A noun phrase parser is useful for several purposes, e.g. for index term generation in an information retrieval application; for the extraction of collocational knowledge from large corpora for the development of computational tools for language analysis; for providing a shallow but accurately analysed input for a more ambitious parsing system; for the discovery of translation units, and so on....

Abstract This article develops foundations for a new typology of nominal expressions. Despite the significant diversity attested in languages around world, view traditionally and sometimes still found holds that either have ‘classic’, rigidly structured noun phrases (NPs) or lack them. A simple dichotomy, however, does not adequately represent language-internal crosslinguistic forms functions W...

The present investigation demonstrates that incremental sentence processing is guided by principles of minimal structure building. Event-related potentials (ERPs) to a local number mismatch between an auxiliary and a subsequent noun phrase revealed that the subject preference, a strategy known to be very robust during processing, can be overridden when information about a verb's valency (i.e., ...

In this paper, I give a semantic account of the grammaticality of the negative particle not with noun phrases in English. On the way to developing my solution, I explore a few previous attempts at this problem, including an extension of Horn’s discussion of the availability of NEG-Q readings (Horn, 1989) and Barwise and Cooper’s treatment of this phenomenon within the generalized quantifiers ap...

The definite determiner “the” conveys a relation between the entity referred to by the noun phrase and the description provided by the noun phrase, and says that the entity is uniquely mutually identifiable in context by the speaker and hearer by virtue of that descripiton. This characterization splits into six different cases. The indefinite determiner “a” and the bare plural (the empty string...

Abstract Reprise questions are a common dialogue device allowing a conversational participant to request clarification of the meaning intended by a speaker when uttering a word or phrase. As such they can act as semantic probes, providing us with information about what meaning can be associated with word and phrase types and thus helping to sharpen the principle of compositionality. This paper ...

In discussing the structure of noun phrases crosslinguistically, I will assume a rather rough characterization of noun phrases, as syntactic constituents which serve as arguments of verbs. There are a variety of ways in which this is inadequate as a precise definition and there are a number of legitimate questions about exactly what ought to be considered a noun phrase, but these issues are som...