Complementizer

Abstract: Immediate effects of verb-specific syntactic (subcategorization) information were found in a cross-modal naming experiment, a self-paced reading experiment, and an experiment in which eye movements were monitored. In the reading studies, syntactic misanalysis effects in sentence complements (e.g., "The student forgot the solution was. . .") occurred at the verb in the complement (e.g., was) for matrix verbs typically used with noun phrase complements but not for verbs typically used with sentence complements. In addition, a complementizer effect for sentencecomplement-biased verbs was not due to syntactic misanalysis but was correlated with how strongly a particular verb prefers to be followed by the complementizer that. The results support models that make immediate use of lexically specific constraints, especially constraint-based models, but are problematic for lexical filtering models. Many aspects of language comprehension take place rapidly, with readers and listeners making commitments to at least partial interpretations soon after receiving linguistic input (e.g., Altmann & Steedman, 1988; Crain & Steedman, 1985; Frazier, 1989; Frazier & Fodor, 1978; Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1987; Tyler, 1989). The on-line nature of comprehension has important consequences for syntactic processing (parsing). Immediate interpretation requires some local syntactic commitments even though sentences often contain temporary ambiguities. As a result, readers and listeners will occasionally make incorrect commitments that will require revision when, an ambiguity is resolved at a later point in processing. The frequency of syntactic misanalysis or garden-pathing will depend on the types of commitments made by the system and the information used to determine these commitments. A system that makes complete syntactic commitments using only a restricted domain of syntactically

Abstract: This article argues that inversion of the subject and auxiliary in English matrix questions and elsewhere is the effect of a violable optimality-theoretic constraint that requires head positions to be filled. When no other auxiliary is available, do-support occurs to satisfy this constraint, resulting in the presence of an expletive verb. When a higher-ranked constraint prohibits inversion, no inversion or do-support is found. The argument is then extended to cases where the complementizer that is obligatory, which are shown to offer best satisfaction of the proposed set of violable constraints

Abstract: We argue that young German children have the major functional sentential heads, in particular the inflectional and complementizer systems. The major empirical basis is natural production data from a 25-month-old child. We perform quantitative analyses which show that the full complement of functional categories is available to the child, and that what crucially distinguishes the child's grammar from the adult's is the use of infinitives in matrix clauses. The evidence we consider includes the child's knowledge of finiteness and verb placement, agreement, head movement, and permissible wordorder variations. We examine several accounts which presuppose a degenerate grammar or which deviate from the standard analysis of German and conclude that they provide a less adequate explanation of the acquisition facts.*