Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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Complex tone sandhi types in the Sinitic Wu dialect of Huangyan
Full text linkThis study examines tone sandhi for disyllabic words in the Sinitic Wu dialect of Huangyan. Huangyan typically shows right-dominance – word-final tones remain unchanged while word-initial tones change. However, other sandhi types are also observed: left-dominance (only final tones changes), both-change (both initial and final tones change), and no-change cases. I propose to incorporate contour slope [±smooth] and movement [±fall] into the feature geometry of tones to capture the tonal inventory and sandhi processes in this language. For word-initial sandhi, contour slope (sharp vs. smooth) predicts whether the contour is preserved, while contour movement (fall vs. non-fall) predicts whether sandhi is sensitive to adjacent tones. Unlike word-initial sandhi, word-final sandhi is structure-preserving, producing tones already in the inventory, and it changes the register but not the contour of tones. Additionally, idiosyncratic sandhi processes serve as special repairs for contour clashes with successive identical contours
Hyperraising and copy raising are structurally different: experimental evidence fromSerbian
Full text linkThis paper documents a hyperraising-to-subject construction in Serbian, previously argued not to be possible in the language. For a subset of Serbian speakers, the raising verb delovati ‘seem’ optionally allows A-movement from the finite complement clause into the matrix clause, resulting in φ-agreement on the matrix verb. A rating experiment with 835 native Serbian speakers, 519 of whom allow hyperraising, found that hyperraising is structurally distinct from copy raising. The experimental results suggest that hyperraising is an A-movement configuration, highly sensitive to movement constraints, such as islands and embedded A-minimality. By contrast, copy raising was found to be generally insensitive to movement constraints, which indicates that it is a non-movement configuration similar to prolepsis. This finding challenges the unified base-generation account of hyperraising and copy raising, which was proposed to eschew the locality issues inherent to the canonical movement-based analyses of hyperraising
Wh-scope-marking in Tamil
Full text linkThis study shows that Tamil exhibits wh-scope-marking constructions that share general properties with those found in other languages such as German and Hindi. In the literature, wh-scope-marking has been analyzed such that the embedded question functions as a restriction on the matrix propositional wh-phrase, with the two forming a constituent in the underlying structure. However, this constituent structure has been motivated solely on semantic grounds and lacks direct syntactic support. I argue that Tamil wh-scope-marking provides syntactic support for the constituency between the matrix wh-phrase and the embedded questoin, using a Proper Binding Condition (PBC) effect as a diagnostic. These findings thus provide empirical support for the constituent structure assumed in previous semantic analyses and help bridge the gap between syntax and semantics in the analysis of wh-scope-marking
Functional structure and case in Italian absolute clauses
Full text linkItalian absolute clauses have been treated as small clauses under previous analyses (Belletti, 1990; Bruno, 2011), meaning they have been claimed to feature reduced functional structure. Additionally, the way in case assignment within absolute clauses has been analyzed has not been uniform, featuring a range of case assignment mechanisms which are not independently motivated such as case assignment via C (Belletti, 1990) or AspP (Bruno, 2011) In the present study, we develop an non-small clause analysis of Italian absolute clauses, based on adverb and clitic placement, the presence of negation, and certain facts about the C-domain of these clauses. Crucially, under our account, these clauses project both CP and TP. Finally, we account for case assignment within these clauses via a default case mechanism (Egerland 2022; Caha, 2024), thus eschewing ad hoc case assignment mechanisms
Determiners do not need to manage donkey anaphora
Full text linkIf a quantificational determiner denotes a relation between the restrictor and the scope, then in order to handle donkey anaphora, the transmission of anaphoric information from the restrictor to the scope must be baked into the lexical semantics of the determiner. By analyzing quantification as unary, rather than relational, I show that donkey anaphora can be accounted for without defining determiners which explicitly manage the flow of anaphoric information
Bare plurals in article-less languages as weak definites
Full text linkBare plural arguments (BPs) in article-less languages (ALs) occurring in episodic contexts have received unambiguously existential analyses and ones ambiguous between definite and narrow-scope existential interpretations. Based on novel data from six ALs we propose a third option, building on suggestions by Dayal (2013); Modarresi & Krifka (2021) and Mirrazi (2021): we argue that at least in these languages BPs receive definite interpretations via a weak definite operator. BPs are shown to be fully parallel to English definite plurals in their ability to occur in so-called non-maximal contexts. This perspective aligns with Heim (1982)’s and Schwarz (2009)’s distinction between the two dimensions of definiteness – familiarity and maximality. We argue that the latter is a defining feature of BPs
