this paper investigates the nature of absolutive case and the syntactic mechanisms underlying its licensing. to this end, two recent minimalist approaches to the syntactic derivation of ergative structure will be introduced. drawing on evidence from the syntactic derivation of clauses with intransitive complex predicates in kurdish, it will be established that the absolutive case is checked by ...

2 Abstract In this article I defend the view that many central aspects of the semantics of tense are determined by independently-motivated principles of syntactic theory. I begin by decomposing tenses syntactically into a temporal ordering predicate (the true tense, on this approach) and two time-denoting arguments corresponding to covert a reference time (RT) argument and an eventuality time (...

Compositionality is a critical and universal characteristic of human language. It is found at numerous levels, including the combination of morphemes into words and of words into phrases and sentences. These compositional patterns can generally be characterized by rules. For example, the past tense of most English verbs ("regulars") is formed by adding an -ed suffix. However, many complex lingu...

In this paper we propose a method to compositionally interpret tenses of Japanese complex sentences on the basis of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Discourse Representation Theory. In this approach, each of the tense-bearing forms such as main verbs and the past auxiliary is given a single temporal meaning independent of its position in the syntactic structure. The `relative tense theo...

On time reference and tense. The problems of time reference and tense in natural languages are discussed in their syntactic and ee::antic aspects. The syntactic description is based on the principles of the genera-tive transformational grammar. Since tense is a deictic category, the semantics language must be a pragmatically extended system. Furthermore, it seems that the use of tense and time ...

Contemporary studies of the semantics of tense and aspect tend to rely on syntactic hypotheses that are at odds with those of a phrase-structure based and lexicalist approach to syntax, such as that embodied in HPSG. For instance, de Swart (1998) explicitly assumes that tense relations originate in a syntactic position distinct from that of the head verb of the clause; and the approach to aspec...

Syntactic trees, or phrase markers, have originally been suggested as a representation of syntax in the mind based on purely linguistic grounds. In this paper, the psychological reality of syntactic trees and hierarchical ordering is explored from another perspective--that of the neuropsychology of language breakdown. The study reported here examined several syntactic domains that rely on diffe...

Structure building in language acquisition involves the adding of successive nodes in a hierarchical structure; its application is seen in the realm of syntax for both L1 (e.g. Clahsen, Penke & Parodi, 1993; Vainikka, 1993) and L2 acquisition (e.g. Vainikka & Young-Scholten, 1994, 1996), and to some extent within phonology as well (Brown, 1997). Although researchers in morphological theory argu...

Polysemy is a major characteristic of natural languages. Like words, syntactic forms can have several meanings. Understanding the correct meaning of a syntactic form is of great importance to many NLP applications. In this paper we address an important type of syntactic polysemy – the multiple possible senses of tense syntactic forms. We make our discussion concrete by introducing the task of T...