This paper shows that the web can be employed to obtain frequencies for bigrams that are unseen in a given corpus. We describe a method for retrieving counts for adjective-noun, noun-noun, and verbobject bigrams from the web by querying a search engine. We evaluate this method by demonstrating that web frequencies and correlate with frequencies obtained from a carefully edited, balanced corpus.

In this article we investigate logical metonymy, that is, constructions in which the argument of a word in syntax appears to be different from that argument in logical form (e.g., enjoy the book means enjoy reading the book, and easy problem means a problem that is easy to solve). The systematic variation in the interpretation of such constructions suggests a rich and complex theory of composition on the syntax/semantics interface. Linguistic accounts of logical metonymy typically fail to describe exhaustively all the possible interpretations, or they don't rank those interpretations in terms of their likelihood. In view of this, we acquire the meanings of metonymic verbs and adjectives from a large corpus and propose a probabilistic model that provides a ranking on the set of possible interpretations. We identify the interpretations automatically by exploiting the consistent correspondences between surface syntactic cues and meaning. We evaluate our results against paraphrase judgments elicited experimentally from humans and show that the model's ranking of meanings correlates reliably with human intuitions.

Binding theory is the component of grammar that regulates the interpretation of noun phrases. Certain syntactic configurations involving picture noun phrases (PNPs) are problematic for the standard formulation of binding theory, which has prompted competing proposals for revisions of the theory. Some authors have proposed an account based on structural constraints, while others have argued that anaphors in PNPs are exempt from binding theory, but subject to pragmatic restrictions. In this paper, we present an experimental study that aims to resolve this dispute. The results show that structural factors govern the binding possibilities in PNPs, while pragmatic factors play only a limited role. However, the structural factors identified differ from the ones standardly assumed.

It has been argued that linguistic acceptability can be estimated using the psychophysical technique of magnitude estimation, in the same way as physical continua such as brightness and loudness (Bard, Robertson, & Sorace, 1996; Cowart, 1997). For physical continua, plotting the perceived stimulus magnitude against the actual physical magnitude results in a power relationship, the Psychophysical Law (Stevens, 1957). We show that a power law of the same kind can be derived by plotting estimated linguistic acceptability against the number of linguistic constraints violated in the stimulus. perceived magnitude (log scale)

In this paper, we discuss data from Greek that provide evidence in favour of Set-CCG, a formalism which shares the attractive linguistic and computational aspects of CCG.

The main purpose of this paper is to provide experimental evidence that two syntactic reflexes of split intransitivity in German- the selection of perfective auxiliaries and the impersonal passive construction-are sensitive to an aspectual/thematic hierarchy of verb classes. We show that there is a split between ‘core ’ verbs that elicit categorical intuitions from native speakers, and ‘intermediate ’ verbs that exhibit gradience. Furthermore, crossdialectal differences between northern and southern German with respect to auxiliary selection tend to occur only with intermediate verbs. We argue that these findings lend support to the view that the unaccusative/unergative distinction is considerably more unstable than often assumed, and suggest that projectionist theories of the lexicon-syntax interface such as those directly derived from the Unaccusative Hypothesis may not be able to account for the systematic variation exhibited by the data. 3

We present an analysis of multiple focus sentences in Greek. On an empirical level, we show that the current generalisation in the Greek literature that multiple focus is unavailable in Greek is too strong as it stands. What is unavailable is multiple maximal foci in sentences where one focused item has moved to the left periphery. We view the unavailability of multiple foci in such sentences as an interface mismatch between interpretation and phonology. Roughly, what is unavailable is not multiple focus but multiple sentence nuclei. We couch this intuition in Büring’s (2008) analysis which provides a theory of mapping the domain of focus operators to domains of prosodic prominence. We further identify and discuss a set of previously unreported data indicating the availability of 2OF in Greek, also providing experimental data to support our analysis. The empirical data mainly involve multiple wh-questions. 1

The paper focuses on some apparent exceptions to the generalization that quantifiers resist CLLD in Greek. The main body of exceptions involves generic statements. Following Fox and Sauerland (1996) I argue that the Generic Operator, by involving quantification over situations, allows a trivialization of quantifiers like kathe(=each). Thus, in sentences with a generic operator the pronominal resumes the single individual involved in each situation the generic tense quantifies over, rather than the quantified phrase. Pronouns in CLLD are-thus-treated as E(/D)-type pronouns. 1. Background 1.1. The problem Examples (1) illustrate Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) in Greek. 1 (1) a. To Yani *(ton) idha sto PARTY the Yani-acc him saw-1sg at-the party Yanis I met at the Party. b. ta klidhia ta edhosa sti MARIA the keys them gave-1sg to-the Maria The keys I gave to Maria. Greek CLLD resists quantifiers and wh-phrases 2 (Anagnostopoulou 1994; Iatridou