Research

The present thesis is concerned with the syntax of constructions variously referred to as 'applicative', 'ditransitive', or 'multiple object' constructions: constructions that contain arguments that transcend the traditional subject-object characterization. The present thesis is also concerned with how the syntax of such constructions yields the interpretive effects that previous research has identified. In this thesis I try to remedy the inadequacies and limitations of previous accounts. As far as the syntax of applicatives is concerned, my analysis necessitates the rejection of phase-based derivation, and requires an emphasis on anti-locality, a rethinking of the phenomenon of successive cyclicity, and a renewed appreciation for the relevance of case and category in the context of multiple object constructions. The system I end up with is more relativized than previous accounts, as it makes use of more factors to capture the syntax of applicatives. In addition to providing a more adequate chracterization of the syntax of applicative constructions, I develop a semantic analysis of double-object/low applicative constructions. Specifically, I argue that such constructions involve object-sharing, captured via theta-driven movement, a derivational process that they share with serial verbs and resultative constructions. If correct, the present thesis offers empirical arguments for various theoretical options currently entertained in the minimalist program, among which movement into theta-position, multiple agree, anti-locality, and early successive cyclic movement (i.e., movement taking place before the final landing site is introduced into the structure).

A number of recent electrophysiological studies of sentence processing have shown that a subclass of syntactic violations elicits very rapid ERP responses, occurring within around 200 ms of the onset of the violation. Such findings raise the question of how it is possible to diagnose violations so quickly. This paper suggests that very rapid diagnosis of errors is possible specifically in situations where the diagnosis problem is tightly constrained by specific expectations generated before the critical word is presented. In an event-related potentials (ERP) study of visual sentence reading participants encountered violations of a word order constraint (...Max’s of...) that has elicited early ERP responses in previous studies. Across conditions the illicit sequence was held constant, while sentence context was used to manipulate the expectation for a noun following the possessor Max’s, by manipulating the possibility of ellipsis of the head noun. Results showed that the anterior negativity elicited by the word category violation was attenuated when the availability of ellipsis reduced the expectation for a noun in the position of the offending preposition of, with divergence between conditions starting around 200 ms after the onset of the violation. This suggests a role for structural expectations in accounting for very fast syntactic diagnosis processes.

In this thesis, I propose a syntactic structure for verbs which directly encodes their event complexities. I present a model that is 'internalist' in the Chomskyan sense: Aktionsart properties of predicates are not a real-world affair, but the interpretation of a mind structure. For this purpose, I base my proposal on the Dimensional Theory of Uriagereka (2005, forthcoming). Syntactic constructs are in this view the results of operations that create increasingly complex objects, based on an algorithm that is homo-morphic with the structure of numerical categories. First, I propose that Aktionsart can be read off from structural complexities of syntactic objects and their associated 'theta-roles'. Specifically, I present the SAAC Hypothesis: Syntactic complexity in a verb is reflected in the number of syntactic arguments it takes. This approach, within the confines of the Dimensional Theory, results in an emergent 'thematic hierarchy': Causer > Agent > Locative > Goal > Theme. I test the accuracy of this hierarchy and concomitant assumptions through paradigms like the control of implicit arguments, selectional properties of verbs, extractions, aspect-sensitive adverbials, etc. Second, I argue that the verbal structure I propose is syntactically and semantically real, by extending the proposal in Lasnik (1999) on VP ellipsis from inflectional to derivational morphology. I discuss two contrasting methods of morphological amalgamation in English and Japanese, executed in Syntax and PF, respectively. This demonstrates a tight network of entailment patterns that holds of verbs, derived crucially from the architecture I argue for. Third, an analogous point is made through the structural positionings of causative and inchoative derivational morphemes in Japanese. There, each order of structural complexity has a profound impact on the class of eventualities a derivational morpheme can describe. 'Dimensional talks' are observed between certain derivational morphemes, which presumably find their roots in operations of the computational system within the Dimensional Theory. I show that the verbal structure in Japanese reflects directly an underlying bi-clausality that I argue for, in terms of derivational morphemes, further supporting a natural mapping between syntax and semantics. This is, in the end, an attempt for a 'Minimalist' theory of Aktionsart.

