Syntax

Animacy is known to play an important role in language processing and production, but debate remains as to how it exerts its effects: (1) through links to syntactic ordering, (2) through inherent differences between animate and inanimate entities in their salience/lexico-semantic accessibility, and (3) through links to specific thematic roles. We contrasted these three accounts in two event-related potential (ERP) experiments examining the processing of direct object arguments in simple English sentences. In Experiment 1, we found a larger N400 to animate than inanimate direct object arguments assigned the Patient role, ruling out the second account. In Experiment 2, we found no difference in the N400 evoked by animate direct object arguments assigned the Patient role (prototypically inanimate) and those assigned the Experiencer role (prototypically animate), ruling out the third account. We therefore suggest that animacy may impact processing through a direct link to syntactic linear ordering, at least on postverbal arguments in English. We also exam- ined processing on direct object arguments that violated the animacy-based selection-restriction constraints of their preceding verbs. These violations evoked a robust P600, which was not modulated by thematic role assignment or reversibility, suggesting that the so-called semantic P600 is driven by overall propositional impossibility, rather than thematic role reanalysis

"I pull my copy of Metrophage out of its battered pink paper folder. It is suitably badly printed, and the black and white stripes of the dysfunctional roller have left interference patterns running from the right to the left that distract the eye and make discernment of the faint courier words difficult and time consuming. I randomly separate the pages and start reading:

He stood and Nimble Virtue tossed a packet of Mad Love at his feet. It came to rest by the toe of his boot, where the water was icing up over a flaking patch of dried blood. Welding marks, like narrow scars of slag. The slaughterhouse had been grafted together from a stack of old Sea Train cargo containers. A cryogenic pump hummed at the far end of the place, like a beating heart, pushing liquid oxygen through the network of pipes that criss-crossed the walls and floor. From the ceiling, dull steel hooks held shapeless slabs of discoloured meat. Jonny looked at the slunk merchant.""

Proverbs which determine a nation’s way of looking at the universe and itself and evolve as products of community are language fortunes. In this sense, this material can be used in sociologic, psychologic and socio-economic fields. In the this article proverbs are classified in the structure of sentence thinking that they are the materials of language.

For many Japanese women, the English language has never been just another school subject. For them, English is the tool of identity transformation and the means of obtaining what they passionately desire – mobility, the West and its masculinity. Language Learning, Gender and Desire explores Japanese women's passion for learning English and how they negotiate identity and desire in the terrain of racial, sexual and linguistic politics. Drawing on ethnographic data and popular media texts, the book offers new insights into the multidirectionality of desire and power in the context of second language learning.

In this article, it is argued that the distinction between strong and weak formal features can and must be eliminated. I will adopt the derivation-and-evaluation model of grammar, according to which Chomsky’s computational system (CHL) functions as a generator which produces candidates that are evaluated in an optimality theoretic manner, and it is shown that the strong/weak distinction can be captured by assuming an interaction between a constraint that disfavors movement (STAY) and a constraint (family) F that requires checking of the formal features. The discussion of Scandinavian Object Shift shows that this is not just a reformulation of the original distinction, but has various desirable empirical consequences. The article concludes with a discussion of Scrambling of the Dutch/German type. A somewhat revised analysis appeared in my 2008-book, Derivations and Evaluations: Object Shift in the Germanic Languages.