The grammar of modification is highly complex and raises numerous questions about the relation between meaning and form. This dissertation provides a study of how modified noun phrases are interpreted and examines the consequences of these results for the syntax of the nominal domain. The discussion centers on two types of modification: superlatives and stacked modification. The data comes primarily from English, but other languages are also discussed. There is initial evidence that the main claims hold across a wide range of languages. The common view on superlatives is that they have two types of interpretations which are the result of a scope ambiguity and that the contrast between them needs to be captured by means of syntactic devices. Contra this standard approach I propose a saliency theory of superlatives which claims that there is no categorical difference between these two interpretations and where the variation in the meaning of superlatives is purely pragmatic in nature. Under this view the meaning of superlatives is a function of the properties of the surrounding discourse and the context-sensitivity of superlatives is subsumed to the more general phenomenon of context-dependency in the interpretation of natural language quantifiers. The saliency theory differs from other analyses that have adopted a discourse approach in that the so-called comparative reading does not depend on the presence or interpretation of focus. Previous approaches to multiple adjectives analyzed their order in terms of the semantics of individual adjectives. I present a new set of data which shows that this is insufficient and propose an explanation that takes into account the meaning of the whole nominal phrase. This result has consequences for how the architecture of grammar should be conceived. In particular, it shows that principles of syntactic well-formedness can sometimes be sensitive to compositional semantic interpretation, as well as pragmatic information. This is in contradiction to many contemporary approaches to grammar where the semantic component has no influence on the syntactic one. / text

This paper analyses the phenomenon of Suspended Affixation (SA) which refers to a situation in coordinated constructions when affixes on the final conjunct have scope over all the non-final conjuncts. The main goal of this paper is to look at the structure of SA for Noun Compound Coordination and to find out how pl and poss suffixes behave regarding suspension. Previous studies have shown that in N and NP coordination poss cannot be suspended leaving pl on the non-final conjunct. This study tests the suspendability of poss in the context of Noun Compound coordination. Since SA seems to represent gradient judgment data two acceptability judgment studies were conducted to find out the (un)grammaticality of Noun Compound constructions. The results show that pl and poss suffixes cannot be suspended for independent reasons. The suspendability of poss does not depend on the presence/absence of pl in the structure due to its structural position. This article proposes an analysis of SA in N and NP coordination which represents a combination of two approaches on SA already proposed in literature and is based on the idea of Parallel Merge proposed by Citko (2005). SA in N and NP coordination is considered to be a coordination of fully inflected conjuncts where the inflections are parallel-merged with two conjuncts (final and non-final). I show that due to the structure of Noun Compound coordination constructions, pl and poss cannot be parallel-merged because of a minimality condition: a non-final conjunct has to be a Minimal Morphological Word.

This is a corpus-based study on adjective use in eighty written compositions by Swedish learners of English from Grade 7 and Grade 9 in junior high school, and from Year 1 and Year 3 in senior high school. The aims of the study are to conduct an analysis of the use of attributive adjectives in noun phrases, and to investigate how attributive adjective use contributes to the syntactic complexity of noun phrases. This study proposes a hypothesis of the complexity of noun phrases in relation to different types of attributive adjectives, that is to say, an assumption that more complex types of attributive adjectives contain more compact information that requires more effort to learn and use.  The investigation shows that Swedish learners of English in junior and senior high school use an overwhelming number of noun phrases without premodifiers. The findings confirm that less proficient students use more adjectives as premodifiers in noun phrases than nouns as premodifiers. The results of the examination also reveal that students from the four school levels investigated use the most common attributive adjectives frequently, which accouts for more than half of the attributive adjectives used. However, a positive trend is that the use of more complex types of adjectives, such as derivational and participial adjectives, steadily increases in number when students advance in school level.  The comparision of the most common attributive adjectives in proportion to other adjectives used in the data from each grade shows that more proficient students use a richer variety of adjectives than less proficient students. Some pedagogical implications in this connection are the need to raise Swedish students’ awareness of different types of adjectives in language teaching and learning. Other pedagogical suggestions are the need to develop students’ skills in elaborating ideas and consolidating syntactic structures in their writing.       Keywords: syntactic development, noun premodification, attributive adjective, Swedish learners of English

