In recent years, several computational models (Alishahi & Stevenson 2008, Chang 2008, Bannard, Lieven & Tomasello 2009) have begun fulfilling the promise of usage-based construction grammar (Tomasello 2003, Goldberg 2006) as a computationally testable account of the acquisition of grammar.1 In simulating specific developmental patterns, such as the generalization of argument structure construct...

This paper examines topic and focus effects on word order in English particle verb constructions. Several authors have reported that speakers often prefer the Verb-Particle-Object (VPO) order when the object has new information focus, and the Verb-Object-Particle (VOP) order when the object is discourse-given (Bolinger 1971, Svenonius 1996a, Kayne 1998, Dehé 2002). We illustrate this effect in ...

I will present an analysis of the intonation of the Banyumas dialect of Javanese (an Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia), based on the autosegmental-metrical framework. As Javanese is a language without lexical stress, there are no pitch accents. Boundary tones are associated with the Accentual Phrase (AP). A non-final AP ends in a H% tone, while a nuclear AP ends in either a HL% or a LH...

In this contribution we present an original analysis of Fronted Focus (FF) in Italian (contrastive/corrective focus in the terminology of Belletti 2004), based on the insight that alleged FF is not a variant of the discourse-level category of Focus but rather instantiates a combination between the semantics associated with the discourse-level category of Contrast and the kind of Exhaustivity Op...

In Danish aspectual differences are expressed by certain verbal constructions. Such aspectual constructions have not received much attention in the Danish literature, but cf. Diderichsen (1946, p. 156), Hansen (1967, vol. 3, pp. 30–31), Jensen (1985, p. 113), Brandt (1992) and Jørgensen (2001). (1) is an example of such an aspectual construction which is used to express imperfective aspect, and...

Polarized dependency (PD-) grammars are proposed as a means of efficient treatment of discontinuous constructions. PD-grammars describe two kinds of dependencies : local, explicitly derived by the rules, and long, implicitly specified by negative and positive valencies of words. If in a PD-grammar the number of non-saturated valencies in derived structures is bounded by a constant, then it is w...

This Guideline had been developed by the Quality Assurance Sub-committee, COC in Paediatrics and the expert authors for the Hospital Authority according to the state of medical knowledge at the time of publication. It has been established that doctors can act in accordance with a practice accepted as proper by a responsible body of medical opinion even though others may adopt a different practi...

Wendy Lehnert (UMass) presented a view of the coreference problem from the perspective of machine learning, i n particular, the idea of treating coreference as classification . To pursue this view, the overall coreference proble m needs to be broken up into sub-problems of the appropriate granularity that are amenable to machine-learnin g paradigms. Once a problem is identified, some of the iss...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between case and free word order in Korean by providing proper LP constraints which solve the problems of the previous analyses such as Kuno's (1980) Crossing-Over Constraint (COC). Based on Cho & Chai (2000), we introduce a new type marker which includes case, postpositions, and delimiters. We also add the Adjunct LP Constraint and the A...

This paper describes our approach to managing multiword expressions in Sentitext, a linguistically-motivated, lexicon-based Sentiment Analysis (SA) system for Spanish whose performance is largely determined by its coverage of MWEs. We defend the view that multiword constructions play a fundamental role in lexical Sentiment Analysis, in at least three ways. First, a significant proportion convey...