Does ‘a couple’ pattern with scalars or numbers - Insights from inference and ‘so’ tasks
Full text linkPrevious research establishes that paucal quantifiers like ‘a couple’ are ambiguous between the literal meaning of ‘at least two’ and the enriched meaning understood as conveying a restriction on quantity, the latter of which can be explained by a pragmatic phenomenon, i.e. scalar inference (SI). To address whether this ambiguity patterns with that of scalars or numbers, our Experiment 1 explored the behaviours of ‘a couple’ and scalars with two types of probe questions in inference tasks, and Experiment 2 continued this theme by testing the naturalness rating for ‘a couple’ and scalars in an ‘X so not Y’ construction. The results of our experiments indicate two natures of ‘a couple’: a non-monotonic /cardinal (approximately two) and proportional (a small proportion of)
The role of definiteness in ad hoc implicatures
Full text linkThis study investigates how ad-hoc implicatures and the definiteness presupposition of the definite determiner ‘the’ interact. Using a Truth Value Judgment Task (Crain & Thornton 2000), we examine whether English-speaking adults interpret the definite and indefinite determiner differently in sentence pairs such as: ‘Mary bought a striped sweater’ and ‘Mary bought the striped sweater’, in contexts in which there are two possible referents, one which is best described with one adjective (e.g. ‘striped’) and the other which is best described with two adjectives (e.g. ‘striped’ and ‘spotted’). We find more ad hoc implicature for ‘the’ than ‘a’; that is, uses of the definite ‘the’ are rejected more frequently than uses of ‘a’ when the purchased item would best be described with two adjectives. We take this finding to suggest that the need to satisfy the uniqueness presupposition of ‘the’ acts as an additional trigger for implicature generation. This result raises questions for both Neo-Gricean and localist models of implicature generation, which we briefly outline
Pseudo-scoping out of relative clauses: an ‘individual concept’ approach
Full text linkSentences where a definite DP is modified by a relative clause containing a universal quantifier (relative clause DPs), like the supervisor that each volunteer reported to, license readings which carry separate presuppositions of uniqueness and existence for each volunteer—henceforth, ‘varying definite readings’ (VDRs). Barker 2022 argues that these readings involve the universal DP scoping out of the relative clause and above the definite and proposes to analyze them using a non-local scope shifting mechanism, like quantifier raising (QR). In this paper, we argue that this is a case of pseudo-scope. Instead, we argue for a functional interpretation of the DP and propose that VDRs result from the definite DP denoting an ⟨e, e⟩ function, from volunteers to supervisors. As support for this claim, we draw a parallel between relative clause DPs and ‘bare DPs’ (the same definite DP but without the relative clause/embedded universal). We observe that both kinds of DPs license VDRs and thus should be analyzed in the same way—yet bare DPs have no universal to undergo QR. Further support for a pseudo-scope analysis comes from one undergeneration and one overgeneration challenge for the QR approach
Sense as sampling propensity
Full text linkBoth individuals and predicates can be referred to in different ways which carry different senses or connotations. Despite this being discussed since at least Frege, it poses a deep problem to standard extensional semantics. For example, as discussed by Jennifer Saul, “Clark Kent went into the phone booth and Superman came out” simply means something different from “Superman went into the phone booth and Clark Kent came out”.
I introduce a novel way of modelling these kinds of semantic phenomena using Sampling Propensity (Icard, 2016). The core idea is that the basic atoms of semantic calculus are generated from a set of potential candidates via a generative cognitive procedure. In other words, when one thinks of Clark Kent, they directly think of someone wearing glasses or being a mild-mannered journalist, whereas Superman draws to mind blue-and-red leotards and heroics. This sampling procedure is also at play with common nouns in generic sentences like “lions have manes” or “mosquitoes carry malaria”. Crucially, it can distinguish co-extensional nouns like “drink” and “beverage”, which occasionally yield different truth conditions in the same kinds of generic sentences.
The account includes a fully-formalised compositional system in which individual concepts and category concepts are modeled as an extension linked with a sampling propensity and where some propositions are evaluated by continually sampling exemplars from a concept. The sampling approach also links competence and performance where finite sampling yields performance and sampling repeatedly converges on competence. This approach also has ramifications for quantification, particularly the generic “flavour” of non-partitive ‘all’