The copy theory of movement receives the strongest for of support from instances of movement leaving phonetically visible copies. Such is the case in Hebrew V(P)-fronting, where the fronted verb surfaces as an infinitive, and its “trace” is pronounced as an inflected verbal copy. This paper argues that V-doubling is explained by the same algorithm that determines pronunciation of single copies ...

This paper discusses how predicate-initial (VOS) order in Malagasy is derived, and the implications of this derivation for general theories of word order. Malagasy clauses are comprised of a predicate phrase followed by a constituent here called the TRIGGER, which occupies the specifier of an A’-position (provisionally labelled TopP). I argue against an analysis where TopP projects its specifie...

We present a simple context-free grammatical inference algorithm, and prove that it is capable of learning an interesting subclass of context-free languages. We also demonstrate that an implementation of this algorithm is capable of learning auxiliary fronting in polar interrogatives (AFIPI) in English. This has been one of the most important test cases in language acquisition over the last few...

This paper describes a parser for German, which treats major phenomena of word order including scrambling, (partial) VP fronting and extraposition. The outputs of the parser are dependency trees and topological phrase structures. We use the CKY parsing algorithm, which is polynomial with some bounds on the number of emancipations (that is, constituents that are positioned outside of the domain ...