Analysis of two Restructuring constructions in Italian, "equi" and "raising" structures, suggests that while lexical functional grammar (LFG) does not offer the kind of analysis previously used on this kind of structure, it does offer an insightful and interesting analysis of Restructuring in Italian. This approach treats…

Many syntactic and semantic studies have focused on the distribution of closed-class lexical noun phrases (NPs) such as "her, herself, and each other." Recent work has demonstrated that many other NPs are also referentially dependent. A model-theoretic semantic analysis of a number of such referentially dependent NPs is presented. These…

Arguments in favor of a particular decompositional approach to word meaning are presented and contrasted with other theories. The approach in question uses semantic markers to represent word meanings. The semantic marker analysis of English causative verbs is outlined and illustrated, showing how such an analysis could account for the semantic…

This study investigates the phenomenon of obligatory dative doubling, examining data based upon a critique of two analyses of clitic doubling in Spanish within different grammatical frameworks. Previous analyses propose that dative clitic doubling is obligatory whenever the Noun Phrase in indirect position is not a semantic Recipient/Addressee…

Recent proposals concerning the relationship between thematic structure and syntactic structure, including the idea of thematic hierarchy, when used with certain language-specific properties, offer insight into some problems concerning the Mandarin Chinese phrase structure condition (PSC). The PSC is such that the internal structure of XP contains…

An analysis of English sentences containing noun phrases (NPs) with extraposed complements argues that the extraposition (EX) is base-generated and not derived by any applications of the Move-alpha principle. A Move-alpha analysis is subject to substantial technical difficulties, and there exist cases of EX for which there is no plausible source…

A group of syntactic studies, primarily concerning English and German, within the framework of generalized phrase structure grammar include: "English Adverb Placement in Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar" (Belinda L. Brodie), concerning the placement of modal, evaluative, temporal, and verb phrase adverbs; "Syntactic Conditions on Two Types of…

There is an obvious morphological relationship between complex words such as "man-eater and self-locking" and phrases such as "eats men and locks itself." The perception of derivation suggests semantic relatedness and provides evidence for the notion of analytic synonymy and by extension, analytic hyponymy. However, judgments…

A study of Dogrib, an Athapascan language, focuses on long-distance agreement in the case of reflexives. While this "control" relationship has generally been considered in the context of infinitives, it is proposed that evidence from long distance agreement in Dogrib indicates that control is also relevant for languages without…

Structures in which nouns modify nouns have raised questions about the form and functioning of generative grammars. By applying and extending Jackendoff's X-bar theory of phrase structure, the syntactic properties of two types of pre-noun modifiers, adjectives and nouns, can be examined. X-bar analysis correctly predicts many features of noun-noun…

This research examines how semantic information influences syntactic parsing decisions during sentence processing. In the first experiment, subjects were presented lexical strings having syntactically identical surface structures but with two possible underlying structures: "The children taught by the Berlitz method," and "The…

There is significant synchronic evidence of the close relationship between anaphoric and grammatical agreement even within the grammatical structures of a single language. It is possible to predict clear syntactic differences between a grammatical agreement marker and a morphologically incorporated pronoun. What is required is a theory of…

An approach to the study of numeral quantifiers in Japanese reveals some fundamental properties of Japanese, especially those pertaining to movement. Using numeral quantifiers, a demonstration shows that the subject of unaccusative verbs in Japanese originates in the object position and moves to the subject position at S-structure. It is also…

The serial verb construction (SVC) in Edo (Bini), a language spoken in Nigeria, is examined, and an analysis that systematically characterizes the notion of functional relationship of verbs within these constructions is proposed. It is argued that the verbs in series are sensitive to different semantic and grammatical phenomena and are therefore…

The paper explores the significance of a contrast between generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG), a context-free grammar with a well structured theory of features, and head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG), a mechanism for increasing the power of GPSG by introducing head-wrapping and lexical rules, using examples from Mandarin Chinese.…