This article investigates how children acquire word order generalizations from ambiguous and infrequent input. We focus on verb placement in Norwegian relative and complement clauses. In two elicitation experiments we explore where children (age 3-7) place verbs in three embedded clauses types: one requiring a purely syntactic generalization and…

In Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture, the well-formed expressions of a language are licensed by correspondences between phonology, syntax, and conceptual structure. I show how this architecture can be used to make sense of the existence of parasitic gap constructions. A parasitic gap is one that is rendered acceptable because of the presence of…

Just as pronouns like "she" and "he" make anaphoric reference to individuals, English words like "that" and so can be used to refer anaphorically to a proposition introduced in a discourse: "That's true; She told me so". Much has been written about individual anaphora, but less attention has been paid to…

We compare the predictions of two different accounts of first language acquisition by investigating the relative contributions of abstract syntax and input frequency to the elicited production of main and embedded questions by 36 monolingual English-speaking toddlers aged 3;00 to 5;11. In particular, we investigate whether children's accuracy…

Accurate recovery of predicate-argument dependencies is vital for interpretation tasks like information extraction and question answering, and unbounded dependencies may account for a significant portion of the dependencies in any given text. This thesis describes a Generalized Categorial Grammar (GCG) which, like other categorial grammars,…

The focus of this thesis is the description and analysis of clausal complementation in Sundanese, an Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia. The thesis examined a range of clausal complement types in Sundanese, which consists of (i) "yen/(wi)rehna" "that" complements, (ii) "pikeun" "for" complements,…

The DP Hypothesis proposes that nominal phrases can be analyzed as consisting of Determiner Phrase (DP) on top of Noun Phrase (NP); however, there is a debate on whether this hypothesis works for all languages. Given that previous studies on Chinese leave this question unresolved, this dissertation investigates new empirical evidence to test…

Landau (2000) distinguishes between P(artial) C(ontrol) and E(xhaustive) C(ontrol): PC predicates like hope admit a subset relation between controller and controllee (e.g., "Kim hoped to gather at noon." [controllee = Kim and contextually salient others]); EC predicates like "try" do not (*"Kim tried to gather at…

The present study exposed five-year-olds (M=5 ; 2), seven-year-olds (M=7 ; 6) and adults (M=22 ; 4) to instances of a novel phrasal construction, then used a forced choice comprehension task to evaluate their learning of the construction. The abstractness of participants' acquired representations of the novel construction was evaluated by varying…

Extracting and representing semantic information from large scale corpora is at the crux of computer-assisted knowledge generation. Semantic information depends on collocation extraction methods, mathematical models used to represent distributional information, and weighting functions which transform the space. This dissertation provides a…

The primary goal of the present study is to gain more insight into the phenomena of Expletive Negation. Chapter 1 starts with the observed hallmark properties of EN and theoretical backgrounds. In chapter 2, I show the pragmatic contribution of two scalar meanings of undesirability and unlikelihood. It is further shown that the base of scale…

This paper investigates a type of grammatical ill-formedness in English which is traceable to the repetition, under certain specified conditions, of present participles, e.g. the verb "continue" cannot occur with participles if it is in the present progressive. The solution to generalizing about ill-formedness of this type is by means of a…