Portmanteau Constructions, Phrase Structure, and Linearization

Portmanteau Constructions, Phrase Structure, and Linearization

In bilingual code-switching which involves language-pairs with contrasting head-complement orders (i.e., head-initial vs. head-final), a head may be lexicalized from both languages with its complement sandwiched in the middle. These so-called "portmanteau" sentences (Nishimura, 1985, 1986; Sankoff et al., 1990, etc.) have been attested for decades, but they had never received a systematic, form...

Relational phrase structure grammar applied to Mohawk constructions

Recently much concern has been given to the problem of the generative adequacy of different types of grammars, [ l ] , [2], [3], [4], [5], [6] and [7]. There are certain types of dependencies in languages which constitute a crucial test for grammars in this respect; languages with certain types of dependencies cannot be generated by certain grammars, while they can be generated by others. For i...

The Analysis of Passive and Raising Constructions in Head-Driven Phrase Structure

Mismatches in Korean Copula Constructions and Linearization Effects

One main complexity of the copula constructions concerns a mismatch between morphology and syntactic constituency: the copula seems to form a morphological unit with the immediately preceding element, whereas in terms of syntax the copula appears to take this as its syntactic complement. In capturing such mismatches, we show that the copula is treated as an independent verb at the level of tect...

Prosodic Structure, Performance Structure and Phrase Structure

It is natural to expect phrase structure to be important in predicting prosodic phrasing. Yet there appears to be a concensus that syntactic phrases do not correspond well to prosodic phrasing, and independent structures have been proposed to account for prosody. I propose that the problem with phrase structure lies with the particular measures of boundary strength applied to syntactic structur...