The abstractness of children’s early syntactic representations has been questioned in the recent acquisition literature. While some research has suggested that children’s knowledge of basic constructions such as the transitive is robust and abstract at a very young age, other work has proposed that young children only have constructions that are specific to individual lexical items. The present...

We show that every formula of the existential fragment of monadic second-order logic over picture models (i.e., nite, two-dimensional , coloured grids) is equivalent to one with only one existential monadic quantiier. The corresponding claim is true for the class of word models ((Tho82]) but not for the class of graphs ((Ott95]). The class of picture models is of particular interest because it ...

There are three dative constructions in Chinese. A verb may be present in just one, in two, or in all three constructions. A pattern can be captured in the constructional approach. While the constructions all carry a sense of transfer, they differ in terms of range of transfer and argument role of the dative object or the gei object. The constructional view also provides an account of the patte...

The abstractness of children’s early syntactic representations has been questioned in the recent acquisition literature. While some research has suggested that children’s knowledge of basic constructions such as the transitive is robust and abstract at a very young age, other work has proposed that young children only have constructions that are specific to individual lexical items. The present...

Research has shown that givenness is one of several factors that influence the choice of word order with the Dative Alternation in languages such as English. This paper investigates to what extent Norwegian children between the ages of 4;2 and 6;0 are sensitive to this factor in production. In order to test this, an experiment was carried out in which the children were prompted to produce struc...

This study investigated the effect of more than two consecutive NPs bearing the nominative case-marker -ga on the processing difficulty associated with Japanese multiply center-embedded sentences. Experiment 1 found that NP-ga sequences are rated substantially less favorably for processability ratings than their matched counterparts; thus, theories that predict processing load must offer an acc...

We show that generation of contextually appropriate syntactic variation can be improved using a model based on automatically extracted features. We adapt a model for predicting dative alternation from (Bresnan et al. 2005); this model incorporates lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features. We evaluate the effect of using different types of feature on this classification task and show ...

We present a method that uses alternation data to add new entries to an existing bilingual valency lexicon. If the existing lexicon has only one half of the alternation, then our method constructs the other half. The new entries have detailed information about argument structure and selectional restrictions. In this paper we focus on one class of alternations, but our method is applicable to an...