De uma maneira geral, este trabalho tem como objetivos descrever e analisar alguns aspectos dos Sintagmas Nominais em Karitiana. Primeiramente, retomamos as discussões de Müller, Storto e Coutinho-Silva (2006a,b) e Sanchez-Mendes (2007) acerca da quantificação em Karitiana e descrevemos o comportamento do suposto quantificador Universal: akatyym, propondo que em Karitiana exista um processo específico de \'quantificação\' que não pode ser tratado como quantificação nominal ou adverbial conforme descrito em Bach et al (1995), pois o que nossa análise tanto do ponto de vista morfossintático, quanto do ponto de vista semântico aponta é que NP+akatyym é uma sentença relativa com núcleo interno, e sua suposta força quantificacional de Universal pode ser justificada como uma característica das relativas livre de núcleo interno que ao interpretar semanticamente seus núcleos nominais internamente ao CP, gera uma operação que tem como resultado semântico uma denotação de entidade plural máxima ou completa (cf. Grosu & Landman, 1998). Além disso, este trabalho analisa alguns fatos inter-relacionados dentro do Sintagma Nominal: analisamos as estruturas demonstrativas, mostrando que elas também são melhor analisadas como sentenças relativas e propomos uma descrição e análise dos pronominais em Karitiana tanto do ponto de vista da Morfologia Distribuída, seguindo os trabalhos de Ritter e Harley (1998), Hanson, Harley e Ritter (2000) e Harley e Ritter (2002) para a composição da geometria de traços no paradigma dos pronomes pessoais na língua, quanto dos recursos envolvidos na ligação e co-denotação (Büring, 2005). Por fim, apontamos que a não existência de um item lexical específico para a Quantificação Universal Nominal, de pronomes demonstrativos e de uma efetiva morfologia de número nos pronomes pessoais corroboram a hipótese de não existência da categorial funcional DP nos nominais em Karitiana proposta por Müller, Storto & Coutinho-Silva (2006a,b). / In a general aspect, this work has as its goals to describe and analyze some aspects of the Karitiana Noun Phrases. First, we take up again the discussions from Müller, Storto & Coutinho-Silva (2006a,b) and Sanchez-Mendes (2007), on Karitianas quantification, and we describe the behaviour of the alleged universal quantifier: akatyym, proposing that, in Karitiana, there is a specific quantificational process that cannot be treated as noun ou adverbial quantification as described in Bach et al (1995), since what our analysis shows from the morphossyntactic, as well as the semantic point of view, is that NP +akatyym is a internalheaded relative clause, and its alleged Universal quantificational force can be justified as a characteristic of the internal-headed free relatives, that, as it interprets its nominal heads semantically DP-internally, generates an operation which has as its semantic result a denotation of plural maximum or complete entity (cf. Grosu & Landman, 1998). Besides, this work analyzes a few interesting facts correlated within the Noun Phrase: we analysed the demonstrative structures, showing that they are best analyzed as relative clauses, and we propose a description and an analysis of the Karitiana pronouns from both the Distributed Morphology point of view, following the works of Ritter & Harley (2002), for the feature geometry composition for the person pronouns paradigm, and also of the resources involved in binding and co-denotation (Büring, 2005). At last, we point that the non-existance of a specific lexical item for universal quantification of nominals, of demonstrative pronouns and of an effective number morphology in the personal pronouns corroborate the hypothesis of non-existance of the functional category DP in the Karitiana nouns, as proposed by Müller, Storto & Coutinho- Silva (2006a,b).

