Grammar Deconstructed: Constructions and the Curious Case of the Comparative Correlative

Comparative correlatives, like "the longer you stay out in the rain, the colder you'll get," are prolific in the world's languages (i.e., there is no evidence of a language that lacks comparative correlatives). Despite this observation, the data do not present a readily apparent syntax. What is the relationship between the two clauses? What is the main verb? What is English's "the" which obligatorily appears at the start of each clause? This thesis reviews prior analyses of comparative correlatives, both syntactic and semantic (Fillmore, 1987; McCawley, 1988; McCawley, 1998; Beck, 1997; Culicover & Jackendoff, 1999; Borsley, 2003; Borsley, 2004; den Dikken, 2005; Abeillé, Borsley & Espinal, 2007; Lin, 2007). A formal syntactic analysis of comparative correlatives is presented which accounts for its syntactic behaviors across several languages. Most notably, it challenges the assumption that constructions are essential primitives for the successful derivation and interpretation of the data (Fillmore, 1987; McCawley, 1988; Culicover & Jackendoff, 1999; Borsley, 2003; Borsley, 2004; Abeillé, Borsley & Espinal, 2007). The analysis is framed within the goals of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1993, 1995a), specifically with respect to endocentricity and Bare Phrase Structure (Chomsky 1995b). Crosslingustically, the first clause is subordinate to the second clause, the main clause. A'-movement (e.g., Topicalization, wh-movement, Focus) out of each clause proceeds successive-cyclically and, in the case of the subordinate clause, via sideward movement (Nunes 1995, 2004; Hornstein, 2001). In English, the word the which obligatorily appears at the start of each clause in English is a Force0. This provides an explanation for the ban on Subject-Aux Inversion (SAI) in the entire expression. The degree phrases which are present in each clause of a comparative correlative crosslinguistically contain a quantifier phrase in Spec,DegP; this quantifier is phonetically null in English. This thesis concludes by presenting conceptual arguments against constructions as primitives in the grammar. Bare Phrase Structure (BPS) (Chomsky, 1995b) is included in the system by virtue of virtual conceptual necessity (VCN). Since constructions do not meet the criteria of (VCN), their existence would compromise the principles of BPS. Further, when applied carefully, BPS renders constructions unable to be defined

The acquisition of adjunct control: grammar and processing

This dissertation uses children’s acquisition of adjunct control as a case study to investigate grammatical and performance accounts of language acquisition. In previous research, children have consistently exhibited non-adultlike behavior for sentences with adjunct control. To explain children’s behavior, several different grammatical accounts have been proposed, but evidence for these accounts has been inconclusive. In this dissertation, I take two approaches to account for children’s errors. First, I spell out the predictions of previous grammatical accounts, and test these predictions after accounting for some methodological concerns that might have influenced children’s behavior in previous studies. While I reproduce the non-adultlike behavior observed in previous studies, the predictions of previous grammatical accounts are not borne out, suggesting that extragrammatical factors are needed to explain children’s behavior. Next, I consider the role of two different types of extragrammatical factors in predicting children’s non-adultlike behavior. With a new task designed to address the task demands in previous studies, children exhibit significantly higher accuracy than with previous tasks. This suggests that children’s behavior has been influenced by task- specific processing factors. In addition to the task, I also test the predictions of a similarity-based interference account, which links children’s errors to the same memory mechanisms involved in sentence processing difficulties observed in adults. These predictions are borne out, supporting a more continuous developmental trajectory as children’s processing mechanisms become more resistant to interference. Finally, I consider how children’s errors might influence their acquisition of adjunct control, given the distribution in the linguistic input. I discuss the results of a corpus analysis, including the possibility that adjunct control could be learned from the input. The kinds of information that could be useful to a learner become much more limited, however, after considering the processing limitations that would interfere with the representations available to the learner

The Processing Of Referential Expressions In Discourse By Chinese, English, And Japanese Native Speakers And By Chinese And Japanese Learners Of English

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2017

Metafictional anaphora:A comparison of different accounts

I argue that pronominal anaphora across mixed parafictional/ metafictional discourse (e.g. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodoi goes through an immense mental struggle. Hei is an intriguing fictional character! ) poses a problem for a workspace account. I evaluate different possible solutions based on a descriptivist approach, Zalta's logic of abstract objects and Recanati's dot-object theory

Anaphora resolution for Arabic machine translation :a case study of nafs

PhD ThesisIn the age of the internet, email, and social media there is an increasing need for processing online information, for example, to support education and business. This has led to the rapid development of natural language processing technologies such as computational linguistics, information retrieval, and data mining. As a branch of computational linguistics, anaphora resolution has attracted much interest. This is reflected in the large number of papers on the topic published in journals such as Computational Linguistics. Mitkov (2002) and Ji et al. (2005) have argued that the overall quality of anaphora resolution systems remains low, despite practical advances in the area, and that major challenges include dealing with real-world knowledge and accurate parsing. This thesis investigates the following research question: can an algorithm be found for the resolution of the anaphor nafs in Arabic text which is accurate to at least 90%, scales linearly with text size, and requires a minimum of knowledge resources? A resolution algorithm intended to satisfy these criteria is proposed. Testing on a corpus of contemporary Arabic shows that it does indeed satisfy the criteria.Egyptian Government

Contrastive Topic: Meanings and Realizations

This dissertation develops a theory of contrastive topics (CTs)—what they mean, and how they are realized. I give a compositional semantics for CT constructions, built on the idea that CT marks anaphora to a complex question in the discourse. The account allows us to maintain an inclusive view of what counts as a contrastive topic, making reasonable predictions about sentences with CT phrases of difference types, in various combinations, and across various speech acts. Empirically, the dissertation focuses on contrastive topic marking in English and Mandarin Chinese. In English, CT phrases are typically realized with a “rising” prosody. I offer an explicit model that predicts the intonational features of English sentences containing contrastive topics. In Mandarin, sentences with CTs often exhibit the discourse particle -ne. I provide a detailed description of the particle’s distribution, and offer the first sustained argument that -ne is a CT marker