Resumption optionality in direct object relative clauses in modern standard Arabic

Resumption by Buffers: German Relative Clauses

In a local derivational (phase-based) approach to syntax, instances of resumption in German (longdistance) relativization constructions with an empty operator and a complementizer wo (‘where’) must be analyzed in terms of movement. Against this background, these constructions raise three problems for syntactic analysis: (i) a locality (backtracking) problem (‘How can the information that a resu...

Modern Hebrew Relative Clauses

Semantic indeterminacy in object relative clauses.

This article examined whether semantic indeterminacy plays a role in comprehension of complex structures such as object relative clauses. Study 1 used a gated sentence completion task to assess which alternative interpretations are dominant as the relative clause unfolds; Study 2 compared reading times in object relative clauses containing different animacy configurations to unambiguous passive...

Building A Modern Standard Arabic Corpus

Language Engineering, including Information Retrieval, Machine Translation and other Natural Language-related disciplines, is showing in recent years more interest in the Arabic language. Suitable resources for Arabic are becoming a vital necessity for the progress of this research. Until recently, only two Arabic corpora were commonly available for researchers: the AFP Arabic newswire from LDC...

Discourse accessibility constraints in children’s processing of object relative clauses

Children's poor performance on object relative clauses has been explained in terms of intervention locality. This approach predicts that object relatives with a full DP head and an embedded pronominal subject are easier than object relatives in which both the head noun and the embedded subject are full DPs. This prediction is shared by other accounts formulated to explain processing mechanisms....