This contribution examines the descriptive and resultative de-constructions in Mandarin Chinese, e.g. Wǒ pǎo-de hěn kuài ‘I run very fast’. There is a longstanding debate about this construction. The primary point of dispute concerns the main predicate: Is the first predicate the root of the sentence, i.e. pǎo-de ‘run’, or is the second predicate the root, i.e. kuài ‘fast’? We demonstrate here ...

Research in Construction Grammar assumes no strict separation between syntax and the lexicon. However, recent work by Goldberg (1995, 2006) shows that there is indeed a separation between lexical entries and grammatical constructions, including constraints regulating the fusion of grammatical constructions with verbs. This paper argues that Goldberg’s characterization of the interactions betwee...

G-TAG is a formalism dedicated to text generation. It relies on the Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) formalism and extends it with several specific notions allowing for the construction of a surface form from a conceptual representation. This conceptual representation is independent from the target language. The goal of this paper is to study G-TAG and its specific notions from the perspective give...

This paper examines the effects of perspective taking on grammar and the processing of sentences. The perspective hypothesis claims that language allows us to shift perspective on four cognitive levels. The specific claims are that: 1. Perspective taking operates online using images created in four systems: direct experience, space/time deixis, plans, and social role taking. 2. Language uses pe...

We describe the construction of a large lexicalized tree adjoining grammar for Italian, automatically extracted from an annotated corpus. We first introduce the TUT, a dependency style treebank for Italian, then we illustrate the algorithm that we have designed to extract the grammar, and finally we report two experiments about parsing complexity and coverage of the extracted grammar.