Focuses on phrasal prominence in American Sign Language (ASL). Reviews the marking of stress and phrase boundaries in ASL, and discusses prominence assignment at the phrasal level, with brief mention of lexical stress. (Author/VWL)

Describes how a laboratory phonologist might investigate three issues in the analysis of the prosody of signed languages: the internal structure, if any, of the signed syllable, the realization of lexical and phrasal prominence, and the marking of edges. Proposes to investigate the internal structure of the syllable by adapting psycholinguistic…

A series of self-paced reading time experiments was performed to assess how characteristics of noun phrases (NPs) contribute to the difference in processing difficulty between object- and subject-extracted relative clauses. Structural semantic characteristics of the NP in the embedded clause (definite vs. indefinite and definite vs. generic) did…

P. Bloom's (1990) data on subject omission are often taken as strong support for the view that child language can be explained in terms of full competence coupled with processing limitations in production. This paper examines whether processing limitations in learning may provide a more parsimonious explanation of the data without the need to…

Four experiments were performed which had the goal of determining how and when young children acquire the ability to understand long distance dependencies. These studies examined the operations underlying the auditory processing of non-canonically ordered constituents in object-relative sentences. Children 4-6 years of age and an adult population…

This study examined the development of spoken discourse among L2 learners of Japanese who received extensive practice on grammatical chunks. Participants in this study were 22 college students enrolled in an elementary Japanese course. They received instruction on a set of grammatical chunks in class through communicative drills and the…

Two rating studies demonstrate that English speakers willingly produce reduced relatives with internal cause verbs (e.g., "Whisky fermented in oak barrels can have a woody taste"), and judge their acceptability based on factors known to influence ambiguity resolution, rather than on the internal/external cause distinction. Regression analyses…

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…

It is suggested that a dictionary of English lexical phrases would be a valuable resource for learners of English as a Second Language. This form of collocation differs from ordinary collocations or idioms in that it is associated with particular discourse functions. In addition, most lexical phrases are in a form that allows interchangeable…

Transformational analysis of verb phrases in English is discussed. More than 150 transformations are classified arising from 10 basic kernel strings. See FL 508 197 for availability. (RM)

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…

Definiteness and indefiniteness are usually seen as essentially a matter of lexical semantics, in that whether a noun phrase (NP) is definite or indefinite depends on the choice of determiner. It may be more accurate to say that the position of the determiners within phrase structure configurations may correlate with the definite/indefinite…

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…

Making this distinction is difficult because German here deals in prepositional phrases. More precise criteria for distinguishing may be expected from dependence grammar, and from application of the concepts of governance ("Rektion") and valence. Reference is made to experiments by J. D. Apresjan. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)