Turkish relative clauses display a subject/non-subject asymmetry. The subject relative (SR) is licensed for relativization from [Spec, TP]. Whereas the non-subject relative (NSR) is never acceptable for subject relativization, the SR is licensed in clauses where there is no external argument, and when relativizing a non-subject in clauses where the subject is non-specific. Within the framework of the Minimalist Program, Turkish RCs are explained in terms of satisfaction of the EPP of T by a D feature and Minimality effects. As long as no nominal expression intervenes between the relative head and [Spec, TP], the SR is licensed. The SR, then, can be used as a diagnostic for movement through TP. Minimality effects are incurred when there is an intervening nominal between T° and the RC head, and the SR becomes unacceptable. The proposal is that in Turkish, specific nominals, +human nominals, and Experiencers of psych verbs all contain a DP projection. Non-specifics are NPs which cannot satisfy the EPP. NP subjects cannot move to [Spec, TP], and thus permit the SR form for relativization of non-subjects. NPs create intervention effects, as does PRO, with the exception of subject control PRO which is perhaps a trace of movement. Scrambling ameliorates intervention effects. Once scrambled, expressions are frozen but remain porous for movement of a subconstituent. Differences between inherent and structural Case are suggested with structural case assignment limited to DPs and in a Spec-Head configuration. Structurally case-marked DPs are barred from moving to case-assigning positions unless there is a morphological match. Further proposals include structures for verb classes, including Psych verbs, and structures for infinitivals and +human DPs. Contrastive focus is briefly addressed. Though superficially complex, relativization in Turkish can be accounted for with a minimum of technology. The suggestions here have implications for the theory of the EPP, Case, its assignment and interface conditions, feature satisfaction, and movement.

Until recently the focus of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community has been on a handful of mostly European languages. However, the rapid changes taking place in the economic and political climate of the world precipitate a similar change to the relative importance given to various languages. The importance of rapidly acquiring NLP resources and computational capabilities in new languages is widely accepted. Statistical NLP models have a distinct advantage over rule-based methods in achieving this goal since they require far less manual labor. However, statistical methods require two fundamental resources for training: (1) online corpora (2) manual annotations. Creating these two resources can be as difficult as porting rule-based methods. This thesis demonstrates the feasibility of acquiring both corpora and annotations by exploiting existing resources for well-studied languages. Basic resources for new languages can be acquired in a rapid and cost-effective manner by utilizing existing resources cross-lingually. Currently, the most viable method of obtaining online corpora is converting existing printed text into electronic form using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Unfortunately, a language that lacks online corpora most likely lacks OCR as well. We tackle this problem by taking an existing OCR system that was desgined for a specific language and using that OCR system for a language with a similar script. We present a generative OCR model that allows us to post-process output from a non-native OCR system to achieve accuracy close to, or better than, a native one. Furthermore, we show that the performance of a native or trained OCR system can be improved by the same method. Next, we demonstrate cross-utilization of annotations on treebanks. We present an algorithm that projects dependency trees across parallel corpora. We also show that a reasonable quality treebank can be generated by combining projection with a small amount of language-specific post-processing. The projected treebank allows us to train a parser that performs comparably to a parser trained on manually generated data.

In this thesis, I present evidence that structural Case in Korean is not absolutely semantically inert. It can have a focus flavor in some contexts, for example, stacked Case and Case attached to an adverb/adverbial and a verb. This sort of Case feature may not be an embarrassment for the good design of language. I discuss the Resultative Construction in a derivational approach. We compare the Resultative Construction between English and Korean in pursuit of finding out the underlying cause for differences between the two languages.

