The Syntactic Algebra of Adjuncts

Application of finite-state transducers to the acquisition of verb subcategorization information

This paper presents the design and implementation of a finite-state syntactic grammar of Basque that has been used with the objective of extracting information about verb subcategorization instances from newspaper texts. After a partial parser has built basic syntactic units such as noun phrases, prepositional phrases, and sentential complements, a finite-state parser performs syntactic disambi...

Towards a Unified Account of Adjuncts

We present an analysis of adjuncts which, while based on the traditional binary adjunction schema, accommodates the phenomena that motivate the alternative Adjunct-as-Complement approach, such as adjunct extraction and case marking. The key idea is to enable the syntactic head (modifiee) to select for its modifier (adjunct) via the new valence feature dedicated for adjuncts, while leaving its v...

The Semantics of the Plural Pronoun Construction*

The meaning of ‘we’ is usually seen as ‘I þ others’. Russian, along with many other languages, has a construction that allows an overt specification of ‘others’, the so-called Plural Pronoun Construction (PPC), which involves a plural pronoun and a comitative phrase. The syntactic behavior of this comitative phrase differs from that of other withphrases such as VP-adjuncts, NP-adjuncts, and com...

Arguments and Adjuncts as Language- Particular Syntactic Categories and as Comparative Concepts

Implicit Adjuncts : The Cases of Degree Modifiers in Japanese and English

The issue of adjuncts has long been a neglected field of linguistic study whether it be syntactic or semantic. It is only in Pustejovsky (1995) that we find a brief mention of adjuncts. In addition to what the author calls true arguments, default arguments, and shadow arguments, he sets up a class of true adjuncts citing the following sentence , Mary drove down to New York on Tuesday. We will t...