Four structural priming experiments investigated the lexical boost effect in priming. In two experiments, we tested whether repeating subject prepositional object or double ditransitive structures boosted other manipulated repetition of verb. Repetition noun affected priming, but only when prime remained visible while participants produced target sentence. contrast, verb regardless could see an...

This paper provides a complex-predicate analysis of resultatives in terms of bare phrase structure. Our main claim is that the predicate types and thematic mapping rules required for simplex verbs can be used to explain core properties of resultative constructions if a strict versions of Chomsky’s inclusiveness condition is adopted. The analysis supports a view of subjects as external arguments...

An exception to a non-categorical generalization consists of a lexical item that exhibits the general pattern at a rate radically different – either far higher or far lower – from the norm. Lexical differences in noun phrases containing non-subject relative clauses (NSRCs) correlate with large differences in the likelihood that the NSRC will begin with that. In particular, the choices of determ...

The present study investigates children's bias when interpreting novel noun-noun compounds (e.g. kig donka) that refer to combinations of novel objects (kig and donka). More specifically, it investigates children's understanding of modifier-head relations of the compounds and their preference for HAS or LOCATED relations (e.g. a donka that HAS a kig or a donka that is LOCATED near a kig) rather...

Bresnan's Endocentric Mapping Principles (Bresnan, 2001) are used as diagnostics to demonstrate that the Mandarin relative clause structure is an endocentric one, in which the particle de is the sole functional and c-structural head, and the modified noun is one of two specifiers. The relative clause occupies a phraseinitial specifier position associated with a Modifier DF, and the final NP occ...

This paper shows by a quantitative evaluation that nonrestrictive modi cation in Japanese is a marked factor of prosody, and describes how to extract non-restrictive modication. In Japanese, restrictive and non-restrictive modi cation have the same syntactic structure, so it is di cult to distinguish them. We propose rules to extract non-restrictive modi cation in news-text based on the classi ...

The paper describes a similarity-based model to present the morphological rules for Chinese compound nouns. This representation model serves functions of 1) as the morphological rules of the compounds, 2) as a mean to evaluate the properness of a compound construction, and 3) as a mean to disambiguate the semantic ambiguity of the morphological head of a compound noun. An automatic semantic cla...

SystemX is a natural language interface (NLI) to relational databases. The system has been used with a customer service statistical database, a research grants database, and an environmental database. Distinctive features of the NLI are its use of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), treatment of complex noun phrases, integration of natural language with other input modes, use with a st...

Research in First Language Acquisition investigates three broad questions: What do children know about language? When does this knowledge emerge? How is children’s knowledge of language different from adults’ knowledge of language? This study adds to previous research in FLA by investigating the interaction between logic and meaning in child language. This study examines preschool children’s co...

Previous theories of conceptual combination have failed to address the possible role of suprasegmental factors such as prosodic emphasis patterns. Here, we investigated the effect of emphasising the initial word (modifier emphasis), both words (dual emphasis), or the final word (head emphasis) on people’s interpretations of novel noun-noun compounds (e.g., octopus apartment). We found that dual...