The paper provides a uniform account of a number of locality effects, in particular, the Subject Condition, the Adjunct Condition, Richards’s (2001) tucking in effect, and the full Comp-trace paradigm, including (in addition to the basic cases) relative and extraposed clauses, the impossibility of short-subject topicalization, French que-qui alternation, and the effect of whmovement on agreemen...

This contribution examines discontinuities in DG. Discontinuities are addressed in terms of catenae and rising. The catena is defined as A WORD OR A COMBINATION OF WORDS THAT IS CONTINUOUS WITH RESPECT TO DOMINANCE. The definition identifies any tree or subtree of a tree as a catena. Rising occurs when a governor fails to dominate one (or more) of its governees. Two sorts of rising are distingu...

Parser evaluation traditionally relies on evaluation metrics which deliver a single aggregate score over all sentences in the parser output, such as PARSEVAL. However, for the evaluation of parser performance concerning a particular phenomenon, a test suite of sentences is needed in which this phenomenon has been identified. In recent years, the parsing of discontinuous structures has received ...

For many linguists interested in pragmatics, including the Prague School theorists, Halliday (1967), and Vallduví (1992,1993), information structure is a sentence-level structure. It is generally characterized as a variation of sentential structure along certain parameters to modulate the presentation of the information imparted by the sentence in such a way as to relate that information to pri...

This article discusses the information-structural status and the syntax of left and right dislocation constructions in Dutch. Four orthogonal information-structural features are proposed, and their distribution is systematically investigated. Furthermore, it is argued that hanging topic left dislocation, backgrounding right dislocation and afterthoughts are a particular kind of parenthesis. The...

We describe a process for converting the Penn Arabic Treebank into the CCG formalism. Previous efforts have yielded CCGbanks in English, German, and Turkish, thus opening these languages to the sophisticated computational tools developed for CCG and enabling further cross-linguistic development. Conversion from a context free grammar treebank to a CCGbank is a four stage process: head finding, ...

Abstract: This study investigated whether Mandarin-speaking children can demonstrate adult-like syntactic competence. Mandarin-speaking 2-, 3-, 4-, 5-year-olds’ and adults’ comprehension of agent-patient relations across four Mandarin transitive constructions with the novel verbs: SVO construction, ba-construction, subjectless ba-construciton, and topicalization construction were examined using...

This article presents a unified solution to two long-standing problems concerning successive cyclicity. First, under the minimalist program of Chomsky (1995), a trigger for successive-cyclic wh-movement to [–wh] SpecC positions must be identified. Second, as noted by den Besten & Webelhuth (1990), there is a strict prohibition against unbound intermediate traces that result from a combination o...

This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in the speech of one German-speaking child aged 2 ; 0 to 5 ; 0. The earliest relative clauses we found in the data occur in topicalization constructions that are only a little different from simple sentences: they contain a single proposition, express the actor prior to other participants, assert new information and often occur with ma...