A Unified Account of English Fronting Constructions

The Study of Stage-like Development of Morpho-syntactic Structures in EFL Learners’ Writing Performance: A Processability Theory Account for Cases of “Plural -s” and “Adverb Fronting”

Negation, VP Ellipsis, and VP Fronting in English : A Construction-HPSG Analysis

It is well-known that the English auxiliaries are sensitive to the so called NICE (Negation, Inversion, Contraction, and Ellipsis) phenomena. Based on these empirical properties of auxiliaries, this paper argues for the existence of the construction aux-headph(rase) whose subtypes include negation-ph, inversion-ph, ellipsis-ph, vp-filler-ph, and the like. Each of this subtype has its own constr...

Learning Auxiliary Fronting with Grammatical Inference

We present a simple context-free grammatical inference algorithm, and prove that it is capable of learning an interesting subclass of context-free languages. We also demonstrate that an implementation of this algorithm is capable of learning auxiliary fronting in polar interrogatives (AFIPI) in English. This has been one of the most important test cases in language acquisition over the last few...

The Pragmatics of Direct Object Fronting in Historical English

Speyer (2008) finds an overall decline in the rate of topicalization in historical English, which we refer to pretheoretically as direct object fronting. He attributes it to two separate phenomena: 1) the early loss of unaccented pronominal and demonstrative fronting, and 2) a gradient decline in the use of accented, contrastive fronting due to prosodic well-formedness conditions imposed by the...

An Inquiry into Existential Constructions

Existential constructions play an important role in the development of Generative Grammar. Their special natures urge linguists to pay painstaking effort to give them a unified account. At first we have a brief review of the relevant study of these constructions and examine their strong points and weakness. On the basis of their study, we assume that in existential constructions of SVO language...