This study investigated the relationship between Iranian high school students’ Universal Grammar knowledge and their performance on such standardized general English proficiency tests as PET and FCE internationally administered by Cambridge University. To this end, 108 students were randomly chosen from some high schools located in Malayer from Hamedan. Since this study was correlational in nat...

Young children find (some) object relatives much harder to understand than subject relatives. The main finding of this article is that not all object relatives are difficult. The difficulty with object relatives (and object Wh-questions) is selective: it depends on the structural similarity between the A’-moved element and the intervening subject. We interpret this selective effect in terms of ...

1. Introduction: The syntactic effects of relativisation in Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic vary in a complex and potentially baffling way between the languages and across their dialects. The crucial components of this variation are resumptivity, " wh-agreeing " complementizers, a differential treatment of locality domains, and variation in the availability of pied-piping. In this paper we arg...

3. Evidence for OT Analyses in Syntax 7 3.1 Constraint Conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 3.2 Repair Phenomena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 3.2.1 Do-Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 3.2.2 Resumptive Pronouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....

In this paper, we claim that the filler-gap linkage in Korean UDCs needs to be handled at the level of syntax and that unbounded dependencies represented by traces, resumptive pronouns, and resumptive reflexives in Korean can be simply captured without posing any extra mechanisms in the traditional HPSG analysis of UDCs following Pollard and Sag (1994). It is because in HPSG traces are not all ...

Eckman, Fred R. 2004. Optimality Theory, markedness and second language syntax: the case of resumptive pronouns in relative clauses. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 10.1. 89–110. This paper proposes a constraint-based analysis for what is arguably the most interesting phenomenon in second language (L2) syntax, the occurrence of an L2 error pattern where the regularity cannot be e...