Examines a set of traditional problems involving the indefinite article and its contrast with the definite article in English. The variability in definite interpretations and the nature of the contrast between "a" and "the" is illustrated, and an explanation for cooccurrence restrictions involving the definite article is provided. (62 references)…

In an examination of pronominal disagreements, this study examined how speakers on certain television interview programs resolve problems of agreement with formally singular epicene antecedents. The form most frequently used is "they," and some forms found in written English hardly occur. (54 references) (Author/LB)

Demonstrates how the important distinction between the locative and nonlocative implication of a noun is essential for the presence of the Chinese locative particle "li," identifying groups of nouns that can not take the particle, nouns that optionally use the particle, and nouns that must use the particle. (CB)

Analyzes two seemingly different types of adjectives in Japanese and claims they share fundamentally similar phrase structures. Discusses the hypothesis that there is a phrase for predication. Japanese adjectives show morphological corroboration for this phrase, which is referred to as the predicative copula. (Author/VWL)

Examines informal Japanese conversations between 16 pairs of same-sex friends to explore the preferred information structure of the intonation unit and the preferred clause structure in terms of the number and type of arguments contained per clause. (Author/VWL)

Looks at infinitival relative clauses, such as "Mary is the person to ask," and their distribution in spoken English. Analyzes the correlation between the function of the antecedent in the relative clause and the function of the whole postmodified noun phrase in the matrix clause. (Author/JL)

Reexamines the notion of non-restrictive relative clauses (NRRCs) in light of spoken corpus evidence, based on analysis of 692 occurrences of non-restrictive "which"-clauses in British and American spoken English data. Reviews traditional conceptions of NRRCs and recent work on the broader notion of subordination in spoken grammar.…

Challenges assumptions regarding dative alternation and proposes an account in terms of one general constraint of what makes a verb a possible verb, which operates over verb-specific conceptual information. Central to the proposal is the assumption that the different forms of dative verbs do not only encode different conceptual representations of…

This study proposes a probabilistic model for automatically extracting English noun phrases for indexing or information retrieval. The technique is based on a Markov model, whose initial parameters are estimated by a phrase lookup program with a phrase dictionary, then optimized by a set of maximum entropy parameters. (Author/LRW)

Investigates the position of adverbial clauses in a subset consisting of 42 texts drawn from 6 text types, 3 from written English and 3 from spoken English. The article identifies factors influencing the position choice for various types of adverbial clauses. Findings indicate that clause length is not a significant positional factor. (nine…

Presents a theory of feature representation that accounts for feature indeterminacy and feature resolution within the lexical functional grammar (LFG) framework. The representations discussed, together with minimal extensions of LFG's description language, enable a simple and intuitive characterization of both these phenomena. (Author/VWL)

Investigated children's acquisition of short- and long-distance "whose"-questions to see whether children know that, in English, the entire "whose"-phrase must pied-pipe to the specifier of complementizer. Subjects were English-speaking children, ages 4-6. phrase. (Author/VWL)

Examines the effects of morphological case on the position of objects in Old English in terms of both formal syntactic accounts and functional explanations. Quantitative analysis of Old English clauses with non-finite main verbs and noun phrase objects demonstrates that overt case-marking, whether ambiguous or unambiguous, has no effect on the…

Examined whether gambit use in Spanish--words or phrases that facilitate the flow of conversation by giving the speaker time to organize her thoughts--can be taught effectively in the classroom, allowing the student to use gambits appropriately in unplanned speech. Results suggest that students can be taught to use gambits effectively in the…

A variety of positions have been proposed to explain the ontological development of functional categories. These positions follow either a maturation or continuity perspective. This article examined the acquisition of inflectional phrase and determiner phrase in children acquiring French and English simultaneously in order to evaluate the…