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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Parsing And Interpretation Of Comparatives: More Than Meets The Eye, Margaret Ann Grant
The Parsing And Interpretation Of Comparatives: More Than Meets The Eye, Margaret Ann Grant
Open Access Dissertations
This dissertation examines comparative constructions, both in terms of their representation in syntax and semantics and in terms of the way these representations are built and interpreted incrementally during sentence processing. While there has been extensive investigation of comparatives in the syntax and semantics literature (see Bresnan, 1973; von Stechow, 1984; Heim, 1985; Kennedy, 1999, among others), there has been little work on how comparatives are processed (although see Fults and Phillips, 2004; Wellwood et al., 2009 for work on so-called comparative illusions). In the first half of the dissertation, I address issues that are primarily syntactic in nature; in …
Natural Selection And The Syntax Of Clausal Complementation, Keir Moulton
Natural Selection And The Syntax Of Clausal Complementation, Keir Moulton
Open Access Dissertations
This dissertation examines the syntax and semantics of clausal complements. It identifies semantic underpinnings for some syntactic properties of the arguments of propositional attitude verbs. The way clausal arguments compose with their embedding predicates is not uniform and semantic differences emerge from the syntactic context clausal arguments appear in. Three case studies are taken up: clausal arguments of nouns, dislocated clausal arguments (sentential subjects and topics), and infinitival complements with overt subjects (AcI constructions). Chapter Two assembles evidence to support Stowell’s (1981) claim that the clausal complements of nouns are modifiers. It is shown that the clausal complements of nouns …
The Emergence Of Dp In The Partitive Structure, Helen Stickney
The Emergence Of Dp In The Partitive Structure, Helen Stickney
Open Access Dissertations
This dissertation is a first look at English-speaking children’s acquisition of the syntax of the partitive. It presents four experiments that contrast three types of structures and examines how they interact with adjectival modification: the partitive, the pseudopartitive and complex nouns with prepositional adjuncts. The experimentation investigates whether children recognize that the Determiner Phrase (DP) in the partitive is a barrier to adjectival modification. The partitive is contrasted with the pseudopartitive –a minimal pair structure that lacks an internal DP. The data shows that children under the age of six do not distinguish between the partitive and the pseudopartitive. They …