One of the remarkable properties of Verb Second (V2) syntax is the fact that the constituent preceding the finite verb – let’s for simplicity call it ‘SpecCP’ – can under certain circumstances be dropped (cf. Ross 1982; Huang 1984; Fries 1988 for German, Ackema & Neeleman 2007 for Dutch). Pronoun drop is strictly confined to pronouns in SpecCP and can only occur in the root clause. In a context...

This is a first attempt at describing word order variation in the early Germanic languages in a dynamic model of discourse relations as outlined in the Segmented Discourse Relation Theory SDRT by Asher and Lascarides (2003). The study aims at investigating the interrelation between information structure and discourse organisation in the text of the Old High German Tatian translation (9 century)...

In this paper we will apply to Korean the standard techniques which have been used to show that young children represent functional projections mainly for European languages. And what we find is the following: First, we suggest that the over-use of the default mood-inflection '-e' in the earliest speech of one Korean two-year old parallels root infinitive forms observed in other languages. Seco...

We infer semantic classes of verbs signaling modality from a purely syntactic classification of 637 German verbs by applying findings from linguistics about correspondences between verb meaning and syntax. Our extensive evaluation of the semantic classification is based on a linking to three other lexical resources at the word sense level: to the German wordnet GermaNet and to the English resou...

To successfully learn language – and more specifically how to use verbs correctly – children must solve the linking problem: they must learn the mapping between the thematic roles specified by a verb’s lexical semantics and the syntactic argument positions specified by a verb’s syntactic frame. One central debate in the linguistics literature is whether this mapping is innately specified (innat...

BACKGROUND Recent literature documented the presence of spatial-temporal interactions in the human brain. The aim of the present study was to verify whether representation of past and future is also mapped onto spatial representations and whether the cerebellum may be a neural substrate for linking space and time in the linguistic domain. We asked whether processing of the tense of a verb is in...

Objectives: Persian is a pro-drop language with canonical Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order. This study investigates the acquisition of word order in Persian-speaking children. Methods: In the present study, participants were 60 Persian-speaking children (30 girls and 30 boys) with typically developing language skills, and aged between 30-47 months. The 30-minute language samples were audio...

Abstract The article asks whether the morphosyntax of embedded direct object clauses and purpose in Western Neo-Aramaic reflects retention from older stages Aramaic, or innovation under influence contact Arabic. To this end, are analysed Neo-Aramaic, namely, Old, Official, Biblical Qumran as well Syriac, three Late Aramaic dialects ( CPA , JPA SA ), contemporaneous Syrian analysis considers ver...