The Effect of Feature Hierarchies on Frequencies of Passivization in English
Shipra Dingare · 2001
It is my pleasure to thank Joan Bresnan, my principal advisor, for making this thesis seem manageable, and for pointing me in directions for research, and for consistently being enthusiastic and suggesting solutions to problem after problem, and equally, for suggesting problems and keeping me aware of the issues involved. And particularly for always making me feel more comfortable, in classes and meetings and a number of other situations, to express myself freely, and for handling it gracefully when I was incoherent. I was lucky to be able to work with her and it was a unique experience watching her work. Thanks to Chris Manning, my second advisor, for being helpful in a number of ways despite the incredible demands on his time this year, particularly in providing advice with statistics, and helping me to search corpora, and setting up software for searching them, and for reading what I wrote critically, and in general for being down-to-earth. Thanks to both Chris and Joan for giving me the opportunity to work on such an interesting project. I have really enjoyed our meetings and watching the ideas in the project take shape. Thanks especially for a wonderful trip to Hong Kong. And thanks to Tom Wasow for helping me get involved with the project and for teaching, with Ivan Sag, an introductory syntax class which I very much liked. A very special thanks to Ivan Sag, who is almost entirely responsible, along with Tom Wasow, for