8,207 research outputs found
Regulation of the subcellular distribution and gene expression of GABAA receptor by microtubules and microfilaments in cultured brain neurons.
A possible causal relationship between the 1998 Ruey-Li sequence and the 1999 Chi-Chi earthquake in Taiwan
Wh-Islands: A View from Correspondence Theory
This paper discusses a family of restrictions on syntactic extraction, so-called wh-islands. The analysis will be based on the OT syntax model developed in Vogel (2004a,b) which focuses on the correspondence between semantic, syntactic and phonological representations, in the spirit of work by Jackendoff (1997), Williams (2003) and Culicover & Jackendoff (2005). I will argue that the wh-island restriction results from the impossibility to establish a perfect semantics-syntax mapping in the relevant structures. The resulting constraint violations add up to yield the wh-island effect. Exceptions to the wh-island restrictions in English are argued to be prosodically licensed.
Section 2 introduces the model I am using, and presents examples of some accounts of ineffability which I developed elsewhere. That section also introduces the basics of my treatment of wh-movement. Section 3 develops the account of wh-islands. Section 4 discusses the exceptions to the wh-island restriction that we see in English, and extends my account to handle these cases. The OT implementation of this account is presented in Section 5.The definitive version of this paper is published in Modeling Ungrammaticality in Optimality Theory. It is available at https://www.equinoxpub.com/equinox/books/showbook.asp?bkid=212Vogel, R. (2009). Wh-Islands: A View from Correspondence Theory. In C. Rice (Ed.), Ungrammaticality in Optimality Theory. Oakville, CT:Equinox Pub. Ltd, 2009ISBN-13 9781845532154 (published book
Data files from 3D velocity structure around the source area of the 1999 Chi-Chi, Taiwan, earthquake: Before and after the mainshock""
3D velocity structure around the source area of the 1999 Chi-Chi, Taiwan, earthquake: Before and after the mainshock
The interaction of syntax, prosody, and discourse in licensing French wh-in-situ questions
The current experiment addresses the proposal by Cheng & Rooryk (2000) that wh-in-situ questions in French are marked by an obligatory rising contour, which is the result of an intonation morpheme [Q: ] in C. Twelve native French speakers participated in a production study in which they produced the target interrogatives, along with a range of similar sentences. While most participants were perceived to assign wh-in-situ questions a sentence-final rise, a minority was not. Moreover, the rise associated with wh-in-situ was smaller than the rise exhibited in yes-no questions, which C&R claim to be licensed by the same morpheme. Given that these two results are unexpected under C&R’s account, we conducted a further acoustic analysis of the productions, which revealed that for sentences lacking a sentence-final rise, the the in situ wh-word had an elevated high pitch accent. A statistical analysis shows a negative correlation between the height of the pitch accent assigned to the wh-word and the presence and height of the sentence-final rise, indicating that instead of the sentence-final rise for wh-in-situ questions being optional, it may instead be variable and predictable by focus placed on the wh-word, for discourse reasons. We discuss three possibilities for the status of the intonation morpheme concerning yes-no and wh-questions and the role of information structure in French wh-in-situ questions.Peer reviewed
Greek wh-Questions and the Phonology of Intonation
The intonation of Greek wh-questions consists of a rise-fall followed by a low plateau and a final rise. Using acoustic data, we show (i) that the exact contour shape depends on the length of the question, and (ii) that the position of the first peak and the low plateau depends on the position of the stressed syllables, and shows predictable adjustments in alignment, depending on the proximity of adjacent tonal targets. Models that specify the F0 of all syllables, or models that specify F0 by superposing contour shapes for shorter and longer domains, cannot account for such fine-grained lawful variation except by using ad hoc tonal specifications, which, in turn, do not allow for phonological generalisations about contours applying to utterances of greatly different lengths. In contrast, our findings follow easily from an autosegmental-metrical approach to intonational phonology, according to which melodies may contain long F0 stretches derived by interpolation between specified targets associated with metrically strong syllables and prosodic boundaries
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