Parasitic Gaps (PGs) are now familiar objects on the syntactic landscape. A PG is an empty category in a Case-marked NP position that shares with Wh-trace the property of being A-bar bound but differs from Wh-trace insofar as it appears to bave the privilege of occuring in positions that are in some sense inaccessible to movement. Thus the PG in (1,2) (represented as ~) appears in a position th...

Wh-exclamatives are, arguably, a formally individuated class of clauses that are conventionally associated with a particular use, on a par with declaratives, interrogatives, or imperatives. The characteristics that set them apart formally have been discussed at length by Elliott (1974), Grimshaw (1979), Gutiérrez-Rexach (1996), among many others. In English, the most prominent property of matri...

WH-words are not uniform in their syntactic behaviors. Adjunct WH-words such as HOW and WHY are said to be more restricted in their distribution than argument WH-words such as WHO and WHAT. It is observed, however, that HOW in some East Asian languages behaves more like argument WH-words and does not display ECP effects. In this paper, I try to account for the HOW vs. WHY difference in Korean. ...

This paper took an experimental approach and examined island constraints in Korean. Among many island constraints, this study took a Complex NP island constraint, and the experiment was designed with 3 related factors: presence vs. absence of island, matrix clause vs. embedded clause, and scrambling. The analysis results illustrated that the presence/absence of complex NP island did not play a ...

In the generative literature, clause type effects have typically been modeled in one of two ways—“truncation” whereby embedded clauses are structurally reduced relative to root clauses, and intervention, by which non-root clauses have additional material that blocks movement available in root contexts. This paper analyzes two clause type effects in Basque— the possibility of verb-initial word o...

The paper describes a rule-based system for tagging clause boundaries, implemented for annotating the Estonian Reference Corpus of the University of Tartu, a collection of written texts containing ca 245 million running words and available for querying via Keeleveeb language portal. The system needs information about parts of speech and grammatical categories coded in the word-forms, i.e. it ta...

Using a self-paced reading task, the present study investigates how highly proficient second language (L2) speakers of German with English as their native language process unambiguous wh-subject-extractions and wh-object-extractions in German. Previous monolingual research has shown that English and German exhibit different processing preferences for the type of wh-question under investigation,...

Right-dislocation constructions, including backgrounding and specificational afterthoughts, are subject to various limitations. Dislocated phrases themselves are islands for extraction. Moreover, there are proximity effects between dislocated phrases and their correlate in the host clause. The main effect reduces to the regular constraints on A-bar movement. This is explained from the perspecti...

It is well known that natural languages may syntactically encode the focus/presupposition divide; we refer to it as the assertion content of the sentence. One construction that overtly and unambiguously structures this aspect of the meaning of a sentence is the pseudo-cleft and, in particular, the so-called specificational pseudo-cleft (Higgins 1976), where the post-copula constituent specifies...

Previous research suggests that time-based working memory limits of 2e3 s constrain the integration of verbal information, and that speakers tend to parse sentences into prosodic phrases that do not extend beyond this time window. The present study used Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to investigate how time-driven implicit prosodic phrasing influences the syntactic processing of embedded claus...