A. The present paper is the result of a long struggle to understand how the notion of compositionality can be used to motivate the structure of a sentence. While everyone seems to have intuitions about which proposals are compositional and which ones are not, these intuitions generally have no formal basis. What is needed to make such arguments work is a proper understanding of what mean...

Syntactic structure is defined in its three components. A survey of prosodist's studies on the relationship between prosody and syntax brings out two major trends: those who think that syntactic structure is immaterial for intonation and those who argue for matching rules between syntax and prosody. The recent studies presented here lend weight to a syntactic-based approach to accounting for in...

Argument structure has two faces, semantic and syntactic. On the semantic side, argument structure represents the core participants in events (states, processes) designated by a single predicator. From this point of view it appears as a type of representation of event structure. On the syntactic side, argument structure represents the minimal information needed to characterize the syntactic dep...

One central task for any theory of grammar is to solve the so-called “linking problem”: the problem of discovering regularities in how the participants of an event are expressed in surface grammatical forms and explaining those regularities. Suppose that one adopts a broadly Chomskyan perspective, in which there is a distinction between the language faculty and other cognitive faculties, includ...

The proper linguistic representation of ellipsis has been a source of debate for years (Hankamer and Sag, 1976), with ellipsis theories broadly categorizable as being either syntactic or semantic, depending on whether or not an elided constituent is held to contain articulated syntactic structure. In this paper, I combine ideas from both syntactic and semantic theories in order to (1) account f...

Speakers sometimes repeat syntactic structures across sentences, a phenomenon called syntactic priming. We investigated the influence of verb-bound syntactic preferences on syntactic priming effects in response choices and response latencies for German ditransitive sentences. In the response choices we found inverse preference effects: There were stronger syntactic priming effects for primes in...

The term Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) first appeared in print in the 1982 volume edited by Joan Bresnan: The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, the culmination of many years of research. LFG differs from both transformational grammar and relational grammar in assuming a single level of syntactic structure. LFG rejects syntactic movement of constituents as the mechanism by which...

1 The Problem Argument structure has two faces, semantic and syntactic. On the semantic side, argument structure represents the core participants in events (states, processes) designated by a single predicator. From this point of view it appears as a type of representation of event structure. On the syntactic side, argument structure represents the minimal information needed to characterize the...

This paper reports an on-line production study on how different levels of syntactic flexibility influence the production of locative resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese. Though previous studies show that having two available syntactic structures (flexible condition) facilitates language production and results in less errors and shorter reaction time than having only one possible synta...