One of the key requirements in understanding a text is deciding how successive utterances relate to one another. Anaphors help in this respect by picking out entities already existing in the discourse and indicating the referent to which the new information encoded in the utterance should be attached. Sometimes, the interpretation of an anaphor is determined entirely by the morphosyntactic feat...

The central claim of this dissertation is that an elliptical VP is a proform. This claim has two primary consequences: first, the elliptical VP can have no internal syntactic structure. Second, the interpretation of VP ellipsis must be governed by the same general conditions governing other proforms, such as pronouns. The basic condition governing the interpretation of a proform is that it must...

This paper examines the interaction of semantic factors of reflexivity in the availability of result type te-ir and te-ar constructions in Japanese. The semantic factors of reflexivity have been examined in a number of studies, and they are known to be of relevance to the te-ir construction of result interpretation as well as to the availability of the te-ar construction. It has not been made e...

if we take ibn malik as the connecting chain of the interconnected history of syntax, we will find him among the last analytic scholars and theorist grammarians, since in his era, the principles of syntax has been established and grammarians didn’t provide new ideas. but discussion of ibn malik’s innovative syntactic approaches is important because of two reasons. due to his authoritative posit...

Which NP does all associate with in “The pandas, the children have all seen”, the pandas or the children, or both? The intuition of adult Mandarin native speakers regarding the interpretation of the adverbial quantifier dou ‘all’ remains unclear and controversial, and based on these unclarities, various incommensurate theories of domain selection have been proposed. This paper points out that p...

The syntactic structure of a sentence is usually a strong predictor of its meaning: Each argument noun phrase (i.e., Subject and Object) should map onto exactly one thematic role (i.e., Agent and Patient, respectively). Some constructions, however, are exceptions to this pattern. This paper investigates how the syntactic structure of an utterance contributes to its construal, using ditransitive...

The central claim of this dissertation is that an elliptical VP is a proform. This claim has two primary consequences: first, the elliptical VP can have no internal syntactic structure. Second, the interpretation of VP ellipsis must be governed by the same general conditions governing other proforms, such as pronouns. The basic condition governing the interpretation of a proform is that it must...

In Distributed Morphology analyses of German, genitives occurring postnominally to deverbal event nominals such as in die Beschreibung der Bürgermeisterin (‘the description of the mayoress’) are argued to occur in different syntactic positions depending on their interpretation. Whenever they are interpreted in a parallel fashion to the internal argument of the underlying verb, they are assumed ...

Statistical approaches to natural language parsing and interpretation have a number of advantages but thus far have failed to incorporate compositional generalizations found in traditional structural models. A major reason for this is the inability of most statistical language models being used to represent relational constraints, the connectionist variable binding problem being a prominent cas...

This article introduces an unsupervised word sense disambiguation algorithm that is inspired by the lexical attraction models of Yuret (1998). It is based on the assumption that the meanings of the words that form a sentence can be best assigned by constructing an interpretation of the whole sentence. This interpretation is facilitated by a dependency-like context specification of a content wor...