Such WH-less WH-Questions (let us call them WLWQs) are very often used as questions in written tests or uttered by quizmasters in quizzes, though not often in daily conversations. 2 I assume that, despite their restriction in the range of registers, WLWQs are also constrained by the knowledge of human language. To my knowledge, there has been no previous research on WLWQs in the field. This pap...

Since Chomsky’s (1981) addition of the requirement that every sentence have a subject to the Projection Principle, the apparent stipulative nature of this constraint has been a source of worry for generative grammarians. The empirical basis of the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) is well-established but the external motivations for why Universal Grammar should contain such a requirement are ...

In this article I propose an alternative account of expletive THERE based on the theory that formal features may move overtly at PF. Specifically, I argue that the «inadequacies» of expletive THERE alluded to in Chomsky (1993: 33) are the result of the fact that THERE is simply a collection of formal features, an «alternative» spell-out of the Case and Agreement features of a lexical NP and has...

One of the fundamental issues in the design of linguistic theory concerns the overall complexity of the grammar. By Occam’s razor, given two competing grammars (or theories) of equal descriptive power, the one that is less complex should be preferred. Since the beginnings of generative linguistics, a number of principles and constraints have been devised in order to keep this complexity to the ...

We prove a Chomsky-Schützenberger representation theorem for weighted multiple context-free languages.

s: Melissa N. Hinman, Hui Zhu, Robert A. Hasman, Kavita Praveen, and Hua Lou. “Mammalian Hu protein family members have non-redundant functions as splicing suppressors”. Rustbelt RNA Meeting, Deer Creek State Park and Resort, Mt. Sterling, OH, October 19-20, 2007. Poster presentation.

This survey paper describes several extensions of context-free grammars as defined in the Chomsky hierarchy. These augmentations use a variety of different strategies to create grammars that generate all context-free and some context-sensitive languages. The basic concepts of each of these extensions will be examined, as well as whether the enhanced grammars inherited some of the desirable prop...

Herman & Chomsky (1988) have developed a propaganda model to explain why some subjects are preferably dealt with by the news media whereas no attention is paid to others. An essential criterion for this is the usefulness of a topic. Herman & Chomsky, therefore, refer to "worthy" und "unworthy victims": victims of national or international violence, whose torments, though comparable from an obje...

Constituency grammars originated with Leonard Bloomfield (1933) and were developed during the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties by a number of American structuralist linguists, including Harris (1946) and Wells (1947) — to mention just two. In the late nineteen fifties, Chomsky (1957) suggested that constituency grammars could be formalized as context free grammars. It is now clear that con...

In this talk, I present a series of cross-linguistic experiments that investigate the interpretation of different anaphoric forms in representational noun phrases (e.g., picture NPs such as picture of her/herself). I’ll present psycholinguistic data from three Germanic languages, namely English, Dutch, German, as well as results from Finnish, a non-Indo-European language. Broadly speaking, thes...