Ravignani et al. (2013) habituated squirrel monkeys to sound sequences conforming to an ABnA grammar (n = 1, 2, 3), then tested them for their reactions to novel grammatical and non-grammatical sequences. Although they conclude that the monkeys "consistently recognized and generalized the sequence ABnA," I remark that this conclusion is not robust. The statistical significance of results depend...

I show how a conversational process that takes simple, intuitively meaningful steps may be understood as a sophisticated computation that derives the richly detailed, complex representations implicit in our knowledge of language. To develop the account, I argue that natural language is structured in a way that lets us formalize grammatical knowledge precisely in terms of rich primitives of inte...

Revisiting the now de facto standard Stanford dependency representation, we propose an improved taxonomy to capture grammatical relations across languages, including morphologically rich ones. We suggest a two-layered taxonomy: a set of broadly attested universal grammatical relations, to which language-specific relations can be added. We emphasize the lexicalist stance of the Stanford Dependen...

Recent parsing research has started addressing the questions a) how parsers trained on different syntactic resources differ in their performance and b) how to conduct a meaningful evaluation of the parsing results across such a range of syntactic representations. Two German treebanks, Negra and TüBa-D/Z, constitute an interesting testing ground for such research given that the two treebanks mak...

when studying russian morphology, one can distinguish two categories. these categories are “grammatical” and “lexico-grammatical”. grammatical categories can be specified through a series of grammatical features of words. considering different criteria, russian grammarians and linguists divide grammatical categories of their language into different types. in determining lexico-grammatical types...

People often speak about visually perceived events that unfold in real time. In doing so speakers regularly translate the details of the visual world they describe onto the grammatical properties of the sentences about it. For example, the speaker needs to map her constantly changing attentional state onto the syntactic plan of the produced sentences. The present paper briefly discusses what at...

The extensive discussion of the principles of word order change in the last decades has resulted in a number of proposals on how to deal with the mechanisms and the motivation for this kind of diachronic development (see e.g. Lightfoot 1999 for an overview). The proposed solutions range from the allegedly universal principle of harmonic branching (Vennemann 1975) and adaptation to human parsing...

Text complexity can be reduced by making different choices at the lexical and grammatical levels. However, discourse-level choices may also affect a text’s complexity. In a coherent text, explicit discourse relations (e.g. CAUSE, CONDITION) are expressed using discourse markers (e.g. since, because, etc.) that may be preferred for texts at different readability levels. In this paper, we investi...

The present study uses probabilistic models of corpus data in a novel way, to measure and compare the syntactic predictive capacities of speakers of different varieties of the same language. The study finds that speakers’ knowledge of probabilistic grammatical choices can vary across different varieties of the same language and can be detected psycholinguistically in the individual. In three pa...

This paper introduces an extension of distinctive-collocate analysis that takes into account grammatical structure and is specifically geared to investigating pairs of semantically similar grammatical constructions and the lexemes that occur in them. The method, referred to as ‘distinctive-collexeme analysis’, identifies lexemes that exhibit a strong preference for one member of the pair as opp...