unless there is a specific statement to the contrary. The three categories – animate, concrete, abstract are not discrete. They are rendered porous by the polysemy of the English language. A common example is the noun chair, which might be concrete (an item of furniture) or animate (the person responsible for the process of a meeting). Connell and Lynott (2012: 461) cite substitute and kingdom ...

Words expressing spatial relationships in Hittite are synchronically adverbs, not case forms of nouns as sometimes alleged. They are attested in three distinct syntactic roles: postpositions, preverbs, and freestanding adverbs. Some of these local adverbs are inherited from Proto-Indo-European, while others reflect petrified case forms of nouns. Postpositions from inherited local adverbs origin...

In this paper, we present a syntactic approach to the annotation of bridging relations, socalled genitive bridging. We introduce the RuGenBridge corpus for Russian annotated with genitive bridging and compare it to the semantic approach that was applied in the Prague Dependency Treebank for Czech. We discuss some special aspects of bridging resolution for Russian and specifics of bridging annot...

A computer grammar is described which includes most of the English relative-clause constructions. It is written in the form of a left-to-right phrase-structure grammar with discontinuous constituents and subscripts, which carry such syntactic restrictions as number and verb government category. The motivation for the hierarchy of syntactic choices and for the use of discontinuous constituents i...

Five experiments looked at the effect of repeated phonemes in the production of colour adjective+noun phrases in English (“green gun”), or noun+colour adjective phrases in Spanish and French. Whereas phoneme repetition sped up naming latencies in the case of prenominal colour adjectives, it induced either no effect or inhibition in the postnominal case. We argue that this dissociation does not ...

We report on chunk tagging methods for German that recognize complex non-verbal phrases using structural chunk tags with Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). This state-of-the-art method for sequence classification achieves 93.5% accuracy on newspaper text. For the same task, a classical trigram tagger approach based on Hidden Markov Models reaches a baseline of 88.1%. CRFs allow for a clean and p...

Abstract This paper deals with word-order variation in a situation of language contact. We present corpus-based investigation word order the variety Russian spoken Daghestan, focusing specifically on noun phrases genitive modifier. In Daghestanian Russian, nonstandard GEN+N (prepositive or left genitive) often occurs. At first glance, this phenomenon might be easily explained terms syntactic ca...

This study charts the development of the genitive masculine inflection, one of the most irregular parts of the Polish case-marking system. 72 Polish children aged from 2;3 to 10;8 participated in a nonce word production experiment testing their ability to supply the genitive form and their sensitivity to the semantic factors determining the choice of ending. Results indicate that productivity, ...