This paper describes a difference in social norms which results in a differing distribution of politeness markers in the Dutch and French speech communities. The use of politeness strategies is compared on the basis of a corpus of parallel Dutch and French requests. The differences in use can be explained by a different conception of the need for repair strategies.

The present study is an examination of an Italian aphasic speaker (M.R.) with non-fluent speech following a focal lesion in the left hemisphere. We develop an explanation of M.R.'s language impairment compatible with theories of generative syntax and with some observations on parsing strategies. The explanatory framework we adopt considers the grammar to be an integral part of on-line language ...

Abstract This article focuses on the interpretation of adjectives that appear in Greek polydefinite DP s. It provides empirical support to established position restrictive modifiers are preferred environments (Kolliakou 1995). At same time, it shows non-restrictively modified polydefinites not excluded by grammar (Manolessou 2000). To reconcile facts, a novel syntactic analysis polydefiniteness...

Development of noun phrase structure and use is analyzed as an important facet of syntactic acquisition from middle childhood to adolescence. Noun phrases occurring in narrative and expository texts produced in both speech and writing by 96 native speakers of English and Hebrew were identified and examined by a set of specially devised criteria including length in words, syntactic depth, abstra...

One major objection to Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory [Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction, Cambridge University Press, 1978, pp. 56–311; Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987] raised by Matsumoto [J. Pragmatics 12 (1988) 403; Multilingua 8 (1989) 207; Japanese/Korean Linguistics, vol. 2, Center for the Study of...

Type-Logical Lexical Functional Grammar (TL-LFG) combines the extreme lexicalism and tight relationship between syntactic and semantic construction of Type-Logical Categorial Grammar with the virtues of having functional structure at the core of syntactic analyses. This paper presents fragments of an analysis of modification in TL-LFG. Particular attention is given to the scope and ordering of ...

Recent work in hierarchical priors for language modeling [MacKay and Peto, 1994, Teh, 2006, Goldwater et al., 2006] has shown significant advantages to Bayesian methods in NLP. But the issue of sparse conditioning contexts is ubiquitous in NLP, and these smoothing ideas can be applied more broadly to extend the reach of Bayesian modeling in natural language. For example, a useful representation...

(Lancaster University, UK) Abstract: The theory of politeness of Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) has remained the most seminal and influential starting point for cross-cultural and cross-linguistic contrastive pragmatics. Yet is has also provoked countervailing arguments from Ide (1989, 1993), Matsumoto (1989), Gu (1990), Mao (1994) and others, pointing out a Western bias in Brown and Levinson’...

This paper proposes an analysis of the syntax and semantics of complex cardinal numerals, which involve multiplication (two hundred) and/or addition (twentythree). It is proposed that simplex cardinals have the semantic type of modifiers (ÆÆe, tæ, Æe, tææ). Complex cardinals are composed linguistically, using standard syntax (complementation, coordination) and standard principles of semantic co...

We present the Database of Catalan Adjectives (DCA), a database with 2,296 adjective lemmata enriched with morphological, syntactic and semantic information. This set of adjectives has been collected from a fragment of the Corpus Textual Informatitzat de la Llengua Catalana of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans and constitutes a representative sample of the adjective class in Catalan as a whole. T...