Abstract not found

We report the results from three cross-modal lexical decision experiments investigating antecedent priming effects in Japanese. In the first two experiments we examined antecedent reactivation at the preverbal trace position in long-distance scrambling sentences. We found an interaction between the participants' working memory (WM) span and antecedent priming. For the High Span Group, the magnitude of antecedent priming at the trace position was significantly larger than at the earlier control position; for the Low Span Group, on the other hand, there was no such difference. In a third experiment, we examined whether similar reactivation effects cotfid be observed for argument expressions that are not base-generated adjacent to the verb. Contrary to scrambled objects, subject NPs in canonically ordered sentences were not reactivated at the preverbal test position in either of the two participant groups. We argue that the priming effect observed in the High Span Group supports a trace-based account of long-distance scrambling. The degree of complexity of the experimental sentences was such, however, that they exceeded the memory span of the Low Span Group. We conclude that argument traces access their antecedents irrespective of the position of their subcategorizers.

Cyclicity effects are implemented in the Minimalist program, in part, by interleaving tree-building operations with other syntactic operations. The order of operations in the derivation is linked to the hierarchical structure of the tree, since this structure is created in the course of the derivation in a way which makes the hierarchical structure a good guide to the order in which material was introduced. Making this theoretical move raises an important question: in which direction is the tree constructed? The standard answer in Minimalism to this question (see, e.g., Chomsky 1995, 1998) is that the tree is created from the bottom up, with material lower in the tree being introduced before material higher in the tree. For instance, a VP with NPs as its specifier and complement 1 would be created as follows. First, the V would be merged with its complement, to create a constituent like that in (1a). The resulting constituent would then be merged with the NP specifier, creating the new constituent (1b): (1) a. 4 b. 4

An algorithm of phrase structure building is proposed within the bare phrase structure framework. The algorithm is rooted in the idea that applications of Merge -- the operation that combines syntactic objects -- should not change the set of basic relations (in particular, c-command) in the existing structure, what Chomsky (2000) terms 'Least Tampering'. Under the proposed algorithm, this idea translates into a requirement that Merger must take place at the root of the tree/phrase marker when possible. As a result, the algorithm forces (basegenerated or moved) structural adjuncts to be Merged postcyclically. Three empirical consequences of the proposed algorithm are discussed: 1) constructions involving raising across the experiencer (e.g. John seems to Mary to be smart) are shown not to be problematic for the Minimal Link Condition (cf. Chomsky 1995b); 2) a novel account of the 'Adjunct Island' effects (Huang 1982) is proposed; 3) a principled analysis of 'approximative in...

Starting from an analysis for the diverging crosslinguistic grammaticality of DP-internal conjunctions such as this [man and woman] are in love, the article develops a theory of the syntax/semantics interface within the DP and a novel proposal for the interpretation of conjunction. The main claims are that plural/mass denotations are built in stages within the DP, by the combined effect of number features and semantic operators associated with functional heads; that languages differ in whether the denotation of nouns is filtered for singular or plural number, and that the word and crosslinguistically denotes SET PRODUCT, an operation which, in different contexts, can mimic the behavior of intersection and union.

(Word Count: 100) Memes are hypothetical cultural units passed on by imitation; although non-biological, they undergo Darwinian selection like genes. Cognitive study of multimodular human minds undermines memetics: unlike genetic replication, high fidelity transmission of cultural information is the exception, not the rule. Constant, rapid “mutation ” of information during communication generates endlessly varied creations that nevertheless adhere to modular input conditions. The sort of cultural information most susceptible to modular processing is that most readily acquired by children, most easily transmitted across individuals, most apt to survive within a culture, most likely to recur in different cultures, and most disposed to cultural variation and elaboration.

This book is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation. I thank my advisor Rita Manzini and Leonardo Savoia for giving me the chance of doing linguistics. In particular, I wish to thank Rita Manzini for teaching me how to pose myself the right questions when I do linguistic research. I received inputs from discussions with many people. It is impossible to remember them all, so I apologize in advance for those I will forget. Among the people I met in Europe, I thank Caterina Donati and Marina Nespor for drawing my attention to Focus; Orin Percus for helping me at the early stages of this work, and Adriana Belletti, Carlo Cecchetto, Roberta D’Alessandro, Mara Frascarelli, Luigi Rizzi, and Kriszta Szendröi for useful discussions and comments. During my intense two weeks at MIT, I specially benefited by the stimulating

This study presents results from sentence-completion and grammaticality-judgment tasks with 7 German-speaking agrammatic aphasics and 7 age-matched control subjects examining tense and subject-verb agreement marking. For both experimental tasks, we found that the aphasics achieved high correctness scores for agreement, while tense marking was severely impaired. To account for the observed tense-agreement dissociation, we suggest that the functional category T/INFL is tense-defective in agrammatic aphasia, i.e. it is specified for [ Realis], but not for [Past]. It will also be argued that other accounts, specifically the treepruning model, do not explain our findings.

This paper examines issues in parsing architecture for a left-to-right implementation of the probe-goal Case agreement model, a theory in the Minimalist Program (MP). Computation from a parsing perspective imposes special constraints. For example, in left-to-right parsing, the assembly of phrase structure must proceed through elementary tree composition, rather than using using the generative operations merge and move directly. On-line processing also poses challenges for the incremental computation of probe/goal relations. We describe an implemented parser that computes these relations and assembles phrase structure, whilst respecting the incremental and left-to-right nature of parsing. The model employs two novel mechanisms, a Move and a Probe box, to implement e#cient parsing, without "lookback" or unnecessary search of the derivational history.

Abstract not found