This article presents a syntactic account of the spray/load alternation in Japanese (e.g., nuru ‘smear’, tsumeru ‘pack’, etc.,). Fukui, Miyagawa and Tenny (1985) claim that the alternation verbs show the double object structure under a single VP node; namely both the Material (i.e., something that is painted) and the Location (i.e., somewhere that is painted) participants are co-sisters of the verb. When the Material participant is affected, it will be realized as the direct object of the verb. On the other hand, when the Location is (completely) affected, it will be realized as the direct object of the verb. I build an account on their intuition that the Material and the Location elements are thematically connected with the lexical verb within the binary branching hypothesis (Kayne 1994, among others); thus, they are arguments of VP. But this structure is valid only for the ni-variant where the Material is the single sister of VP. In the structure of the de-variant, the Location is a single sister of VP but the Material element is a PP, merging above VP. Under this view, the two syntactic alternants are available because they are derived from different numeration arrays. The present analysis minimizes the burden on the syntax by eliminating the affectedness condition for determining argument distribution of spray/load verbs in Japanese.

We discuss how we use the Japanese version of PAPPI, a multilingual parsing engine in the Principles-and-Parameters framework (Chomsky 1981), to computationally model a theory that accounts for the grammaticality of certain Japanese wh-constructions. In this theory, a Q-feature is base generated within a wh-phrase and raises to C, where it checks an uninterpretable Q-feature. Qfeature movement can be blocked by an intervening quantificational head; an effect due to the Minimal Link Condition (Chomsky 1995). Furthermore, certain multiple wh-questions in which Q-feature movement is not subject to the Minimal Link Condition are accounted for in terms of the Principle of Minimal Compliance (Richards 2001), which is basically the notion that once a constraint is satisfied it may be subsequently ignored. In this paper, we describe modifications to the parsing engine of PAPPI necessary to implement this Q-feature movement theory.

Ultrasound imaging experiments were conducted to study vowel-to-vowel coarticulation patterns involving the environment of vowel assimilation in Korean. Results showed that anticipatory coarticulatory effects occur and that vowel assimilation is truly phonological and that the degree of coarticulation is stronger in assimilated words than in non-assimilated words. These results imply that phonological rules might directly influence coarticulation in a phonology-phonetics unified grammar.

In Mandarin Chinese topic constructions of the possessor, optional resumptive pronouns (RP) seem to occur. Meanwhile, the data also show a difference in the extractability of the possessor, i.e., the so-called subject-object asymmetry in extractability (Huang 1982). That is, when the possessor of a subject possessive phrase is topicalized/left-dislocated, a gap is grammatical, and an RP is also allowed; when the possessor of an object possessive phrase is topicalized, a gap is disallowed, and an RP saves the otherwise illicit extraction of the possessor. This paper first argues that the Chinese possessive phrase has a phrase structure that resembles the English counterpart, and adopts Abney’s (1987) DP-Hypothesis for the Chinese possessive phrase. Based on the Left Branch Condition (LBC; Ross 1986), the paper then proposes the Symmetrical Hypothesis, i.e., extraction of the possessor is equally illegal from either argument position. With respect to the occurrence of the seemingly optional RPs along with the extraction of the possessor from the subject possessive phrase, the paper posits two distinct possibilities for the extraction: extraction from the subject position directly, which is an argument position, or from the topic position instead, which is a derived position in the left periphery. LBC is at work with the former possibility, and therefore the subject-object asymmetry dissolves; LBC is violable in the latter possibility, given the specific nature of the left periphery (Rizzi 1997). The analysis for the latter possibility leads to the claim that the RP is in fact obligatory, and that the RP and the gap are in different derivations. Further data from Lu (1995) present a challenge to Huang’s asymmetry as well as the proposed Symmetrical Hypothesis. That is, when the possessor is 3rd person non-human, the extraction of the possessor from the object position renders the gap grammatical, but the RP ungrammatical. The analysis of the data finds that the animacy of the possessor plays an important role in eliciting the different grammaticality judgment here. As a result, the utterance of the 3rd person nonhuman RP is prohibited, hence the proposed No Pronunciation Rule. In this sense, Mandarin Chinese also has null RPs.

This paper provides a Distributed Morphology (DM) approach to the thematic licensing of verbs and extends that approach to the licensing of strong verb alternations such as eat/ate. These verbal behaviors have been captured in the DM literature by limiting the morphological environments that condition the insertion of Vocabulary Items (c.f. secondary exponence). In this paper, I show that the verbs in question gain the features of the environment they appear in by undergoing fusion with the relevant heads. In this way, DM does not need to rely upon conditioning the insertion of irregular verbs, but need only rely upon the Subset Principle to license the insertion of these verbs.

A prototype of an automated tool to construct a propositional textbase, AutoProp, is described and qualitatively assessed. The tool is specifically designed to propositionalize texts for experimental studies that collect and analyze participants’ recall of text. The procedure for creating the propositionalized text is explained, followed by a descriptive analysis of the tool’s propositions as compared to 29 hand-coded propositions. In initial testing, all of AutoProp’s propositions differed from the hand-coded propositions at a superficial level; however, no differences deemed uncorrectable were encountered. Based on the success of these initial results, we conclude that AutoProp is a viable tool worthy of continued examination and development. Limitations of the tool, along with future developmental plans and requirements addressing these limitations are also discussed.

It has been well documented in the literature that translation equivalents have special status in bilinguals’ lexical system and can be treated as synonymy across languages. It has been claimed that translation equivalents are overlapped at the conceptual level across languages with different orthographic and phonological forms. Evidence to support this claim comes from cross-language priming studies in which subjects respond to L2 targets faster if targets are preceded by their translation equivalents (translation primes), compared to unrelated primes in lexical decision. Evidence observed in the masked priming paradigm is more convincing in the sense that subjects are not aware of the existence of primes but still produce priming effects from L1 to L2 in lexical decision. In order to have a complete understanding of the semantic organization of bilinguals’ lexical system, a question worthwhile to ask is whether crosslanguage word pairs that are semantically related but not translationequivalents bear any relation with each other at the conceptual level. Previous studies have shown even semantically related cross-language word pairs can generate priming from L1 to L2 when the primes are visible. However, visible primes usually involve strategic processing, which cannot be taken as evidence to support the argument that semantically related cross-language word pairs are conceptually-mediated. This study attempts to investigate whether an L1 prime could generate a more ‘general’ level of semantic priming to enhance the processing of the L2 target under the masked priming condition. This will test the hypothesis of whether semantically related cross-language word pairs are conceptually-mediated by using the lexical decision task. The results show strong priming from L1 to L2 for translation equivalents, but not for semantically-related word pairs. It is suggested that cross-language processing is specific and priming is unique to translation equivalents. In conclusion, it can be argued that semantically-related cross-language word pairs do not conceptually overlap and their mental representations could be very separate.