Browsing by Author "Wilhelm, Andrea"

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    A closer look at coalescence: the Slave D-effect*
    (University of Calgary, 2000-01) Wilhelm, Andrea
    I will analyze the Slave D-effect in the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993). My analysis will cover the full range of phenomena and will not refer to morphological information. This makes it superior to previous analyses of the D-effect, e.g., Lamontagne & Rice 1994, 1995, which have to refer to morphological information, and which do not account for all D-effect alternations. I will propose constraints guiding the inner workings of coalescence (which features of which input segment are maintained), thus shedding light on the nature of coalescence in general. Finally, I will show that my analysis is more valid universally, as it is compatible with accounts of coalescence in child language (Ganandesikan 1995).
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    Event structure and syntax: German*
    (University of Calgary, 1999-01) Wilhelm, Andrea
    This paper deals with the role of the lexicon versus the syntax in event structure by examining particle verb formation in German. There are two types of particles in German: Delimiting particles, which derive accomplishments or activities from activity base verbs, and nondelimiting ones, which leave the aspectual class of the base verb (activity) unchanged. A theory such as Ritter & Rosen (1998, to appear), which explicitly represents event structure in the syntax (e.g., through an FF-delimitation) is not able to account for the German facts, as it cannot explain the uniform morphosyntactic behavior of all particles. An analysis which combines syntactic structure (VP-shells, following Hale & Keyser (1994), Chomsky (1995)) and lexical features is adapted. It treats particles as heads of an empty PP in the lower VP. Delimiting particles are distinguished from nondelimiting ones through a lexical feature [+delim]. This analysis is also successful in providing homogeneous case-marking for all internal arguments. It questions Ritter & Rosen's purely syntactic analysis of event structure, where delimitation is assumed to be a grammatical primitive.
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    On the acquisition of WH-questions
    (University of Calgary, 1992-09) Hanna, Ken; Wilhelm, Andrea
    This paper is the account of a study carried out in 1990 in which we tried to gain further insight into the acquisition of subject and object wh-questions. We differentiated between two wh-words, who and what, for subject and object questions. The study consisted of a production and a comprehension task and was carried out with 11 children aged between 3;4 and 4;7 years. The results suggest that children find subject questions easier to produce and comprehend than object questions. In addition, the animate question pronoun who was used more often than the inanimate question pronoun what.
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