Combination of grammatical roles in relative clauses (RC) is determined by a multitude of factors (Fox and Thompson 1990, Pu 2007, Ming and Chen 2009). This study shows that four factors (discourse functions of RCs, grounding mechanism, information status, and animacy of head nouns) interact with one another to determine which combination is favored in a Chinese discourse. 1. Introduction The p...

This paper discusses switch-reference (SR) systems in Pano and Muskogean languages, and propose that grammatical case plays an essential role in licensing same subject SR constructions in these languages. Specifically, case activates an agreement relationship between two clauses, allowing for transmission of information about participant coreference. Different subject SR, on the other hand, doe...

In this study, we investigated grammatical feature selection during noun phrase production in German and Dutch. More specifically, we studied the conditions under which different grammatical genders select either the same or different determiners or suffixes. Pictures of one or two objects paired with a gender-congruent or a gender-incongruent distractor word were presented. Participants named ...

We present Constituent Grammatical Evolution (CGE), a new evolutionary automatic programming algorithm that extends the standard Grammatical Evolution algorithm by incorporating the concepts of constituent genes and conditional behaviour-switching. CGE builds from elementary and more complex building blocks a control program which dictates the behaviour of an agent and it is applicable to the c...

Three studies provided evidence that syntax influences intentionality judgments. In Experiment 1, participants made either speeded or unspeeded intentionality judgments about ambiguously intentional subjects or objects. Participants were more likely to judge grammatical subjects as acting intentionally in the speeded relative to the reflective condition (thus showing an intentionality bias), bu...

To account for cross-linguistic differences in agrammatism, Bates and her colleagues have employed the Competition Model, proposing that the cue validity and cue costs of a grammatical morpheme in a particular language will directly affect how agrammatism is manifested. Using Goodglass et al.'s (1993) Morphosyntax Battery in English and a translated version in Spanish, we analyzed the use of eq...

Usually writing teachers feel commitment to provide their learners with corrective feedback (CF) to their linguistic errors. The study investigated whether two types of written corrective feedback, indirect focused corrective feedback and indirect unfocused corrective feedback, produced differential effects on the accurate use of grammatical forms by high intermediate EFL learners. In this stud...

This study investigated the impact of individual differences like language proficiency, gender and age on the Iranian EFL learners interlanguage pragmatics in institutional discourse especially, their capacity to recognize and to rate pragmatic and grammatical infelicities in speech act situations of request and apology.  To this end, one hundred and eighty-seven EFL university students at thre...

In this paper we discuss the so-called “dominant” construction found with Latin participles. We argue that this construction instantiates a rare type of subject case assignment where the case of the participle’s subject depends on the grammatical function of the participial clause. To capture this in the LFG formalism, we argue for a “copy theory” of agreement, where the information from the ag...