Superficially postverbal subjects of free inversion languages such as Italian are argued to be able to meet two distinct structural analyses: they may occupy either a VP-internal position, as more traditionally assumed, or a higher (preverbal and, actually, left-peripheral) position, with the remnant of the clause crossing leftward over them by dislocation or focus movement. These are all and o...

In this paper we explore the development of the morphosyntax-semantics interface by comparing development in 4 typologically diverse languages: Dutch (a Germanic V2 language), Greek, Italian (a Romance pro-drop language) and Swahili (a Bantu language), with particular emphasis on Swahili, a relatively understudied language whose morphosyntactic structure is particularly relevant to the question...

This paper introduces the CLIMB (Comparative Libraries of Implementations with Matrix Basis) methodology and grammars. The basic idea behind CLIMB is to use code generation as a general methodology for grammar development in order to create a more systematic approach to grammar development. The particular method used in this paper is closely related to the LinGO Grammar Matrix. Like the Grammar...

This article presents a set of morphological tools for small Uralic languages. Various Hungarian research groups specialized in Finno-Ugric linguistics and a Hungarian language technology company (MorphoLogic) have initiated a project with the goal of producing annotated electronic corpora for small Uralic languages. The languages described include Mordvin, Udmurt (Votyak), Komi (Zyryan), Mansi...

In many languages prosody is used for marking focus, but the way this is done varies from one language to the next. Previous work on the acquisition of prosodic focus marking has been centred on English, German and Dutch, thus little is known about how prosodic focus is acquired outside West-Germanic varieties. We present a study of prosodic focus marking in Central Swedish, showing how the foc...

Unlike Germanic, Italian and many other languages from different language families allow whclauses to occur as the complement of existential predicates and be interpreted as indefinites. I call these whclauses indefinite free relatives. A compositional semantics will be given for indefinite free relatives that is based on Jacobson’s (1995) proposal for the semantics of whwords. In a nutshell, I...

The computational processing of compound semantics poses several interesting challenges. Up to now, the processing of nominal compounds with non-noun left-hand constituents (henceforth XN compounds) has not received any attention, despite the fact that these also seem to be rather productive in Germanic languages. In our research project, we aim to fill this hiatus by investigating various kind...

Verbal word formation processes involving prefixes and particles are highly productive in Germanic languages. The compositional semantics of such prefix and particle verbs requires an in-depth analysis of the interdependence of their constituent parts for adequately representing these types of complex verbs in lexical-semantic networks. The present paper introduces modeling principles that acco...

In recent years, there has been a considerable amount of interest in using Natural Language Processing in Information Retrieval research, with specific implementations varying from the word-level morphological analysis to syntactic parsing to conceptual-level semantic analysis. In particular, different degrees of phrase-level syntactic information have been incorporated in information retrieval...

This paper discusses constructions such as We’ll have two beers and a coffee that are typically used for beverage orders in restaurant contexts. We compare the behavior of nouns in these constructions in three Germanic languages, English, Icelandic, and German, and take a closer look at the correlation of the morphosyntactic and semantic-conceptual changes involved. We show that even within suc...