This paper presents a LTAG-based analysis of gapping and VP ellipsis, which proposes that resolution of the elided material is part of a general disambiguation procedure, which is also responsible for resolution of underspecified representations of scope.

Recent studies in both artificial intelligence and linguistics have demonstrated the need for a theory of the comprehension of anaphoric expressions, a theory that accounts for the role of syntactic and semantic effects, as well as inferential knowledge in explaining how anaphors are understood. In this paper a new approach, based on a theory of the process of focusing on parts of the discourse...

Variation in prosody, or intonation, can influence the interpretation of linguistic phenomena in many languages (Ladd 1980, 1996; Bolinger 1986, 1989). Type and location of prosodic prominence and prosodic phrase boundaries, different overall intonational contours, and changes in intensity, duration, and speaking rate can, in appropriate contexts, help to indicate syntactic attachment, disambig...

Studies in linguistics define lexico-syntactic patterns to characterize the linguistic utterances that can be interpreted with semantic relations. Because patterns are assumed to reflect linguistic regularities that have a stable interpretation, several software implement such patterns to extract semantic relations from text. Nevertheless, a thorough analysis of pattern occurrences in various c...

1. Control Structures The proper analysis of control structures is a much debated aspect of linguistic theory, whether “control” is taken in a narrow sense to refer to a nonfreely arrived at, i.e. controlled, interpretation of an empty category, and in particular a missing subject, or in broader terms to take in the interpretation of missing objects as well or even of any nonfreely selected ana...

This paper summarizes the extension of the theory of lexical-functional grammar to include a formal, model-theoretic, semantics. The algorithmic specification of the semantic interpretation procedures is order-free which distinguishes the system from other theories providing model-theoretic interpretation for natural language. Attention is focused on the computational advantages of a semantic i...

This paper presents an approach to creating flexible general-logic representations from language for use in high-level reasoning tasks in cognitive modeling. These representations are grounded in a large-scale ontology and emphasize the need for semantic breadth at the cost of syntactic breadth. The task-independent interpretation process allows task-specific pragmatics to guide the interpretat...

Although many theories of on-line syntactic processing invoke the parallel activation of multiple syntactic representations, evidence supporting simultaneous activation has been inconclusive. Here, we exploited the continuous and non-ballistic properties of computer mouse movements, identified by recording streaming x, y coordinates, in order to determine the validity of serial versus parallel ...

Pylkkänen (2001) argues that there are two types of applicatives, which have different lexical semantics. I will show that this difference underlies the contrast between (1) and (2), and argue that the two applicatives have different syntactic ‘phase’ structures (Chomsky 1999, 2000). Phases are chunks of syntactic structure that are sent off to PF and LF for interpretation before the derivation...