Pseudo noun incorporation constructions in Sakha and Tamil obey a strict linear adjacency condition, such that not only the NP but its head noun must be adjacent to the verb at PF. I argue that this adjacency condition can be explained if the head of the NP adjoins to the verb to create a unit that is interpreted as a complex predicate at LF. The resulting structure can be linearized at PF if a...

This paper compares Baker’s head-movement analysis of noun incorporation to alternative nonlexicalist theories of noun incorporation, including Massam’s pseudoincorporation analysis, Van Geenhoven’s base generation analysis, and the Koopman/Szabolcsi analysis in terms of remnant movement. It is shown that the headmovement approach captures important facts about noun incorporation in the Mapudun...

The Competition Among Relation in Nominals theory (Gagné & Shoben, 1997) asserts that the relation frequency of the modifying noun is the primary determinant of ease of interpretation for noun-noun compounds. It also assumes that the influence of this variable is independent of the head noun. However, we suggest that both constituents exert an influence and that this influence depends on the pa...

Spanish plural last name noun phrases appear with a determiner and singular or noun. Last names marked as are interpreted group, whereas ones collection of individuals (additive reading), although both behave like fully DPs. Based on comparison first names, I propose that involve null nominal ‘group’ head dominated by an associative realized the morpheme determiner. When is plural, it has addit...

In this work we test the use of word similarity lists for anaphora resolution in Portuguese corpora. We applied an automatic lexical acquisition technique over parsed texts to identify semantically similar words. After that, we made use of this lexical knowledge to resolve coreferent definite descriptions where the head-noun of the anaphor is different from the head-noun of its antecedent, whic...

In this paper we argue that the distribution of article omission in newspaper headlines is constrained by information-theoretical principles (Shannon 1948). To this effect, we present corpus data and results from an acceptability rating study. Both point in the same direction: In our corpus, articles are significantly more frequent, when they precede a less predictable head noun. And subjects p...

This paper describes a system that resolves prepositional phrase attachment ambiguity in English sentence processing. This attachment problem is ubiquitous in English text, and is widely known as a place where semantics determines syntactic form. The decision is made based on a four-tuple composed of the head verb of the verb phrase, the head noun of the noun phrase, and the preposition and hea...

This paper proposes how to extend Pappi, a principles and parameters parser which can currently parse ten languages based on the same core grammar, to handle nominalization constructions in Mandarin Chinese by deliberately revising the periphery file without affecting the other languages. There are four categories of nominalizations: relative clauses with a head noun as an adjunct, relative cla...

We describe two experiments using French noun-noun combinations which parallel a study carried out by Gagné (2001) using English combinations. The order of the modifier and head noun are reversed in French, allowing us to investigate whether the influence of relation priming that Gagné found is due to the order of the modifier and head noun or whether it is due to their different functional rol...

In the recent literature, see Cinque (1993) and subsequent work, the paradigm in (1) has been analyzed as follows. The APs are located in the specifier of various functional projections DP internally in all languages; in Italian the head noun moves from its base position through the head that hosts the first adjective in (1b) to a higher head in the functional domain above that adjective, see (...