We revisit the purported locality constraint on Quantifier Raising (QR) by investigating children’s and adults’ interpretation of antecedentcontained-deletion (ACD) sentences, where the interpretation depends on the landing site targeted by QR out of an embedded clause. When ACD is embedded in a nonfinite clause, 4-year-old children and adults access both the embedded and the matrix interpretat...

In this paper we show that input frequency plays a role in the acquisition of word order, but only combined with other factors. Two constructions with similar input frequencies are investigated: embedded questions and (all) embedded clauses with negation. It is shown that the lack of input cues for the target word order in embedded clauses with negation leads children to overgeneralize main cla...

This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in the speech of one German-speaking child aged 2;0 to 5;0. The earliest relative clauses we found in the data occur in topicalization constructions that are only a little different from simple sentences: they contain a single proposition, express the actor prior to other participants, assert new information and often occur with main-c...

In Yaeyaman, a critically endangered Japonic language of the Southern Ryukyus, there is a distinction made between singular and plural wh-questions, with plurality indicated by reduplication of the indeterminate (wh) pronoun. I argue that reduplication of the indeterminate is triggered by a morpheme RED that requires the presence of non-atoms in the set of Hamblin alternatives denoted by its si...

We investigate the on-line processing of verb-phrase ellipsis (VPE) constructions in two brain injured populations: Broca's and Anomic aphasics. VPE constructions are built from two simple clauses; the first is the antecedent clause and the second is the ellipsis clause. The ellipsis clause is missing its verb and object (i.e., its verb phrase (VP)), which receives its reference from the fully ...

The relationship between the wh -remnant and null correlate in type of ellipsis known as backward sprouting is superficially almost identical to relation a -filler gap -question. In both cases, there dependency -phrase later element. We conduct sentence acceptability experiment test whether remnant–correlate exhibits two well-known properties filler–gap -questions: sensitivity clause boundaries...

This paper reexamines the Ross (1967) claim that while interrogative (+Q) CPs are islands for whextraction, as shown in 1a and 1b, declarative (-Q) CPs are not, as shown in 2a and 2b. Alexopoulou and Keller (2007) report that English-speaking subjects find extractions in the Island condition to have degraded acceptability as compared to the Non-island condition, in non-embedded and embedded con...

It is well known that in sluicing constructions wh-dependencies can cross certain projectionsthat are otherwise barriers to movement (Ross 1969, Chomsky 1972). This fact would follow under the assumption that the relevant barriers are somehow deactivated when phonologically deleted (‘‘island repair’ ’ ). The problem, however, is that another form of phonologicaldeletion (VP-ellipsis;VPE) seems ...

In this paper, I show how these specificity effects are accounted for straightforwardly in the analysis of Tagalog morphosyntax and phrase structure proposed by Aldridge (in preparation). Under this analysis, absolutive DPs receive a presuppositional interpretation because they are located outside VP at LF and mapped to the restrictive clause, in the sense of Diesing (1992). Oblique DPs, on the...