The semantics of determiner phrases, be they definite descriptions, indefinite descriptions or quantified noun phrases, is often assumed to be a fully solved question: common nouns are properties, and determiners are generalised quantifiers that apply to two predicates: the property corresponding to the common noun and the one corresponding to the verb phrase. We first present a criticism of th...

A desirable property of a noun phrase analysis is a level of detail which makes it possible to account for the distribution of elements inside the phrase. In this respect Danish noun phrase structure poses a special problem because of its subtle combinations of deenite prenominal expressions. Examples of Danish nominals containing such expressions are given in (1) 1. (1) a. denne min nyvundne v...

In this paper, a theory T H based on combining type freeness with logic is introduced and is then used to build a theory of properties which is applied to determiners and quantiiers. It is well known that mixing type freeness and logic leads to contradictions. For example, by taking the following syntax of terms: t := xjx:tjt 1 t 2 j:t and applying the term x::xx to itself one gets a contradict...

Optionality is an issue within the minimalist theory of language, in which principle “last resort” does not admit competing options to express same meaning. What needed a solid empirical base showing that apparently forms do specialize for some syntactic/semantic traits. Hence, aim this pilot study investigate optionality choice indefinite determiners Piacentine, Italo-Romance variety spoken no...

To test predictions of a forward modeling framework for spoken language processing, we characterized effects of context speech rate on the real-time interpretation of indefinite noun phrases using the visual world paradigm. The speech rate of sentence material distal to the onset of the noun phrase was manipulated such that the segments surrounding the determiner a in singular noun phrases had ...

A classical conjecture in generative linguistics is that universal restrictions on determiners in Natural Language (e.g. monotonicity, invariance, and conservativity) serve the purpose of simplifying the language acquisition task. This paper formalizes this conjecture within the PAC-learnability framework.

In many languages, the production of noun phrases requires the selection of gender-marked elements like determiners or inflectional suffixes. There is a recent debate as to whether the selection of freestanding gender-marked elements, such as determiners, follows the same processing mechanisms as the selection of bound gender-marked morphemes, such as adjective suffixes. Most of the evidence on...

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 approach has been developed in the context of the E U R O T R A machine translation (MT) project and thus has been d e s i g n e d w i t h r e spec t to a s y n t a x based s t r a t i f i c a t i o n a l translation process? We assume that in a semantic representation determiners are deleted and that their semantic funct ion which is represented by semantic features is percolated into the...