Classifying what-type questions into proper semantic categories is found more challenging than classifying other types in question answering systems. In this paper, we propose to classify what-type questions by head noun tagging. The approach highlights the role of head nouns as the category discriminator of whattype questions. To reduce the semantic ambiguities of head noun, we integrate local...

Abstract This paper describes the gender system of Ubangi language Mba, which can be characterized by co-existence two different classification systems. The ‘formal agreement’ is tightly bound with nominal deriflection system, while ‘semantic contrast, emanates from a tripartite distinction in made between masculine humans, other animates, and inanimates. Whereas formal agreement manifested on ...

To examine how semantic integration and the scope of advance planning affect utterance planning and subject-verb agreement error rates, participants described picture displays using complex subject noun phrases (e.g., the apple for the pie(s)), with singular head nouns (apple) and local nouns (pie(s)) in prepositional phrase modifiers, and then completed them as full sentences. Semantic integra...

Pseudo-partitives are strings of the form [N 1 – N 2 ] in which denotes a quantity or amount whatever it is that and bare nominal. Such come two types, depending on whether combination shares number value . The first type can be analyzed along familiar lines, but second one hard nut to crack. article presents existing treatments, showing they all involve departures from independently motivated ...

Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences containing noun-noun compounds that varied in frequency (e.g., elevator mechanic, mountain lion). The left constituent of the compound was either plausible or implausible as a head noun at the point at which it appeared, whereas the compound as a whole was always plausible. When the head noun analysis of the left constituent was impla...

In his recent article (Shlonsky, U., 2004. The form of Semitic noun phrases. Lingua 114, 1465–1526), Shlonsky proposes a phrasal-movement analysis of word order in Hebrew (and Arabic) noun phrases and argues that the positioning of nominal modifiers with respect to the head-noun cannot be adequately handled by an N-raising derivation. In the present article I argue that in fact the head movemen...

In his recent article Deutscher (2009: 199) suggests that “nominalization is an unsung hero in the story of subordination”. He goes on to say that “[t]he ability to derive a noun from a verb, that is, to reify a verbal predicate and present it as a nominal argument or modifier, is the core of subordination”. While Deutscher (2009) believes that the relevant nominalization for his study is “deri...

phrases. The partial parser is motivated by an intuition (Abney, 1991): To acquire noun phrases from running texts is useful for many applications, such as word grouping, terminology indexing, etc. The reported literatures adopt pure probabilistic approach, or pure rule-based noun phrases grammar to tackle this problem. In this paper, we apply a probabilistic chunker to deciding the implicit bo...

Subject relative (SR) clauses have a reliable processing advantage in VO languages like English in which relative clauses (RCs) follow the head noun. The question is whether this is also routinely true of OV languages like Japanese and Korean, in which RCs precede the head noun. We conducted an event-related brain potential (ERP) study of Korean RCs to test whether the SR advantage manifests in...

We introduce a new multilingual resource containing judgments about nominal compound compositionality in English, French and Portuguese. It covers 3 × 180 noun-noun and adjective-noun compounds for which we provide numerical compositionality scores for the head word, for the modifier and for the compound as a whole, along with possible paraphrases. This resource was constructed by native speake...