The main aim of this thesis is to provide insight into the interaction of the syntactic and pragmatic properties of German, particularly with respect to the issue of congurationality. This language is particularly di cult to classify as it displays both subject-object asymmetries (a feature of \con gurational" languages), but also has a topic position (a feature of \discourse-con gurational" la...

This study uses the concept of "emergent texture" to analyze the corpus behavior of the four nominal demonstratives -this, that, these, and those -in an interlanguage corpus created at Yonsei University in the Fall of 1999. "Emergent texture" refers to the manner in which interlanguage texts gradually develop their use and control of the grammatical and semantic means used to establish textual ...

In Mandarin Chinese there are two possibilities with regard to the relative order of relative clauses (RC) and demonstrative expressions (DM). A relative clause may either precede a demonstrative expression (RC+DM) or follow it (DM+RC). Traditionally, it is assumed that the latter is transformationally derived from the former by virtue of the movement of DM across RC. An investigation of a larg...

In this paper, we present the results of a corpus analysis, and a model of anaphora resolution in spontaneous spoken dialogues. The main finding of our corpus analysis is that less than half the pronouns and demonstratives have NP antecedents in the preceding text; 22% have sentential antecedents and the remainder have no identifiable linguistic antecedents. As part of the corpus analysis we pr...

This reply shows that arguments against the no-DP analysis (Bošković 2005, 2008), according to which article-less languages do not have DP, given in Pereltsvaig 2007) do not go through. Additionally, it is shown that ordering restrictions on demonstratives, possessives, and adjectives in Serbo-Croation follow from the semantics of the elements in question. These elements can be generated in any...

Consider the class of contextually sensitive expressions whose context independent meanings do not by themselves suffice to secure semantic values for those expressions in contexts. Demonstratives and deictically used pronouns are the most obvious examples of such expressions. But arguably gradable adjectives, modals, possessives, tense, quantifiers, expressions that take implicit arguments (‘r...