De uma maneira geral, este trabalho tem como objetivos descrever e analisar alguns aspectos dos Sintagmas Nominais em Karitiana. Primeiramente, retomamos as discussões de Müller, Storto e Coutinho-Silva (2006a,b) e Sanchez-Mendes (2007) acerca da quantificação em Karitiana e descrevemos o comportamento do suposto quantificador Universal: akatyym, propondo que em Karitiana exista um processo específico de \'quantificação\' que não pode ser tratado como quantificação nominal ou adverbial conforme descrito em Bach et al (1995), pois o que nossa análise tanto do ponto de vista morfossintático, quanto do ponto de vista semântico aponta é que NP+akatyym é uma sentença relativa com núcleo interno, e sua suposta força quantificacional de Universal pode ser justificada como uma característica das relativas livre de núcleo interno que ao interpretar semanticamente seus núcleos nominais internamente ao CP, gera uma operação que tem como resultado semântico uma denotação de entidade plural máxima ou completa (cf. Grosu & Landman, 1998). Além disso, este trabalho analisa alguns fatos inter-relacionados dentro do Sintagma Nominal: analisamos as estruturas demonstrativas, mostrando que elas também são melhor analisadas como sentenças relativas e propomos uma descrição e análise dos pronominais em Karitiana tanto do ponto de vista da Morfologia Distribuída, seguindo os trabalhos de Ritter e Harley (1998), Hanson, Harley e Ritter (2000) e Harley e Ritter (2002) para a composição da geometria de traços no paradigma dos pronomes pessoais na língua, quanto dos recursos envolvidos na ligação e co-denotação (Büring, 2005). Por fim, apontamos que a não existência de um item lexical específico para a Quantificação Universal Nominal, de pronomes demonstrativos e de uma efetiva morfologia de número nos pronomes pessoais corroboram a hipótese de não existência da categorial funcional DP nos nominais em Karitiana proposta por Müller, Storto & Coutinho-Silva (2006a,b). / In a general aspect, this work has as its goals to describe and analyze some aspects of the Karitiana Noun Phrases. First, we take up again the discussions from Müller, Storto & Coutinho-Silva (2006a,b) and Sanchez-Mendes (2007), on Karitianas quantification, and we describe the behaviour of the alleged universal quantifier: akatyym, proposing that, in Karitiana, there is a specific quantificational process that cannot be treated as noun ou adverbial quantification as described in Bach et al (1995), since what our analysis shows from the morphossyntactic, as well as the semantic point of view, is that NP +akatyym is a internalheaded relative clause, and its alleged Universal quantificational force can be justified as a characteristic of the internal-headed free relatives, that, as it interprets its nominal heads semantically DP-internally, generates an operation which has as its semantic result a denotation of plural maximum or complete entity (cf. Grosu & Landman, 1998). Besides, this work analyzes a few interesting facts correlated within the Noun Phrase: we analysed the demonstrative structures, showing that they are best analyzed as relative clauses, and we propose a description and an analysis of the Karitiana pronouns from both the Distributed Morphology point of view, following the works of Ritter & Harley (2002), for the feature geometry composition for the person pronouns paradigm, and also of the resources involved in binding and co-denotation (Büring, 2005). At last, we point that the non-existance of a specific lexical item for universal quantification of nominals, of demonstrative pronouns and of an effective number morphology in the personal pronouns corroborate the hypothesis of non-existance of the functional category DP in the Karitiana nouns, as proposed by Müller, Storto & Coutinho- Silva (2006a,b).

Chan Kun-Chung Timothy. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 79-83). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Motivation --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Outline of Thesis --- p.3 / Chapter 2 --- Background --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1 --- Chinese Noun Phrase Structure --- p.5 / Chapter 2.2 --- Literature Review --- p.6 / Chapter 2.3 --- Observations --- p.10 / Chapter 2.4 --- Chapter Summary --- p.11 / Chapter 3 --- Maximal Chinese Noun Phrase Extraction System --- p.13 / Chapter 3.1 --- Background --- p.13 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- Part-of-speech Tagset --- p.13 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- The Tagging System --- p.14 / Chapter 3.1.3 --- Chinese Corpus --- p.16 / Chapter 3.1.4 --- Grammar Rules and Boundary Information --- p.17 / Chapter 3.1.5 --- Feature Selection --- p.19 / Chapter 3.2 --- Overview of Our Chinese Noun Phrase Extraction System --- p.19 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Training --- p.19 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Testing --- p.21 / Chapter 3.3 --- Chapter Summary --- p.21 / Chapter 4 --- Preliminary Noun Phrase Extraction --- p.23 / Chapter 4.1 --- Framework --- p.23 / Chapter 4.2 --- Boundary Information Acquisition --- p.24 / Chapter 4.3 --- Candidate Boundary Insertion --- p.26 / Chapter 4.4 --- Pairing of Candidate Boundaries --- p.27 / Chapter 4.4.1 --- Conditional Probability-based Model --- p.28 / Chapter 4.4.2 --- Heuristic-based Model --- p.29 / Chapter 4.4.3 --- Dynamic Programming-based Model --- p.30 / Chapter 4.4.4 --- Model Selection --- p.31 / Chapter 4.4.5 --- Revised Dynamic Programming Model --- p.32 / Chapter 4.4.6 --- Analysis of the Impact of the Revised DP Model --- p.35 / Chapter 4.4.7 --- Experiments of Dynamic Programming-based Model --- p.38 / Chapter 4.4.8 --- Result Analysis --- p.42 / Chapter 4.5 --- Concluding Remarks on DP-Based Model --- p.47 / Chapter 4.6 --- Chapter Summary --- p.49 / Chapter 5 --- Automatic Error Correction --- p.50 / Chapter 5.1 --- Introduction --- p.50 / Chapter 5.1.1 --- Statistical Properties of TEL --- p.54 / Chapter 5.1.2 --- Related Applications --- p.55 / Chapter 5.2 --- Settings of Main Components --- p.57 / Chapter 5.2.1 --- Initial State --- p.58 / Chapter 5.2.2 --- Transformation Actions --- p.58 / Chapter 5.2.3 --- Triggering Features of Transformation Templates --- p.58 / Chapter 5.2.4 --- Evaluation of Rule --- p.62 / Chapter 5.2.5 --- Stopping Threshold --- p.62 / Chapter 5.3 --- Experiments and Results --- p.63 / Chapter 5.3.1 --- Setup and Procedure --- p.63 / Chapter 5.3.2 --- Overall Performance --- p.63 / Chapter 5.3.3 --- Contribution of Rules --- p.67 / Chapter 5.3.4 --- Remarks on Rules Learning --- p.69 / Chapter 5.3.5 --- Discussion on Recall Performance --- p.70 / Chapter 5.4 --- Chapter Summary --- p.73 / Chapter 6 --- Conclusion --- p.74 / Chapter 6.1 --- Summary --- p.74 / Chapter 6.2 --- Contributions --- p.76 / Chapter 6.3 --- Future Work --- p.76 / Bibliography --- p.79 / Chapter A --- Chinese POS Tag Set --- p.84 / Chapter B --- Algorithms of Boundary Pairing Models --- p.88 / Chapter B.1 --- Heuristic based Model --- p.88 / Chapter B.2 --- Dynamic Programming based Model --- p.89 / Chapter C --- Triggering Environments of Transformation Templates --- p.91

