This experiment was designed to investigate whether the acoustic correlates of prosody of the pre-wh-part of the sentence differentiate in-situ-wh-questions from declaratives in Persian. To accomplish the purpose of this research 115 declaratives and 115 insitu-wh-questions were constructed. These sentences were elicited from eight Persian native speakers in a sentence elicitation task. The con...

This study presents new data on prosodic effects of focus in wh-questions in Tokyo Japanese, by examining prosodic effects of focus on and after lexically unaccented compound wh-words (e.g., nani.iro ‘what.color’). The results show that the realization of post-focal reduction differs considerably depending on the accentedness of the wh-word as well as of post-wh-words. When there is an accent o...

It is well known that natural languages may syntactically encode the focus/presupposition divide; we refer to it as the assertion content of the sentence. One construction that overtly and unambiguously structures this aspect of the meaning of a sentence is the pseudo-cleft and, in particular, the so-called specificational pseudo-cleft (Higgins 1976), where the post-copula constituent specifies...

Prior research has shown that sentences with noncanonical argument order (e.g., patient-before- agent instead of agent-before-patient order) are associated additional online processing difficulty, but this difficulty can be alleviated if the discourse context licenses order. Other studies demonstrated prone to misinterpretation effects: comprehenders sometimes seem form interpretations incorrec...

An ATN-Parser is presented with emphasis on the treatment of those phenomena which in the framework of transformational grammar are subsumed under the concept of WH-movement. The approach taken tries to embed these constructions into an ATN grsmmar in a general, linguistically motivated and in terms of the ATN gr~mrn~r formalism descriptive way. To accomplish this goal the approach described in...

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants processed case-unambiguous German subject and object WH-questions with either a long or a short distance between the WH-filler and its gap. A sustained left anterior negativity was observed for object questions with long filler-gap distance but not for short object questions. This negativity was modulated by individual diffe...

This article presents a unified solution to two long-standing problems concerning successive cyclicity. First, under the minimalist program of Chomsky (1995), a trigger for successive-cyclic wh-movement to [–wh] SpecC positions must be identified. Second, as noted by den Besten & Webelhuth (1990), there is a strict prohibition against unbound intermediate traces that result from a combination o...

The di-peptide Trp-His (WH) has vasorelaxant and anti-atherosclerotic functions. We hypothesized that WH has multiple biological functions and may aid AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) activation and affect the glucose transport system in skeletal muscle. First, we examined whether WH or His-Trp (HW) can activate AMPKα. Treatment of L6 myotubes with WH or HW significantly increased phosphoryl...

The decomposition space R3/Wh associated with the Whitehead continuum Wh is not a manifold, but the product (R3/Wh) × Rm is homeomorphic to R3+m for any m ≥ 1 (known since the 1960’s). We study the quasisymmetric structure on (R3/Wh) × Rm and show that the space (R3/Wh) × Rm may be equipped with a metric resembling R3+m geometrically and measure theoretically—it is linearly locally contractible...