Universal Dependencies is an initiative to develop cross-linguistically consistent grammatical annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning and parsing research from a language typology perspective. It assumes a dependency-based approach to syntax and a lexicalist approach to morphology, which together entail that the funda...

This book consists of an analysis, solidly within the framework of Government and Binding, of tense and its interaction with adverbials, temporal connectives, and complementation. There is both good news and bad news about the book; parts of it are carefully worked out and are therefore a valuable resource for the computational linguist, while other parts are less clearly argued. Like much curr...

It is widely believed that the scientific enterprise of theoretical linguistics and the engineering of language applications are separate endeavors with little for their techniques and results to contribute to each other at the moment. In this paper, we explore the possibility that machine learning approaches to natural-language processing (NLP) being developed in engineering-oriented computati...

although the majority of linguists believing in chomskyan revolution have no doubt about the presence of ug in ll acquisition, its availability in l2 acquisition _in general, and in adult l2 acquisition in particular, is controversial. on the one hand, there are proponents of the access to ug in l2 acquisition, lidia white for example, says: therange of option available to the second language l...

This paper presents the first version of Estonian Universal Dependencies Treebank which has been semi-automatically acquired from Estonian Dependency Treebank and comprises ca 400,000 words (ca 30,000 sentences) representing the genres of fiction, newspapers and scientific writing. Article analyses the differences between two annotation schemes and the conversion procedure to Universal Dependen...

The human brain is exquisitely sensitive to musical stimuli. Cognitive neuroscientists and physicians are discovering that mere exposure to different musical forms can induce a wide variety of ‘extra-musical’ brain responses, alleviate the symptoms of challenging neurological disorders and accelerate physiological development in premature infants. I suggest that music has the capacity to enhanc...

Grammar-based surface realizers require inputs compatible with their reversible, constraint-based grammars, including a proper representation of unbounded dependencies and coordination. In this paper, we report on progress towards creating realizer inputs along the lines of those used in the first surface realization shared task that satisfy this requirement. To do so, we augment the Universal ...

“Noun phrase number is a privileged source of information as to the semantic structure of predicates.” So concludes a recent article by Lidz, Gleitman, and Gleitman (2003: 169), which purports to demonstrate the viability of a “universalist” mapping between syntax and semantics as opposed to an “emergentist” view of the mapping, attributed to Goldberg (1999) and Tomasello (2000). Lidz et al. (2...

The idea of Universal Grammar (UG) as the hypothetical linguistic structure shared by all human languages harkens back at least to the 13th century. The best known modern elaborations of the idea are due to Chomsky. Following a devastating critique from theoretical, typological and field linguistics, these elaborations, the idea of UG itself and the more general idea of language universals stan...