In the processing of subject-verb agreement, non-subject plural nouns following a singular subject sometimes "attract" the agreement with the verb, despite not being grammatically licensed to do so. This phenomenon generates agreement errors in production and an increased tendency to fail to notice such errors in comprehension, thereby providing a window into the representation of grammatical n...

A structural priming study examined whether the mapping between grammatical functions (e.g. subject) and thematic roles agent) persists across utterances. Specifically, we tested native Cantonese speakers are more likely to produce a standard subject–verb–object (SVO) active or passive sentence after repeating an in object–subject–verb (OSV) order where direct object (i.e. patient) is grammatic...

We are reasonably convinced by the remarks in Pullum (p. 182) that the sluicing construction, on which the argument in Postal and Langendoen (p. 177) for the non-CFhood of English is based, is not, contrary to what is assumed there, subject to an intrasentential matching condition. Consequently, the argument does not go through. However, we believe that an analogous argument can be given, which...

the persian morpheme ra has attracted the attention of many linguists including karimi (1989), dabir-moghaddam (1990) and ghomeshi (1996) among others. karimi takes ra as the accusative case marker, the presence of which on subjects and objects of prepositions render the sentence ungrammatical. according to ghomeshi (1996), it marks dps functioning as vp-level topics. dabir-moghaddam (1990) ana...

This paper reports on the participation of the NLP GROUP at UNED in the DiSCo’2011 compositionality evaluation task. The aim of the task is to predict compositionality judgements assigned by human raters to candidate phrases, in English and German, from three common grammatical relations: adjectivenoun, subject-verb and subject-object. Our participation is restricted to adjectivenoun relations ...

In this paper, we present empirical data from a corpus study on the linear order of subjects and objects in German main clauses. The aim was to establish the validity of three well-known ordering constraints: given complements tend to occur before new complements, definite before indefinite, and pronoun before full noun phrase complements. Frequencies of occurrences were derived for subject-fir...

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In the preceding chapters, we presented an analysis of lexical aspect that integrates the many lexical aspectual distinctions relevant to grammar with grammatical consequences into a single model. The model analyzes the aspectual structure of events as a temporal sequence of qualitatively distinct phases. The phases are represented in two geometric dimensions, time and qualitative states. In th...