by Li Wenjie. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 209-226). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.

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A cross-sectional study of the performance of groups of Vietnamese learners is reported with focus on how they deal with the expression of number in English (singular/plural; definite/indefinite) through a cloze exercise and a translation excercise. This research investigates the hypothesis that some NP environments facilitate the distinction between singular and plural, count and mass, and that the context in which a noun is used can provide positive clues to the choice of number in nouns. It has been found that transfer of Vietnamese NP structures into English occurred where the NP environment was not obviously countable or uncountable, i.e., it has no conspicuous structural signals for number determination. Transfer was also found where an NP was taken from its context. The analysis of learners' errors gives some insight into ways in which the teaching of the number expression can be made more effective and beneficial for Vietnamese learners. A number of activities were suggested, which enable the teacher to exploit the advantages of NP environments to convey the syntactic-semantic properties of number to learners. Communicative practice of NP structures (e.g., in a conversation or a role play activity) can make learners aware of different aspects of the number expression in English. It is argued that the pragmatic aspect of the number expression is most important as in use, the syntactic and semantic properties of the category of number are unified to achieve communicative purposes.

This study investigated the neural bases underlying representation of nouns and verbs at the semantic, lexical form, and morpho-syntactic levels in Mandarin Chinese, a language with little inflectional morphology. Compared with other studies employing European languages with rich inflections, examination of Chinese would allow the separation of conceptual and morpho-syntactic operations based on different stimulus formats and experimental paradigms. To deal with both the theoretical and design issues in previous studies, several additional measures were taken. First, at each cognitive level, two experiments, one receptive and one expressive, were conducted. Moreover, convergence across experiments at the same cognitive level was computed in order to search for taskindependent grammatical class effects. Second, both concrete and abstract nouns and verbs were included, and conjunction analyses across the two concreteness levels were employed to ensure the generalizability of the findings to all nouns and verbs. Results revealed greater activation for verbs in the left posterior lateral temporal gyri in experiments at both semantic and morpho-syntactic levels, and stronger responses in the prefrontal cortex, including left BA47 and the supplementary motor area, only for morpho-syntactic processing associated with nominal grammatical morphemes, namely, classifiers. No differential levels of activation for nouns and verbs were observed in tasks emphasizing word form representation. While greater activation for processing of nominal classifiers in prefrontal areas may reflect differences in computational complexity associated with selection of grammatical morphemes, the involvement of left posterior lateral temporal cortex has been interpreted as reflecting semantic processing of verbs. The nature of processes represented in each of these regions was further discussed with findings from previous relevant studies. Finally, future studies are proposed for further exploration into the neural mechanisms underlying presentation of nouns and verbs using more recently developed methods of analyses. / published_or_final_version / Speech and Hearing Sciences / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy