This study addresses the acquisition of the morphological markers in Persian learners of English as a foreign language. To this end, the accuracy order of nine morphemes including plural –s, progressive –ing, copula be, auxiliary be, irregular past tense, regular past tense –ed, third person –s, possessive -ʼs and indefinite articles was studied in 6...

Floating quantifiers (FQs) in English exhibit both universal and language-specific properties, and this paper shows that such syntactic and semantic characteristics can be explained in terms of a constraint-based, lexical approach to the construction within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Based on the assumption that FQs are base-generated VP modifiers, this paper ...

A set of points in the plane is said to be in general position if no three of them are collinear and no four of them are cocircular. If a point set determines only distinct vectors, it is called parallelogram free. We show that there exist n-element point sets in the plane in general position, and parallelogram free, that determine only O(n/ √ logn) distinct distances. This answers a question o...

In this paper we look at the interpretation of Quantifier Phrases from the perspective of Symmetric Categorial Grammar. We show how the apparent mismatch between the syntactic and semantic behaviour of these expressions can be resolved in a typelogical system equipped with two Merge relations: one for syntactic units, and one for the evaluation contexts of the semantic values associated with th...

This paper proposes to give an analysis of VP coordination in the LTAG semantics framework of (Kallmeyer and Joshi, 2003). First the syntax of VP coordination is described using an operation called conjoin. Then we discuss interactions of coordination scope and quantifier scope in simple sentences and their analysis in LTAG. Finally we point out coordination scope ambiguities in embedded senten...

Treating ellipsis : two abstract categorial grammar perspectives The treatment of ellipsis in models of the syntax-semantics interface is troublesome as the linguistic material removed in the phonologic interpretation is still necessary in the semantics. Examples are particular cases of coordination, especially the ones involving verbal phrase ellipsis or subject elision. We show a way to use a...

The logical problem of language acquisition is the problem every child is facing when acquiring the grammar of its native language: it has too little evidence to uniquely determine which is the target grammar from the set of all grammars that would in principle be possible. The basic intuition that the grammars of natural languages are not learnable from available evidence is supported with a s...

The absence of negative universal determiners in natural languages expressing “not all” has given rise to various speculations, ranging from an innate principle of grammar to blocking on the basis of pragmatic principles. After arguing that these proposals are flawed, I propose that there are no general principles standing in the way of such determiners, but that the two main processes which di...

In this paper, we describe the annotation and development of Telugu treebank following the Universal Dependencies framework. We manually annotated 1328 sentences from a Telugu grammar textbook and the treebank is freely available from Universal Dependencies version 2.1.1 In this paper, we discuss some language specific annotation issues and decisions; and report preliminary experiments with POS...