Efficient deep processing of japanese

We present a broad coverage Japanese grammar written in the HPSG formalism with MRS semantics. The grammar is created for use in real world applications, such that robustness and performance issues play an important role. It is connected to a POS tagging and word segmentation tool. This grammar is being developed in a multilingual context, requiring MRS structures that are easily comparable across languages

Morphology, derivational syntax and second language acquisition of resultatives

This thesis explores questions of functional morphology in morphosyntactic theory and in second language acquisition. The work develops Emonds' (2000) notion of a Syntacticon as the store of grammatical lexical items in the Lexicon and it explores the interaction between morphology and syntax in syntactic derivation. The focus of the work is the resultative construction (e.g. She painted the table red). As a resultative, the string conforms to a regular syntactic structure and gives rise to an interpretation in which there is an agent that acts upon some object so as to effect some change of state. In this work, resultative formation in English is contrasted with resultative formation in Korean because the latter, but not the former, includes an obligatory functional result morpheme, -key. The proposed analysis of the resultative accounts for both the morphological and syntactic facts in English and Korean. Additionally, traditional notions of subcategorization are developed, using a Feature-based approach in order to explain the lexical restrictions associated with resultatives. The thesis also includes an experimental study of the acquisition of English resultatives by native Korean and Mandarin Chinese speakers. These languages were chosen in order to highlight the mismatch between Korean and English resultative formation in terms of functional morphology. Accepting the Full Transfer/Full Access model of Schwartz and sprouse (1996), the whole of the native language is assumed to transfer to form the initial state of second language acquisition. The results of the experimental study provide support for the claim that functional morphology, like that implicated in Korean resultative formation, transfers from the native language to affect the development of the Interlanguage in second language acquisition

Are there biological gender differences at the early stages of first language acquisition when producing double object constructions and to/for-datives?

Producción CientíficaThis study examines whether biological gender differences appear in the early stages of acquisition in the case of English dative alternation (DA) structures (double object constructions (DOCs) and to/for-datives). Girls have been found to show faster syntactic development when compared to boys (Lovas, 2011). In the case of the acquisition of DA, an order in the emergence and in the incidence of English DA would entail a syntactic derivational status between DOCs and to/for-datives with one being the original structure and the other the derived one (Gu, 2010). However, analogous ages of onset and fairly similar frequency rates in the production could suggest the construction of two underived structures. We investigate whether biological gender differences appear in the case of DOCs and to/for-datives. We also investigate whether the exposure to English DA (adult input) results in differences between the girls’ output and the boys’ output. We analyze data from eight monolingual English girls and five monolingual English boys, and the adults that interact with them, as available in CHILDES. Our findings reveal that monolingual girls and monolingual boys pattern closely in the acquisition of the syntactic non-derivational relationship between DOCs and to/for-datives, as seen in their similar emergence. Biological gender differences are not seen either in the acquisition of the additional properties of to/for-datives given their later onset and their lower incidence when compared to DOCs. These production patterns also correlate with the frequency with which these structures are heard in the adult input.Junta de Castilla y León (programa de apoyo a proyectos de investigación - Ref. VA009P17)Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (ref. PGC2018-097693-B-I00