We investigated the processing of violations of the verb position in Dutch, in a group of healthy subjects, by measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) through electroencephalography (EEG). In Dutch, the base position of the verb is clause final, but in matrix clauses, the finite verb is in second position, a construction known as Verb Second. In embedded clauses, the finite verb remains in it...

Abstract This article studies you bet and related phrases when they are used as a parenthetical free-standing response. Drawing on range of corpora, we provide both contemporary historical perspectives the set pragmatic expressions that has largely escaped scholars’ attention. Synchronically, demonstrate colloquial American markers to express speaker certainty/affirmation or respond thanks. Dia...

This study explores the wh-movement in Hadhrami Arabic (HA), a non-standard variety of Arabic, focusing on simple and embedded questions as well definite restrictive relative clauses within framework Chomsky’s (1995) Minimalist Program (MP). The researchers adopted descriptive ethnographic qualitative research design collecting their data from 10 purposefully chosen HA speakers through question...

Prosody and syntax are highly related, even if the prosodic structure cannot be directly mapped to the syntactic one and vice versa. This paper presents an experiment for exploring in what degree a powerful HMM-based automatic prosodic segmentation tool can recover the syntactic structure of an utterance in speech understanding systems. Results show that the approach is capable of recalling up ...

When Nez Perce speakers were presented with a cartoon depicting the interactions between Sue, the classmate, and the teacher, they judged both (1) and (2) to be appropriate utterances by the classmate. In (1), a 3rd person pronoun in the embedded clause co-refers with the matrix subject, Sue. In (2), a 1st person pronoun replaces it, with the same reference. In English, this second pattern is a...

When Nez Perce speakers were presented with a cartoon depicting the interactions between Sue, the classmate, and the teacher, they judged both (1) and (2) to be appropriate utterances by the classmate. In (1), a 3rd person pronoun in the embedded clause co-refers with the matrix subject, Sue. In (2), a 1st person pronoun replaces it, with the same reference. In English, this second pattern is a...

Assuming the Raising-to-Object analysis of ECM (Bošković, 1997; Lasnik, 1999a, 1999b; Lasnik & Saito, 1991; Postal, 1974), this raises a problem for recent minimalist accounts of Subjacency (e.g., Davies & Dubinsky, 2003; Uriagereka, 1999) that tries to derive the Subject Condition effect in (1), since the DP that receives Accusative Case in (2b) is essentially raised from the embedded clause s...

"D-linked" wh-phrases such as which car are known to increase the acceptability of sentences with island violations. One influential account of this attributes the effect to working memory: the D-linked filler is easier to retrieve at the site of the gap and this leads to the amelioration in acceptability. Such an account predicts that this effect should occur in general with non-trivial wh-dep...

Abstract The article asks whether the morphosyntax of embedded direct object clauses and purpose in Western Neo-Aramaic reflects retention from older stages Aramaic, or innovation under influence contact Arabic. To this end, are analysed Neo-Aramaic, namely, Old, Official, Biblical Qumran as well Syriac, three Late Aramaic dialects ( CPA , JPA SA ), contemporaneous Syrian analysis considers ver...