Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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\u27Negation-blind\u27 N400 effect disappears when lexical priming is controlled
No full textPrevious ERP studies showed that false affirmative sentences elicited a larger N400 than their true versions, but they found the reverse pattern when the sentences were of negative form as if N400 was blind to negation. This negation-blind N400 pattern arguably constituted evidence for two-step accounts of negation processing: When processing negative sentences, a comprehender first computes an internal proposition and then considers the negation. However, the prior studies were confounded by a lexical priming relation between subject and object. Therefore, it was an open question whether or not the observed ERP pattern really reflected the two-step process. To tackle this question, we conducted an ERP experiment, using size-comparison statements where subjects and objects are semantically unrelated. This design allowed us to remove the priming confound. We predicted that if the previous negation-blind N400 pattern is unrelated to lexical priming, it would be replicated; if not, it would disappear. The result was consistent with the second prediction. This suggests that the previously observed negation-blind N400 pattern does not necessarily constitute evidence for two-step accounts of negation processing
Fake reefs are sometimes reefs and sometimes not, but are always compositional
Full text linkThe semantics of adjective modification often begins with set intersection,such that [[yellow flower]] = [[yellow]] ∩ [[flower]]. Thus a yellow flower is a flower. Such an account, however, runs into problems for adjectives like fake or counterfeit, which display a privative inference: a fake gun is not a gun and a counterfeit dollar is not a dollar. Moreover, recent work shows privativity cannot easily be encoded as a property of specific adjectives like counterfeit, since e.g. counterfeit watch robustly licenses the subsective inference of being a watch (Martin 2022). We gather judgments on nearly 800 adjective-noun bigrams (of which 180 are novel, i.e. zero corpus frequency), andshow that privativity depends on the adjective, noun and context, and can be manipulated for the very same adjective-noun bigram by presenting it in different contexts. This poses a challenge for theories which fix privativity as a property of the adjective and always use the same method of composition (Partee 2010, del Pinal 2015). Moreover, we find no difference in participant behavior between novel adjective-noun bigrams and high frequency ones, suggesting that the process is nonetheless compositional and not the result of convention or memorized idiosyncrasy. Our results support compositional accounts like Martin (2022) (which modifies del Pinal 2015) and Guerrini (2024), which treat privativity as context-dependent
Parenthesized Modifiers in English and Korean: What They (May) Mean
Full text linkAlthough the semantics of some classes of parentheticals are well studied, such as appositives, there is relatively little work on parentheticals marked with parentheses. Lewen & Anderson (2022) analyze the semantics of a certain parenthesized construction they refer to as a restricted parenthesized parenthetical, and propose that the parentheses invoke and negate an alternative to the parenthesized content.
This paper presents experimental evidence about the interpretation of parenthesized modifiers in Korean and English, manipulating syntactic position and modifier properties (scalar/non-scalar, categorical/continuous). In both languages, our results confirm Lewen & Anderson (2022)’s proposal that some alternative is negated; however, the impact of the modifier properties we explore is different in English and Korean. Our findings corroborate the richness of the (often neglected) semantico-pragmatic space of parenthesized content
A nonce investigation of a possible conjunctive default for disjunction
Full text linkOur study explores whether there is a conjunctive default in the interpretation of disjunction, focusing on Romanian children’s and adults’ understanding of nonce functional words. We investigate how participants interpret novel connectors such as mo and mo...mo, which could theoretically correspond to ‘(both) A and B’, ‘(either) A or B’, or ‘A not B’ / ‘neither A nor B’. Our results reveal that both adults and children overwhelmingly assign a conjunctive meaning to these nonce words. This suggests the existence of a conjunctive default in interpreting unknown operators linking two elements, which could explain why children have sometimes been found to interpret disjunctions as conjunctions in previous studies (Singh et al. 2016, Tieu et al. 2017, Bleotu et al. 2023). In particular, we discuss how this conjunctive default may influence Romanian children’s interpretation of complex disjunctions such as fie...fie, potentially explaining why they treat these constructions conjunctively. Importantly,our findings also raise broader questions about why certain logical interpretations are favored over others, and whether frequency or cognitive simplicity can drive such biases
How to compute a focus: Evidence from incremental processing
Full text linkThe global interpretation of a focus marked sentence with a particle like only arises due to the interplay of several formal components: F-marking, the semantics of the particle, the nature of contrastive alternatives, and a dependence on context. In this paper, we argue that on-line reading measures can be used to probe which of these com- ponents are computed when. In order to isolate which components give rise to reading slowdowns typically observed on foci (Birch & Rayner 1997, Benatar & Clifton 2014, Lowder & Gordon 2015, Hoeks et al. 2023), a Maze reading study tested whether such slowdowns still arise on second-occurrence foci (SOF)—foci whose inferences have already been computed in prior discourse and are therefore entirely predictable—and on foci whose size and location can only be determined via a previously introduced contrast. Results indeed showed slowdowns on such foci, suggesting that these cannot solely be attributed to readers computing focal inferences anew, nor to comprehenders initiating their reasoning about the relevant alternatives
