This paper proposes two syntactic positions for the wide range of Cantonese sentence-final particles that occur in the CP domain. The first position that I argue for is identified with the Force head (SFP1) of the C space (à la Rizzi 1997) which hosts particles that express speech acts and speaker-oriented modality. The second position (SFP2) is an iterative head located lower than the higher T...

In analyzing the formation of a given compound, both its internal syntactic structure and semantic relations need to be considered. The Generative Lexicon Theory (GL Theory) provides us with an explanatory model of compounds that captures the qualia modification relations in the semantic composition within a compound, which can be applied to natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we ...

Townsend and Bever (2001) and Ferreira (2003) argue that simple templates representing the most commonly used orderings of arguments within a clause (e.g., NP-V-NP = Agent-Action-Patient) are used early in sentence comprehension to derive a preliminary interpretation before a full parse is completed. Sentences which match these templates (e.g., active sentences, subject clefts) are understood q...

In three experiments, participants received nouns or noun phrases for objects and verbally generated their properties ("feature listing"). Several sources of evidence indicated that participants constructed perceptual simulations to generate properties for the noun phrases during conceptual combination. First, the production of object properties for noun phrases depended on occlusion, with unoc...

The article deals with the characteristics of noun phrases functioning in pre-position. Pre-noun modifiers, or attributive modifiers, are among the high-capacity structures in the contemporary English language, as they enable to devoid of prepositions and to describe objects in a laconic way. The goal of this research was to analyze the way scholars interpret this linguistic structure today, as...

Event nouns can lexically encode eventive information. Recently these nouns have generated considerable scholarly interest. However, little research has been conducted in their morphological and syntactic structure, qualia modification, event representing feature, and information inheritance characteristics. This study has these main findings. 1) Morphologically, the modifier and the head is ei...

This paper investigates the types and the developmental trajectory of noun modifying constructions (NMCs), in the form of [Modifier + de + (Noun)], attested in Mandarin-speaking children’s speech from a semantic perspective based on the generative lexicon framework (Pustejovsky, 1995). Based on 1034 NMCs (including those traditionally defined as relative clauses (RCs)) produced by 135 children ...

In this paper, we present a statistical model for detecting article errors, which Japanese learners of English often make in English writing. The model detects article errors based on probabilities estimated looking at the three head words the head verb, the preposition, and the head noun in a corpus. Unfortunately, simply looking at the three head words causes the data sparseness problem. To a...

To teach compounds effectively, this paper aims to explore the rules in terms of their grammatical categories, stress, and meaning. The study shows that there are two predict categories compounds:Generally speaking, if head is content word, determined by right-hand words.If function usually left-hand words. In addition, several determine stress compounds. For example, primary noun placed on fir...