The study investigates the relationship between input, UG parameter values, and the native language in the acquisition of a purely semantic property that is superficially unrelated to its syntactic trigger, The Bare Noun/Proper Name parameter. A bidirectional study of the two properties was conducted. In the English Italian direction, the lack of one native interpretation in the target language...

The role and nature of syntactic categories in language acquisition is unresolved. While many researchers assume that children have innate knowledge about syntactic categories which helps them to acquire syntax, others assume that children’s early syntactic theories are semantically based and learned. In this paper I will summarize evidence against both a syntactic and a semantic basis for chil...

The acquisition of syntactic categories is a crucial step in the process of acquiring syntax. At this stage, before a full grammar is available, only surface cues are available to the learner. Previous computational models have demonstrated that local contexts are informative for syntactic categorization. However, local contexts are affected by sentence-level structure. In this paper, we add se...

1 The Problem Argument structure has two faces, semantic and syntactic. On the semantic side, argument structure represents the core participants in events (states, processes) designated by a single predicator. From this point of view it appears as a type of representation of event structure. On the syntactic side, argument structure represents the minimal information needed to characterize the...

Abstract The shared-syntax account of bilingual syntactic representations suggests that similar structures from different languages are represented as one in the mind. In this study, we examined degree morpho-syntactic similarity needed for to be shared mind by comparing passive Greek and English. Contrary English, non-active morphology is not restricted passives “by phrase” considered marked. ...

Japanese Bare Nouns (JBNs) appear to behave like indefinites in some contexts, and mass nouns in some other contexts. For example, when accomplishment verbs have JBNs as their theme, they are modified by both in-adverbs and for-adverbs. This paper first claims that JBNs are weak indefinites and introduce a variable to be bound by Existential Closure. Second, it shows how telic predicates are de...

Rauzy graphs of subshifts are endowed with an automaton structure. For Sturmian subshifts, it is shown that its transition semigroup is the syntactic semigroup of the language recognized by the automaton. A projective limit of the partial semigroups of nonzero regular elements of their transition semigroups is described. If the subshift is minimal, then this projective limit is isomorphic, as a...