The present paper addresses the well-known alternation type “spray paint on the wall/ spray the wall with paint” which has received extensive attention in the literature. The discussion is based on Germanic data (English, German and Norwegian) and data from one Slavic language (Bulgarian). In trying to amend previous proposals (e.g. Tenny 1987, 1994, Jackendoff 1996) and resolve issues left open in those works, the current analysis suggests that the semantic properties of both entities involved in a situation denoted by “spray” are relevant for the aspectual properties of the respective constructions headed by “spray”, i.e. both the substance sprayed, and the surface subjected to spraying. It is proposed that the aspectual properties of such constructions reside primarily in the semantic characterization, including the ontological properties, of the latter, coupled to their linguistic realization as distinct types of noun phrases.

This paper develops within HPSG a model of grammar with two syntactic levels, valence lists and argument structure, at which sentences may have different representations: syntactically ergative and Western Austronesian languages are distinctive by allowing different prominence orderings between the valence lists and argument structure, while forms like passives and causatives have nested argument structure lists. While binding theory and related phenomena have traditionally been described in terms of surface grammatical relations or configurations, we demonstrate that binding theory is actually correctly described in terms of argument structure configurations. Such an approach generalizes nicely over accusative and ergative constructions, correctly predicts binding patterns with causative and passive verbs, and supports the lexicality-preserving account of passives and causatives advocated within HPSG.

The grammar of Finnish licenses two different types of complex numeral expressions.While the two occur in the same range of external syntactic and semantic contexts, theynevertheless exhibit striking differences in internal case-marking properties. Utilizing a sign-based, Construction Grammar approach, an analysis of the two types of numeral expressions is provided in terms of a set of closely related constructions. It is argued that the range and properties of numeral expressions as well as the interactions among them reveal a tight system of organization across constructions, expressed here in terms of a carefully formulated inheritance hierarchy. It is also argued that a close examination of the grammar of Finnish numeral expressions provides important insights into more general grammatical phenomena, including compounding, morphosyntactic feature distribution, inflectional realization, and the semantics of quantification

This paper explores the possibilities of modelling and simulating the early phases in child language acquisition using neural networks. A back-propagation model is proposed for language acquisition in a highly inflecting language, Finnish. Some preliminary tests for simulating the U-shaped behaviour of a child's language acquisition process have been performed.

In this article, the traditional analysis of grammatical case in Finnish - in which the form of the object depends on the presence of an overt subject — is reworked within a formal syntactic framework. Within the Case competition model adopted here, the role of argument structure in case assignment, captured by Burzio's Generalization, plays a vital role in the underlying mechanisms of the case system: only when a verb governs two arguments, one of them Caseless, may it also license accusative case. This dependency is subsumed under universal syntactic relations, including government, binding and the ECP. It is also argued that Finnish incorporates active case subsystems within a main nominative-accusative system. These facts receive a natural account within the adopted framework.

An indirect object can be interpreted as a Provider or as a Recipient. The evidence considered in this article suggests that the two interpretations can be morphologically analytic in Chinese and typologically parametrized for certain natural classes of verbs in English and Chinese. Two VP projections are proposed for the ditransitive construction. The head of the lower VP can be phonologically realized or null. The content of the null verb is parametrized across languages. The contrasts in indirect object interpretations in these languages are explained in terms of the lexical meanings of the null verb. The contrasts in verb occurrence restrictions in these languages are accounted for by the interpretable feature compatibilities in head adjunction from the lower to the higher VP.