It is well known that sentences containing object-extracted relative clauses (e.g., "The reporter that the senator attacked admitted the error") are more difficult to comprehend than sentences containing subject-extracted relative clauses (e.g., "The reporter that attacked the senator admitted the error"). Two major accounts of this phenomenon…

Imperfective or progressive verb morphology makes it possible to use the name of a whole event to refer to an activity that is clearly not a complete instance of that event, leading to what is known as the Imperfective Paradox. For example, a sentence like "John was building a house" does not entail that a house ever got built. The Imperfective…

Five experiments examined how the duration of a word spoken in a sentence is influenced by the grammatical category to which it belongs, and the position of the word in a constituent. The findings indicated that a binary distinction between major and minor categories is sufficient for a theory of speech timing and synthesis. (Author/JAC)