This dissertation investigates long-distance backwards pronominal dependencies (backwards anaphora or cataphora) and constraints on such dependencies from the viewpoint of language development and real-time language processing. Based on the findings from a comprehension experiment with Russian-speaking children and on real-time sentence processing data from English and Russian adults I argue for a position that distinguishes structural and non-structural constraints on backwards anaphora. I show that unlike their non-syntactic counterparts, structural constraints on coreference, in particular Principle C of the Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981), are active at the earliest stage of language development and of real-time processing. In language acquisition, the results of a truth-value judgment task with 3-6 year old Russian-speaking children reveal a striking developmental asymmetry between Principle C, a cross-linguistically consistent syntactic constraint on coreference, and a Russian-specific discourse constraint on coreference. Whereas Principle C is respected by children already at the age of three, the Russian-specific (discourse) constraint is not operative in child language until the age of five. These findings present a challenge for input-driven accounts of language acquisition and are most naturally explained in theories that admit the existence of innately specified principles that underlie linguistic representations. In real-time processing, the findings from a series of self-paced reading experiments on English and Russian show that in backwards anaphora contexts the parser initiates an active search for an antecedent for the pronoun which is limited to positions that are not subject to structural constraints on coreference, e.g. Principle C. This grammatically constrained active search mechanism associated observed in the processing of backwards anaphora is similar to the mechanism found in the processing of another type of a long-distance dependency, the wh-dependency. I suggest that the early application of structural constraints on long-distance dependencies is due to reasons of parsing efficiency rather than due to their architectural priority, as such constraints aid to restrict the search space of possible representations to be built by the parser. A computational parsing algorithm is developed that combines the constrained active search mechanism with a strict incremental left-to-right structure building procedure.

Linguistic semantics should be the study, not of reference and truth conditions, but of how the expresssions of a natural language constrain the contents of thoughts and communicative actions.

This dissertation develops novel derivational mechanics for characterizing the syntactic component of human language -- Tree Contraction Grammar (TCG). TCG falls within a general class of derivationally-oriented minimalist approaches, constituting a version of a Multiple Spell Out (MSO-)system (Chomsky 1999, Uriagereka 1999, 2002). TCG posits a derivational WORKSPACE restricting the size of structures that can be active at a given stage of derivation. As structures are expanded, workspace limitations periodically force contractions of the span of structure visible to operations. These expansion-contraction dynamics are shown to have implications for our understanding of locality of dependencies, specifically regarding successive cyclic movement. The mechanics of TCG rely on non-standard assumptions about the direction of derivation -- structure assembly is required to work top-down. TCG draws a key idea from TAG; that is, recursive structure ought to play a direct role in delimiting the range of possible interactions between syntactic elements in phases of derivation. TAG factors complex structures into non-recursive elementary trees and recursive auxiliary trees that are combinable via TAG's two operations (substitution/adjoining). In TCG the expansion of structure in the workspace is similarly limited to containing only non-recursive stretches of structure. In the course of a derivation, encountering "repeated elements" in the expanding dominance ordering forces contractions of the workspace (understood to happen in potentially different ways depending on the properties of repeated elements). In certain circumstances, repeated elements are identified, allowing information from earlier stages of derivation to be carried over to later stages, underwriting our (novel) view of successive cyclicity. Recursive structure is retained in the global "output" structure, upon parts of which we understand the workspace to be superimposed.

The aim of the present study is to revisit the old debate between rationalists and empiricists in relation to language development with new longitudinal data in hand. I show that when it comes to the development of a specific piece of linguistic knowledge, namely the distribution of the third person singular morpheme -s in child English, the generativist approach can satisfactorily account for the quirks observed in the longitudinal data presented herein. First, I argue that children are not conservative learners in the sense of Tomasello (2003), but they set parameters in the sense of Crain (1991). That is to say, child grammars may vary from the adult -significantly-, but the variation is conservatively limited by the hard-wired principles and parameters of Universal Grammar. I conclude that a parameter setting account of the development of functional categories is preferred as it attains explanatory adequacy with a minimal set of assumptions. I then adopt Lasnik's (1995a) parametric account of verbal morphology, which distinguishes two types of Infl(ectional) items: affixal Infl and featural Infl. Furthermore, I use the same distinction to account for the development of sentential Neg(ation), as well, arguing that there are two parametric values associated with the Neg(ation) category: affixal Neg and featural Neg. In natural languages, the intersection of these values defines different grammars (e.g. Swedish vs. English, Middle English vs. Modern English). Based on the Principles and Parameter theory, I show that at any given point in development, innately hard-wired UG principles and parameters can accurately define child grammars the same way they define any natural language. I argue that longitudinal evidence suggests that these parametric values are hard wired as those options are explored by four different English-speaking 2-year-old children. Thus, I conclude that language development is better understood as language change driven by parameter setting and re-setting.