This paper discusses the feature checking mechanism of interrogative sentences in Japanese and Korean. We first focus on a phenomenon of omitting question markers in informal speech in Japanese and attempt to provide an account for it within the framework of Principles and Parameters approach. We argue that question markers can be omitted only if interrogative features of the sentence can be pr...

We model the differences between declarative and interrogative intonation in Chinese with Stem-ML, an intonation description language combined with an algorithm for translating tags into quantitative prosody. Our study shows that the diverse surface patterns can be accounted for by two consistent gestures: 1. Interrogative intonation has a higher phrase curve than declarative intonation; 2. Sen...

In our quest to design and develop more effective natural language processing systems, our user models are becoming more sophisticated. But we have not gone far enough. The notion of a user model can be extended to social groups and subculture to produce group models. In this paper we use ILP techniques to learn interrogative subculture idioms. From those idioms we produce a model of the interr...

In Danish relative clauses and embedded interrogative clauses are not extraction islands. However, there is an asymmetry between the two clauses. In Danish it is possible to extract the subject out of an embedded interrogative clause. Extraction of the subject out of a relative clause, on the other hand, is not allowed. In this paper we present a formal HPSG analysis of extraction in Danish whi...

Frequency evidence, which we can write as p(x), the probability of x occurring, concerns itself simply with the overall distribution of linguistic phenomenon x – such as whether informal written English has a higher proportion of interrogative clauses than formal written English. In order to calculate frequency evidence we must define x, i.e. decide how to identify interrogative clauses. We mus...

The primary goal of this paper is to investigate whether interrogative suggestibility is related to certain personality traits in an Estonian sample of subjects (N = 61; 20 men and 41 women; mean age = 20.6 years; SD = 2.98). Results show that the means and standard deviations for different suggestibility scores in a sample of the Estonian population were all lower compared with those obtained ...

This paper providers unification-based GPSG and LFG analyses of Mandarin questions. First, we briefly introduce four kinds of Mandarin question, namely, WH-questions, A-not-A questions, disjunctive questions, and particle questions. Their different interrogative messages are adequately encoded with different feature-value pairs. Then, the compatibility of this interrogative information in a sim...