This study reports the results of a study in which participants were asked to repeat a sentence and produce a tag question (e.g. The girl behind the headmaster got punished, didn't she?). Holding the head noun phrase constant, three properties of the noun phrase within the modifier were manipulated: number (e.g., headmaster, headmasters), gender (e.g., headmaster, headmistress), and animacy (e....

This paper wants to verify to what extent semantic effects contribute to the alternation between inflected and uninflected adjectives in a definite NP with a singular neuter head noun as observed in the Corpus Gesproken Nederlands. Existing accounts invoke the non-compositional semantics of the adjective-noun combination to interpret this case of inflectional variation, generally using highly i...

Previous theories of conceptual combination comprehension have failed to address the possible role of suprasegmental factors such as prosody and emphasis patterns. In this study, we investigated the effect of prosody on the comprehension of novel noun-noun compounds. First, we formulate some predictions based on existing theories of conceptual combination and linguistic accounts of emphasis ass...

This paper investigates vowel elision and morpheme deletion in Embosi (Bantu C25), an under-resourced language spoken in the Republic of Congo. We propose that the observed morpheme deletion is morphological, and that vowel elision is phonological. The study focuses on vowel elision that occurs across word boundaries between the contact of long/short vowels (i.e. CV[long] # V[short].CV), and be...

We present a novel method for mapping thematic trends called "Classification by Preferential Clustered Link" (CPCL). This method clusters relevant textual units (terms) from a corpus of texts, based on meaningful linguistic relations (syntactic variations) identified amongst the units. Terms related through syntactic variations are represented in the form of a graph and are first clustered into...

Previous research has suggested that the conceptual representation of a compound is based on a relational structure linking the compound's constituents. Existing accounts of the visual recognition of modifier-head or noun-noun compounds posit that the process involves the selection of a relational structure out of a set of competing relational structures associated with the same compound. In th...

Development of noun phrase structure and use is analyzed as an important facet of syntactic acquisition from middle childhood to adolescence. Noun phrases occurring in narrative and expository texts produced in both speech and writing by 96 native speakers of English and Hebrew were identified and examined by a set of specially devised criteria including length in words, syntactic depth, abstra...

Japanese allows the numeral+classifier combination to appear in a variety of positions in relation to the head noun. This paper argues that it is necessary to posit at least four functional projections above NP (#P, CaseP, QP, and DP) and massive phrasal movement of such functional projections in order to provide a principled account for the structural diversity of the numeral+classifier combin...

Objectives: Nouns and verbs are the central conceptual linguistic units of language acquisition in all human languages. While the noun-bias hypothesis claims that nouns have a privilege in children’s lexical development across languages, studies on Mandarin and Korean and other languages have challenged this view. More recent cross-linguistic naming studies on children in German, Turkish,...