This paper quantitatively evaluates the empirical claim that adding a third wh-phrase to object-initial multiple-wh-questions increases their acceptability (e.g., Bolinger 1978, Kayne 1983)—a claim that posed a problem for accounts of the subject/object asymmetry in multiplewh-questions (e.g., Chomsky 1973, 1993; Lasnik & Saito 1984; Pesetsky 1987, 2000; Richards 2001). Recently, Clifton et al....

Ross (1969) proposed that sluicing in English is derived by wh- movement and deletion. The wh-movement analysis, however, not straight- forward wh-in-situ languages like Japanese. A number of studies argued Japanese based on wh-cleft structure with much empirical evidence. More recently, Kimura (2010) Abe (2015) have an in-situ analysis Japanese, which deletes everything but a wh-phrase (and th...

This paper presents a preliminary work on aligning Turkish and English parallel texts towards developing a statistical machine translation system for English and Turkish. To avoid the data sparseness problem and to uncover relations between sublexical components of words such as morphemes, we have converted our parallel texts to a morphemic representation and then used standard word alignment a...

This paper addresses two central issues related to the problem of auxiliary inversion in English wh-questions: 1) there are multiple proposals of the source of the error but none can explain the data in full; 2) the data on children’s wh-questions are inconsistent, due to differences in methods and techniques. We propose that language-specific structural characteristics of the target grammar (e...

This study investigates the prosody of rhetorical questions in German. In an interaction study we examined how speakers use boundary tones, pitch, duration and voice quality to mark syntactically ambiguous questions as rhetorical or information seeking. To this end, speakers produced identical interrogatives (polar and wh questions) in rhetorical and information seeking contexts. The results sh...

It has been known that the ungrammaticality of (1b) is due to the violation of the Superiority Effect (SE) to the effect that WH is not allowed to move over another c-commanding WH (Chomsky 1995) unless the WH is the D-linked (Discourse-linked) phrase like which apple, which carries an implication that there exists a set of entities that can be determined from the context (Pesetky 1987). In oth...

This paper reports a series of formal acceptability-judgment experiments designed to investigate the syntactic properties of a relatively understudied type of wh-dependency: multiple wh-questions in English. By using a factorial definition of island effects made available only by formal experiments, we report an unpredicted pattern of acceptability that suggests the existence of reverse island ...

The active maintenance of sentence meaning in working memory was investigated using event-related electroencephalogram (EEG) coherences. Participants read a sentence, retained it for 2.5 s, and then verified a statement about its meaning. The sentences contained either three semantically related nouns or unrelated nouns and started either with a what phrase (WH sentences) or not (non-WH sentenc...

1 Introduction 1.1 Wh-expressions as diagnostics of scope 1.1.1 Fronting and possible answers as indicators of scope 1.1.2 3 Subjacency and wh-in-situ 3.1 The diagnostic of possible answers 3.

We describe the English-Turkish and Turkish-English translation systems submitted by Yandex School of Data Analysis team to WMT16 news translation task. We successfully applied hand-crafted morphological (de-)segmentation of Turkish, syntax-based pre-ordering of English in English-Turkish and post-ordering of English in Turkish-English. We perform desegmentation using SMT and propose a simple y...