The Principles and Parameters approach aimed to eliminate syntactic rules and constructions in favor of general movement processes and principles, and to account for language-specific syntax by construction-independent parameters. Disappointingly, much systematic syntactic variation, including the cross-linguistic variation in passives that is the topic of this article, turned out not to be red...

It is commonly acknowledged that deverbal action nominals are semantically ambiguous: among the many interpretations they can express (event, state, manner, location, etc.), the semantic distinction between Event (E) and Result (R) readings has been particularly emphasized because of its challenging syntactic corollaries (cf. Grimshaw 1990). Although this ambiguity has been subject to massive s...

In this paper we propose a unified account of ergativity in two unrelated languages with very different systems of marking grammatical relations. Both Chol (Mayan, Mexico) and Mẽbengokre (Jê, Brazil) have what appear to be aspect-based ergative splits. However, while in Mẽbengokre ergativity is found in verb stems which are formally nominal, ergativity in Chol is found in what can be shown to b...

This paper is about the development of semi-automatic methods to disambiguate genitive attributes of German deverbal nouns. Human listeners use structural and semantic clues to disambiguate these genitives — tools for automatic semantic text analysis, information extraction and information retrieval need to mimic this process by extracting clues from corpus data. I present morphosyntactic and l...

1. Introduction Typological research has uncovered a surprising amount of variation in which parts of a complex motion event (Bohnemeyer et al 2007) or causal chain (Bohnemeyer et al 2010) can be described as a single event across the languages of the world. The intuitive property of presenting a scenario as a " single event " has been operationalized in these studies in terms of the Macro Even...

Between classical symbolic word sense disambiguation (wsd) using explicit deep semantic representations of sentences and texts and statistical wsd using word co-occurrence information, there is a recent tendency towards mediating methods. Similar to so-called lightweight semantics (Marek, 2009) we suggest to only make sparse use of semantic information. We describe an approximation model based ...

In this study we map out a way to build event representations incrementally, using information which may be widely distributed across a discourse. An enhanced Discourse Representation (Kamp, 1981) provides the vehicle both for carrying open event roles through the discourse until they can be instantiated by NPs, and for resolving the reference of these otherwise problematic NPs by binding them ...

This paper presents the thesis that adjectives and nouns trigger processing by two different cognitive systems, those reported in the literature to be involved in the processing of rulebased versus similarity-based artificially construed categories, respectively. To support this thesis, the paper illuminates a number of links between findings reported in the literature concerning ruleversus sim...

The NLP community has shown a renewed interest in deeper semantic analyses, among them automatic recognition of relations between pairs of words in a text. We present an evaluation task designed to provide a framework for comparing different approaches to classifying semantic relations between nominals in a sentence. This is part of SemEval, the 4 edition of the semantic evaluation event previo...

Reference to properties is normally achieved by the use of nominalizations of predicative expressions. The article examines the relation between different kinds of such nominalizations: while traditionally, the terms ‘wisdom’ and ‘the property of being wise’ were thought to be coreferential, there are certain contexts in which they do not seem to be interchangeable salva veritate. Based on this...