This paper describes various aspects of syntactic theory, including lexical, functional, and phrasal categories and how they are put together in clauses and sentences, how words are represented in the mental lexicon, and how noun phrases are assigned structural and semantic information. Language acquisition and the treatment of language disorders…

Discusses the automatic construction of abstracts from the texts of documents. Automatic sentence extraction is examined, including syntactic criteria and semantic relational criteria; textual cohesion is discussed, including the recognition of anaphors and noun phrases; text structure is addressed; and the concept of abstract-frames is described.…

An important question in the study of language production is the nature of the semantic information that speakers use to create syntactic structures. A common answer to this question assumes that thematic roles help to mediate the mapping from messages to syntax. However, research using structural priming has suggested that the construction of…

The role of prosodic phrasing in sentence comprehension was investigated by means of three different tasks, namely auditory word monitoring (Experiment 1), self-paced reading (Experiment 2) and cross-modal comparison (Experiment 3). In all three experiments a critical prosodic unit or frame comprising a determiner, a noun and a Prepositional…

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…

It is proposed that syntactic processes (rules and constraints) may have a semantic basis. Evidence is presented that the constraint against backward pronominalization with indefinite antecedents derives from the semantic properties of various classes of definite noun phrases. (CK)

A discussion of Japanese topic construction argues that topicalization is merely an attachment of the topic particle "wa". It also proposes that other operations associated with this construction, such as movement and base-generation, are not specifically related to topicalization but can be explained in terms of more general rules of…

This paper reports a portion of a research effort to develop a program which will simulate the language learning behavior of humans. Here presented is a heuristic parsing procedure which accepts natural language sentences and produces for each a form of analysis called a "labeled dependency tree." The formal grammar on which the…

This grammar deals only with the speech form of Tzotzil currently in use by 65,000 speakers in the area around Huixtan, Chiapas, Mexico. The grammar is framed in terms of a theory which depends upon Pike's hierarchical structures and Lamb's stratificational model. It presents a description of the syntactic component of Tzotzil, with a few…

A comprehensive system for transformational grammar has been designed and is being implemented on the IBM 360/67 computer. The system deals with the transformational model of syntax, along the lines of Chomsky's "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax." The major innovations include a full and formal description of the syntax of a transformational…

The human sentence parsing device assigns phrase structure to sentences in two steps. The first stage parser assigns lexical and phrasal nodes to substrings of words. The second stage parser then adds higher nodes to link these phrasal packages together into a complete phrase marker. This model is compared with others. (Author/RD)

A discussion of the use of the preposition "de" in Spanish, based on the distinction "Calle Carniceria" or "Calle de Carniceria." A simplification of usage under several headings is presented. Regarding "Calle de,""de" is preferred if a proper noun follows it. (Text is in Spanish.) (AMH)

This article draws attention to a number of syntactic peculiarities of the so-called pronominal adverbs "en" and "y" in French, and maintains that these adverbs differ quite markedly in syntactic behavior. (Text is in French.) (Author/AM)

Examination of two works by Per Aage Brandt, "Pour une chromatique. Note sur des prepositions francaises" in "Lingua e Stile," 1971, and "L'analyse phrastique: reflexions pour une grammatique;" both of which discuss the need to develop a grammar superior to transformational grammar or Chomsky's surface structure-deep structure option. (DD)