ivan’s (chi...

Many concepts have stereotypes. This leaves open the question of whether concepts are stereotypes. It has been argued elsewhere that theories that identify concepts with their stereotypes or with stereotypical properties of their instances (e.g., Rosch, E. (1978). Principles of categorization. In E. Rosch & B. B. Lloyd (Ed.), Cognition and Categorization. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associa...

Abstract On the basis of a sample 424 languages or dialects, this article provides typological-comparative investigation designations for three major internal organs torso, ‘heart’, ‘liver’, and ‘lungs’. While colexification patterns are relatively unconstrained, data show skewing in morphologically complex terms: ‘heart’ ‘liver’ often serve as head nouns terms ‘lungs’, but reverse is rare. Ano...

There is a construction in English, exemplified by how long a bridge, which is so irregular that it has been named the Big Mess Construction, see Berman (1974). This paper first sketches its main characteristics (section 1) and a treatment of the internal structure of the noun phrase which serves as a background for the analysis (section 2). It then presents three ways in which the Big Mess Con...

We report on chunk tagging methods for German that recognize complex non-verbal phrases using structural chunk tags with Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). This state-of-the-art method for sequence classification achieves 93.5% accuracy on newspaper text. For the same task, a classical trigram tagger approach based on Hidden Markov Models reaches a baseline of 88.1%. CRFs allow for a clean and p...

Abstract On the basis of original data from Moksha Mordvin (Finno‐Ugric), I argue that some languages have nominal concord even though modifiers noun generally do not show inflection. Evidence for presence comes ellipsis, under which inflection is phonologically realized and restricted in same way as regular concord. To account distribution exponents, develop a model allows features to be prese...

Even if we disregard all those nominal expressions employed with purely connotative meaning, that is, those which do not refer to any object, and confine our attention to nouns which are names of things, it is clear that no extant lexicon contains anywhere near enough expressions of this kind to suffice even for ordinary daily life. We cannot get along with any single common noun to refer to a ...

Determining the semantic intent of web queries not only involves identifying their semantic class, which is a primary focus of previous works, but also understanding their semantic structure. In this work, we formally define the semantic structure of noun phrase queries as comprised of intent heads and intent modifiers. We present methods that automatically identify these constituents as well a...

BACKGROUND Residing remotely from health care resources appears to impact quality of care delivery. It remains unclear if there are differences in vascular access based on distance of one's residence to dialysis centre at time of dialysis initiation, and whether region or duration of pre-dialysis care are important effect modifiers. METHODS We studied the association of distance from a patien...