Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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Alternative comparison in underspecified degree operators
Get PDFThis paper proposes a new theory for the recurrent ambiguities between the meaning of comparison, additivity, and continuation (CAC) across languages. The theory has two pillars. One is a semantic reanalysis of CAC meanings. I will show that all three meanings can be cashed out via comparisons between alternatives, and that by doing so we can establish inherent logical connections between them. The second pillar is a de-compositional analysis of lexical items expressing CAC meanings (henceforth CAC operators), which makes use of their logical connections to derive the ambiguities as results of underspecification.
The things that we can(not) exclaim!
Get PDFEnglish famously has both wh- and nominal exclamatives (e.g., Portner & Zanuttini 2005). For instance, both What (strange) stories Nina tells! and The (strange) stories that Nina tells! are expressive speech acts about the very high degree that the stories that Nina tells have on some—explicit or implicit—scale. However, puzzlingly enough, Russian only has wh-, but not nominal exclamatives. I propose, partially following Esipova 2021, that both wh- and nominal exclamatives are instances of expressive intensification (akin to She is damn smart), with the expressive component of the expressive intensifier promoted to being the primary speech act (not unlike in Damn {she is / is she} smart!). However, while English can do direct intensification of NPs (e.g., He’s a damn coward) and can, thus, have nominal exclamatives, Russian can only do expressive intensification by predicating a degree property of a free relative over degrees and can, thus, only have wh-exclamatives
Maximality and modality in infinitival Wh-complements
Get PDFInfinitival Wh-complements exhibit a modal interpretation, which arises despite there being no overt lexical modal. In the only comprehensive analysis of the modality, Bhatt (1999) argues that it should be attributed to a covert modal operator. The semantics of this operator is more specific than the typical Kratzerian one. This paper reexamines the original motivation underpinning Bhatt\u27s analysis of the covert modal, and argues that such facts can be accounted for if the interrogative component of infinitival Wh-complements is specified to denote only maximal answers – a solution that is needed more generally in the interpretation of questions. Thus, it is not necessary to imbue the covert modal with a more specific semantics, making it possible to more broadly unify modal Wh-questions and infinitival Wh-complements
Scope assignment in quantifier-negation sentences in early Korean-Chinese bilinguals’ grammars
Get PDFQuantifier-negation sentences allow an inverse scope reading in many languages, but this phenomenon is not observed in Chinese. Building on the work of Chen and Huan (2023), this study investigates whether early Korean-Chinese bilinguals can make a distinction between Korean and Chinese in terms of the inverse scope. Employing the sentence-picture matching truth value judgment experiment from Chen and Huan (2023), we recruited a group of 23 early Korean-Chinese bilinguals and 15 monolingual Korean speakers. The experimental results aligned with those of Chen and Huan (2023), which identified three distinct groups of bilinguals. The first group permits an inverse scope reading in both Korean and Chinese, the second group prohibits it in both languages, and the third group successfully distinguishes between Korean and Chinese regarding inverse scope. These findings suggest that early bilinguals may experience long-lasting crosslinguistic influence that extends into adulthood. They may adopt either of two opposite strategies when constructing sentences, both of which can potentially minimize syntactic differences between their two languages.