Characterizing illocutionary content
Full text linkThere are at least two semantic distinctions made in the literature: the (not-)at-issue distinction, and the distinction between descriptive and illocutionary or use-conditional content (Kaplan 1997; Horn 2013; Rett 2021b). Two phenomena that have traditionally been characterized as illocutionary are illocutionary mood and illocutionary modifiers (e.g. frankly). Most treatments of not-at-issue content don’t differentiate between illocutionary content and descriptive not-at-issue content, like that encoded in appositives or conventional implicature. Those that do can’t model both illocutionary mood and illocutionary modifiers, or require additional formal apparatuses to do so. The goal of this paper is to present a unified and natural account of illocutionary content. I argue that all illocutionary content has in common that it is discourse-anaphoric to the speech event. As a result, we can model all of these types of content as (different kinds of) Common Ground update, in the Stalnakarian sense. I provide a formal account of this model, and argue that it makes certain novel and correct predictions about how encoders of illocutionary content behave, and how they’re encoded
Testing a place-of-articulation double phoneme boundary in English-Tamil bilinguals
Full text linkCategorical perception work in bilinguals has been found to support a Dual Language System Hypothesis, which states that bilinguals use one of two language-specific phonemic boundaries dependent on language context. This phenomenon of the double phoneme boundary has only been tested on the Voice Onset Time continuum. The current study tests bilingual speakers for a double phoneme boundary along the place-of-articulation (POA) continuum. English contrasts between dental and alveolar POAs whereas Indian Tamil contrasts between dental and retroflex POAs. In this study, American English-Indian Tamil bilinguals performed an Identification Task and a Discrimination Task in an English language session and a Tamil language session to demonstrate if they would place a dental category boundary at different points along a stimulus continuum between sessions. Participants did not demonstrate a shift in boundary location and a double phoneme boundary. Participants instead demonstrated two boundaries and thus a three-way categorization in both language contexts for POA, supporting a Unitary Language System. Further studies testing English and Tamil monolinguals would clarify if there is truly a unique bilingual categorization mechanism, or if bilinguals and monolinguals can both be explained via the Perceptual Assimilation Model
When “anonymous” is not enough: methodological issues and the safety of human subjects in social media research
Full text linkDrawing on data from a previous study on slur reclamation practices on Twitter/X, as well as scholarly discussion of context collapse and digital research ethics, I discuss the need to (re)evaluate how scholars engage with, publish, and present searchable language data online.
Even when a subject’s social media persona is not linked –by name, location, and other identifying information – to their offline self, the distinction between the two is increasingly thin. Harm done to a person online –through harassment, dogpiling, suicide-baiting, other emotional abuse, and doxxing, among other tactics – is also harm done to their offline self. This is an especially salient risk for social media users from vulnerable or marginalized communities. I argue that stricter methodological and ethical standards should be established for research on social media language data, and present strategies myself and others have used (in various combinations) to tackle this issue: quotation with informed consent; discourse tallying; data aggregation; and focus on (in)famous public figures and organizations. I discuss the drawbacks and advantages of these methods, supplying examples from my work on metalinguistic attitudes towards slur reclamation on Twitter/X
Future reference and covert modality in Khalkha Mongolian
Full text linkAn open question in semantic theory is whether the future is best characterized as a temporal operator or as a future-oriented modal operator (see Bochnak 2019). Based on original field data from Khalkha Mongolian (Eastern Mongolic), I argue that the temporal reference of the tense morpheme -n and its morphosyntactic interaction with negation support an analysis of future reference as the combination of two morphemes: a covert modal, which is overtly realized under negation, and a prospective aspect, which is covert. This work adds to cross-linguistic analyses of future reference, expanding our existing typology of future marking (Matthewson et al. 2022; Mucha 2016; Pancheva & Zubizarreta 2023; Tonhauser 2011)
How are polar interrogatives in Mauritian Creole formed?
Full text linkMauritian Creole is known to form polar questions in two ways: by using the utterance-initial particle eski, derived from French est-ce que \u27is it the case that\u27, or by applying a rising intonation to the declarative sentence. This paper asks the question whether both question forms are syntactically interrogative sentences or instead have different underlying structures. The question is relevant if we consider that a number of languages use declarative sentences to ask (biased) polar questions, a question type known as \u27\u27declarative questions\u27\u27 in the literature (also: \u27\u27rising declaratives\u27\u27 in English). We evaluate the possibility of intonation questions being the equivalents of declarative questions. Using a battery of tests originally designed for European French, we present native speaker judgments from the third author of the paper. While we found that not all our tests point to the conclusion that intonation questions are declarative sentences, the test results provide significantly more support to intonation questions being declarative questions rather than syntactic interrogatives.