SUMMARY The occurrence of lucid dreaming (dreaming while being conscious that one is dreaming) has been verified for 5 selected subjects who signaled that they knew they were dreaming while continuing to dream during unequivocal REM sleep. The signals consisted of particular dream actions having observable concomitants and were performed in accordance with pre-sleep agreement. The ability of pr...

The goal of this paper is to outline the core of a new minimalist analysis of accusative vs. ergative patterns of argument encoding (via case marking or agreement). The central observation is that indeterminacies may arise in the application of the two elementary operations Merge and Agree (see Chomsky (2000, 2001)), given that they both obey an Earliness requirement (see Pesetsky (1989)); and ...

SpatialML is an annotation scheme for marking up references to places in natural language. It covers both named and nominal references to places, grounding them where possible with geo-coordinates, including both relative and absolute locations, and characterizes relationships among places in terms of a region calculus. A freely available annotation editor has been developed for SpatialML, alon...

SpatialML is an annotation scheme for marking up references to places in natural language. It covers both named and nominal references to places, grounding them where possible with geocoordinates, and characterizes relationships among places in terms of a region calculus. A freely available annotation editor has been developed for SpatialML, along with several annotated corpora. Inter-annotator...

This paper investigates the contribution of the German Vorfeld to local coherence. We report on the annotation of a corpus of parliament debates with a small set of coarse-grained labels, marking the functions of the Vorfeld constituents. The labels encode referential and discourse relations as well as non-relational functions. We achieve interannotator agreement of κ = 0.66. Based on the annot...

Although it is well-established that children with Specific Language Impairment characteristically optionally inflect forms that require tense and agreement marking, their abilities with regards to derivational suffixation are less well understood. In this paper we provide evidence from children with Grammatical-Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI) that derivational suffixes, unlike tense and a...

This study examined abstract syntactic categorization in infants, using the case of grammatical gender. Ninety-six French-learning 14-, 17-, 20-, and 30-month-olds completed the study. In a preferential looking procedure infants were tested on their generalized knowledge of grammatical gender involving pseudonouns and gender-marking determiners. The pseudonouns were controlled to contain no pho...

This paper explores seemingly puzzling subject-verb agreement patterns with Finnish numeral noun constructions (NNCs, e.g. three birds) in subject position, which can occur singular or plural verbs. alternation is not predicted by current theories. Building on properties of independent NNCs, I argue that the data be reconciled prior analyses if we analyze verb number marking as dependent refere...

This paper addresses the question of φ -feature marking in Basque. Basque finite verbs display an uncommonly large number of morphemes which covary with the φ -features of the absolutive, ergative, and dative arguments as well as (in some dialects) the gender of the addressee. Recent work (Preminger 2009; Arregi & Nevins 2012) has addressed the question of how these morphemes are derived. In ta...

Signed languages display a variety of pointing signs that serve the functions of deictic and anaphoric pronouns, possessive and reflexive pronouns, demonstratives, locatives, determiners, body part labels, and verb agreement. We consider criteria for determining the linguistic status of pointing signs. Among those criteria are conventionality, indexicality, phonological compositionality, being ...