A first semantics for at first and at last
Get PDFThis paper offers the first ever semantic analysis of a puzzling restriction on the distribution of ordinal numbers in English: while the temporal adverbials at first and at last are felicitous, putting any other ordinal in this environment is degraded (#at second, #at third). My analysis builds on the notion that assertions are relativized to a salient time interval, known in the literature as reference time or topic time. On my semantics, at first and at last further relativize an assertion to a salient subinterval of the topic time that shares an infimum (first point) or supremum (last point) with it. On the standard assumption that time-intervals are dense, the infelicity of #at second, #at third, etc. follows from this semantics. Since at first and at last invoke the first and last points of a time-interval on my analysis, #at second will attempt to invoke the second (i.e. second earliest) point of a time-interval. Invoking the first and last points of a dense interval is coherent, but invoking the second point (i.e. the point closer to the first point than any other) is not. My analysis makes interesting predictions about the interaction of at first/at last with present tense and frame adverbials, and it opens up several avenues for future research
The C△G and Polish causative/anticausative deadjectival verbs
Get PDFPolish inchoative deadjectival verb forms have been noted in Bobaljik (2012) to exemplify a potentially problematic paradigm for the Comparative-Change-of-State Generalization described within the same work. While Polish causative and anticausative deadjectival verbs formed from adjectives that display suppletion in the comparative form show the expected corresponding suppletion in the verb form as well, the inchoative deadjectival verbs display what appears to be an illicit ABA pattern. We argue that in these cases, Bobaljik’s Generalization can still be upheld, due to the two deadjectival verb types, anticausative and inchoatives, belonging to two different classes of anticausatives (Alexiadou et al. 2015). For the anticausative, belonging to Class A, the root takes the suppletive comparative, leading to the suppletive anticausative form. On the other hand, we argue the inchoative represents a Class B anticausative and the corresponding root does not undergo suppletion. Therefore, the Comparative-Change-of-State Generalization does not apply to the Class B verbs
Online demonstration experiments as experiential learning
Get PDFDemonstration experiments are commonly used as a teaching tool in courses in experimental linguistics, cognitive psychology and cognitive science. This paper presents an inquiry into the impact of participating in demonstration experiments on student learning. This inquiry frames demonstration experiments as a form of experiential learning. As such, the experiment exercises were designed following the Co-Constructed Developmental Teaching Theory (Shenk & Cruikshank 2015), a model of experiential teaching inspired by the cognitive neuroscience of learning. One demonstration experiment exercise on the concept of categorical perception is presented in the context of an introductory-level course in cognitive science
Investigating syntactic effects in NPI illusions in Turkish
Get PDFNegative Polarity Items (NPIs) are licensed when they are within the scope of negation. Judgment and online reading tasks revealed that comprehenders may show illusory licensing effects in sentences in which the licensing negation is in a structurally illicit position as in *The bills that no senators voted for will ever become law. Here we investigate whether NPI illusions reported in earlier studies on Turkish would be replicated and whether such effects would differ depending on the syntactic position of the intrusive licensor, i.e. complement or adjunct clauses. With a speeded acceptability judgment and two self-paced reading tasks, we show that offline NPI illusions with complement clauses in Turkish are replicated and extend to sentences with adjunct clauses, but illusory effects are not observed in online reading tasks
Commitments de lingua and assertoric commitments: the case of expressives
Get PDFThis paper presents the results of two series of experimental studies concerning the interpretation of expressives (e.g., ‘the jerk’) and the sentences they occur in. While expressives are known for their strong speaker-orientation, Harris & Potts (2009) found that in the right context, i.e. when a different subject is introduced into the discourse as a reported speaker, it is possible to interpret the expressive from this subject’s perspective. In our first series of experiments we corroborated the systematic availability of non-speaker oriented readings of expressives, but we also found a strong correlation between the attribution of the expressive and that of the sentence content: participants who attribute the expressive to the subject rather than the speaker, also tend to attribute the sentence as a whole to the subject. In other words, shifted interpretations of expressives do occur, but tend to go hand-in-hand with a reportative reading of the sentence in which the expressive occurs. In our second series of experiments, we identified factors that influence such a reportative reading. Following Kaiser (2015), we found that when we made the subject more prominent as an anchor—by removing the reference to the actual speaker and by adjusting the tense to facilitate a free indirect discourse reading—the number of subject-oriented readings grew significantly. On the basis of these findings we argue for a pragmatic account in terms of commitment attribution with three constraints at work: (i) commitments de lingua for expressives need a salient anchor, (ii) commitments de lingua tend to be attributed in concert with assertoric commitments, and (iii) the main speaker is the most salient anchor by default. These three constraints jointly explain the observations in the experiments
Arguments, Suppositions, and Conditionals
Get PDFArguments and conditionals are powerful means natural languages provide us to reason about possibilities and to reach conclusions from premises. These two kinds of constructions exhibit several affinities—e.g., they both come in different varieties depending on the mood; they share some of the same connectives (i.e., ‘then’); they also allow for similar patterns of modal subordination. In the light of these affinities, it is not surprising that prominent theories of conditionals—old and new suppositionalisms and dynamic theories of conditionals—as well as certain reductive theories of arguments tend to semantically assimilate conditionals and arguments. In this paper, I shall marshall some linguistic evidence as well as some theoretical considerations for thinking that, despite these similarities, arguments and conditionals should be given a different semantics. In the final part of the paper, extending and improving on Kocurek & Pavese 2022, I make some progress outlining a framework that has the potential to capture the affinities of conditionals and arguments, while modeling their differences too