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Previous studies have demonstrated that, for adults, differences between unaccusative verbs (e.g., "fall") and unergative verbs (e.g., "dance") lead to a difference in processing. However, so far we don't know whether this effect shows up in children's processing of these verbs as well. This study measures children's processing of intransitive verbs using the Visual World Paradigm. We found that children differentiate in processing between unaccusative and unergative verbs, yet in a different way than adults do. We identify and discuss potential sources for this difference.

This contribution addresses the general theme of Multifunctionality and syncretism in non-finite forms. When we see a particular form in a number of different environments yielding different effects, what does it mean to say that this reflects multifunctionality rather than syncretism? As a refinement of multifunctionality the notion of 'multi-effectuality' is introduced: one element participates in different derivations, performing one and the same operation, but yields different interpretive effects depending on the environment. The analysis takes as a starting point the role of the affix -en in Dutch. The canonical view is that when attached to a verb stem, -en functions either as an infinitival marker or as a nominalizing affix. It is shown that this view cannot be maintained. The "functions" of -en are unified by analyzing it as projecting an 'eventuality expression', with different effects depending on the syntactic environment. The analysis is extended to English, focusing on the contrasts between Dutch and English infinitives and on the role of the English -ing affix in gerunds and participles. The discussion proceeds with an analysis of Frisian with its two forms of the infinitive and concludes with some reflections on the relation between syntactic and semantic categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What prevents pronominals from being locally bound? Does this a) reflect an intrinsic property of pronominals (Chomsky 1981), is it b) a relative (economy) effect, that only shows up where there is a more dedicated competitor (see from different perspectives, Safir 2004, Boeckx, Hornstein and Nunes 2007, Levinson 2000), does it c) have a semantic basis as in Schlenker (2005), or does it d) follow from general conditions on agree based chains, and reflexive predicates (Reuland 2011a)? To help resolve this issue, we investigate Khanty (Uralic, spoken in Northwest Siberia), a language that is reported to allow locally bound pronominals (Nikolaeva 1995), and assess whether it in fact does have them, and, which factors come into play when local binding obtains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguistic accounts of anaphor resolution propose that a pronominal can either be resolved by a grammatical operation in logical syntax (i.e., variable binding) or through value assignment in the discourse (i.e., coreference). A consistent finding in offline studies on the interpretation of ambiguous VP-ellipses is that bound-variable dependencies have a privileged status. The online evidence, on the other hand, is almost absent. In two experiments (one questionnaire and one eye-tracking experiment) we show that the binding preference is not solely an offline phenomenon, but can be detected in real-time measures of language comprehension. Furthermore, and in contrast to an earlier claim (Frazier & Clifton 2000), the binding preference of the language processor is not restricted to elliptic structures, but emerges in ambiguous structures with the ow(y-operator as well. The implications of these results are discussed in the light of a linguistic model of anaphoric comprehension, that is, the Primitives of Binding framework (Reuland, 2001) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article investigates the nature of syntactic categories: What does it mean to be a noun or a verb? The discussion focuses on nominalizations. It is shown that there is a distinction between nouns and verbs at a basic level. The essential difference between verbs and nouns resides in the availability in principle of merging instructions in the sense of . What makes a nominalized verb nominal is consequently shown to reside in the instructions determining the way it is merged in the syntactic representation. Modifying a thesis formulated in , it will be shown that Verbs represent relational concepts for which merging instructions are defined, and Nouns represent concepts for which merging instructions are not defined. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]