All studies that have examined children’s comprehension of passives using both actional (e.g. wash) and psychological (e.g. see) verbs in English have found a significant interaction of voice (active vs. passive) and verb type (actional vs. psychological), with psychological passives being answered most poorly. Accounts differ as to whether a grammatical impairment with passive syntax underlies...

This paper presents a comprehensive, corpus-based study of adjectival concepts. An adjectival concept is a semantic class of adjectives, for example, “adjectives which express feeling”. We represent adjectival concepts by abstract nouns (such as “feeling”), and extract instances where abstract nouns are modified by adjectives (such as “happy feeling”) from a large corpus of Japanese newspaper a...

An empirical overview of the properties of English prepositional passives is presented, followed by a discussion of formal approaches to the analysis of the various types of prepositional passives in HPSG. While a lexical treatment is available, the significant number of technical and conceptual difficulties encountered point to an alternative approach relying on constructional constraints. The...

This paper provides an overview of the economic issues and cost models associated with the conversion of discrete passives to embedded passives in printed circuit boards. Three attributes of economic analysis are included herein: fabrication and manufacturing cost analyses, embedded resistor trim and rework economics, and non-manufacturing life cycle costs that are impacted by the conversion of...

A great number of West Iranian languages Persian, different Kurdish dialects, Hawramani, Zazaki...share several aspects in their noun phrase structure: 1. The surface word order pattern is strongly head initial. Adjectival modifiers, the possessor NP, prepositional phrases and the relative clause follow the head noun in a strict order. The head noun may be preceded only by some determiners – if...

The English passive construction has played a central role in the to-ings and fro-ings of grammatical theory over the last 30 years, from the earliest days of transformational grammar, to more recent, surface oriented theories of syntax. The casual reader of the linguistic literature might therefore suppose that the computational linguist looking for an off the shelf analysis of passives would ...

Within the domain of passives, children have been shown to be delayed in their understanding of byphrase passives like (1-2) (Bever, 1970; de Villiers & de Villiers, 1973; Horgan, 1978). Several studies have also noted that children’s performance depends on the lexical semantics of the verb (Maratsos et al., 1985; Messenger et al., 2012; Nguyen, 2015; Liter et al., 2015). For example, younger c...