Typological diversity among the natural languages of the world poses interesting challenges for the models and algorithms used in syntactic parsing. In this paper, we apply a data-driven dependency parser to Turkish, a language characterized by rich morphology and flexible constituent order, and study the effect of employing varying amounts of morpholexical information on parsing performance. T...

In this paper, I submit two empirical claims regarding the cross-linguistic variation in alternative questions (AltQs). The first claim is that there are in principle two ways in which AltQs are derived: scope-shifting of the disjunction and disjoining PolQs. The other claim is that some languages, in particular Japanese, only allow the second option in forming an AltQ. With these empirical res...

The notion of subject in human language has a privileged status relative to other arguments. This special status is manifested in the behavior of subjects at the morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels. Here we bring evidence that subjects have privileged status at the lexical level as well, by analyzing lexicalization patterns of verbs in three different sign languages. Our ana...

This paper aims at accounting for the emergence and loss of constraints governing the formation of deverbal nominalizations in German from a cognitive point of view. Specifically, diachronic changes in the formation of derivatives in the suffix -ung are investigated on the basis of two large corpora of Middle High German (MHG, 1050-1350) and Early New High German (ENHG, 1350-1650) texts, respec...

Does number–word structure have a long-lasting impact on transcoding? Contrary to English, German number words comprise decade–unit inversion (e.g., vierundzwanzig is literally translated as four-and-twenty). To investigate the mental representation of numbers, we tested effect visual and linguistic–morphological characteristics development verbal–visual transcoding. In longitudinal cross-lingu...

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: Can learning additional languages affect what we perceive to be similar events? The current study explores the impact of a second language (L2) third (L3) on how motion is categorized in functional Cantonese–English–Japanese multilinguals. Specifically, it examines extent which L1 speakers Cantonese (equipollent-framed) with an L2-English (satelli...

We investigate the effect of spatial categories on visual perception. In three experiments, participants made same/different judgments on pairs of simultaneously presented dot-cross configurations. For different trials, the position of the dot within each cross could differ with respect to either categorical spatial relations (the dots occupied different quadrants) or coordinate spatial relatio...

The notion of subject in human language has a privileged status relative to other arguments. This special status is manifested in the behavior of subjects at the morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels. Here we bring evidence that subjects have privileged status at the lexical level as well, by analyzing lexicalization patterns of verbs in three different sign languages. Our ana...