BACKGROUND Previous studies have shown that in semi-spontaneous speech, individuals with Broca's and anomic aphasia produce relatively many direct speech constructions. It has been claimed that in 'healthy' communication direct speech constructions contribute to the liveliness, and indirectly to the comprehensibility, of speech. AIMS To examine the effects of the occurrence of direct speech c...

This is the second part of a two-part article that reviews a number of the current debates regarding raising and control constructions. The issues addressed in this part include the spectrum of related raising (e.g. possessor raising, further raising) and control (partial, split, generic, super-equi) phenomena; cross-linguistic typology, including backward and copy constructions; and their acqu...

In this paper, I will address the question of Case absorption from a somewhat different angle: rather than focus on the conditions that must be met in order to allow a clitic to co-occur with a full NP, I will examine constructions that require a clitic (sometimes allowing, but at others prohibiting a doubled NP). I will argue that the existence of such constructions demonstrates that clitics c...

Many analyses of initial coordination are based on the view that elements like either, both and neither are conjunctions. Such a view, however, leaves many questions unanswered with respect to the prosodic and syntactic structure of these constructions and their interpretation. This study argues that English either and its Dutch counterpart of are focus particles rather than conjunctions. This ...

This experimental study tests the predictions of the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011, 2012) using two constructions whose appropriateness depends on monitoring discourse information: Clitic Left Dislocation and Fronted Focus. Clitic Left Dislocation relates a dislocated and clitic-doubled object to an antecedent activated in previous discourse, while Fronted Focus does not relate the fronted...

NLP-NG is a new NLP system consisting of three components: NG-CORE (language processing), NG-DB (database management), and NG-SEE (interactive visualization and entry). The ultimate goal of NLP-NG is to produce information retrieval systems in which users can choose full-text schema, adding specific items to focus their queries. Schema are created by a normalization process which elides adjunct...

The prosody of utterances containing one focused constituent is well investigated in German. However, little is known about the realisation of multiple contrastive accents in double-focus contexts. The present study addresses syntactic and rhythmic factors affecting the occurrence of multiple contrastive accents. In particular, we compare the prosodic marking of double-focused argument-predicat...

In direct contrast to their frequency amongst the world's languages, verbless constructions, such as those illustrated in the following examples (taken from Stassen 1997:62-63), have received relatively little attention in the lfg literature.

This paper presents a method to translate a proof in an extensional version of the Calculus of Constructions into a proof in the Calculus of Inductive Constructions extended with a few axioms. We use a specific equality in order to translate the extensional conversion relation into an intensional system.

A new universal hash family is described. Messages are sequences over a finite field IFq while keys are sequences over an extension field IFqn . A linear map ψ from IFqn to itself is used to compute the output digest. Of special interest is the case q = 2. For this case, we show that there is an efficient way to implement ψ using a tower field representation of IFqn . From a practical point of ...