Glossa a journal of general linguistics

Title Pending 11075

Title Pending 10851

Title Pending 10776

Title Pending 11681

Title Pending 11032

Title Pending 15333

Title Pending 10724

Title Pending 11036

In this study we tested the comprehension of Subject Relative Clauses (SRCs) and Object Relative Clauses (ORCs) by Spanish monolingual children aged 4-6. Our results provide novel evidence that a subject-object asymmetry holds true also for Spanish: SRCs are easier than ORCs. Moreover, the test of different types of ORCs revealed that both overt Differential Object Marking (DOM) and word order properties (i.e. the subject position within the relative clause) constitute ameliorating factors in the comprehension of ORCs. Children proved to benefit more from word order than DOM-marking, with pre-verbal subjects bringing about higher accuracy rates than overt DOM. Moreover, these cues interact when occurring together: children’s comprehension decreases when ORCs with a pre-verbal subject also feature overt DOM. We additionally measured children’s knowledge of the grammar underlying DOM through an ad-hoc Sentence Repetition Task and found that DOM constitutes an ameliorating cue only with children who have acquired it. At the empirical level, we integrate these findings with the vast literature on children’s comprehension of relative clauses and advance a new descriptive generalisation of which grammatical properties characterise as ameliorating cues across languages. At the conceptual level, we interpret our results as evidence for both processing-oriented theories and grammar-based accounts to intervention locality. Whereas the interaction between DOM and word order suggests an effect of processing cost, the fact that cues need to be associated with an acquired grammatical representation inevitably tie amelioration effects to language-specific factors. We show that this apparent contrast is predicted if amelioration effects are regulated at the interface between the grammar and the performance system, and argue in favour of an interface interpretation in line with tout court minimalist criteria.

Giacomo Presotto

Jacopo Torregrossa

Title Pending 11254

The insertion of additives such as too has been argued to be obligatory (in affirmative sentences) if the immediate context contains a suitable antecedent such that the presupposition triggered by additives is satisfied. However, the obligatoriness of additives has been found to be gradient and their insertion to depend on contextual factors. While most research has focused on comprehension, the present study examines the production of additives and the extent to which they are obligatory by manipulating the factors Similarity and Turn Distance. We furthermore explored whether not using additives even in obligatory environments could be an instance of diverging (i.e. socially distancing) from the antecedent speaker. For this purpose we investigated whether speakers would omit additives when interacting with an impolite antecedent speaker. Overall, the results of our two experiments suggest that (i) in line with previous results on similarity, speakers tend to utter additives more frequently when their utterance’s content more closely matches the content of a previously formulated utterance; and (ii) speakers use additives more frequently when the matching utterance directly precedes their utterance. Furthermore, the results of experiment II suggest that (iii) speakers deliberately drop the use of additives when doing so would allow them to signal divergence from an impolite speaker. Our findings lend support to models in which speakers use additives as a discourse managing tool to organise the discourse and maintain discourse coherence.

Alexandra Lorson

Hannah Rohde

Chris Cummins

Title Pending 10109

In Modern Mongolian, the subjects of many subordinate clauses, both complements and adjuncts, may be marked with the accusative case (von Heusinger, Klein &amp;amp; Guntsetseg 2011; Guntsetseg 2016). This study argues that the full empirical picture of these marked subjects necessitates an analysis based on Dependent Case Theory (Marantz 1991; Baker &amp;amp; Vinokurova 2010; Baker 2015), which additionally provides an account of case assignment more broadly in the language, including in differential object marking. Prior syntactic analyses (Bao et al. 2015; Fong 2019) rely on Agree-based case-licensing from v, resulting in ECM-like accounts. However, the appearance of accusative on subjects of adjoined clauses, as well as in clauses with no canonical accusative-assigning verbs (intransitives, passives) rules out v as the case assigner. Instead, following Baker &amp;amp; Vinokurova (2010), this account argues that accusative case is assigned configurationally. Once established that a configurational approach to case-assignment handles subjects, as well as direct objects, the approach is applied to Mongolian-specific issues including voice alternations and converbial adjuncts, showing that the theory predicts case-assignment patterns there. Finally, the study examines data from dative marking and scrambling in ditransitives to refine Baker &amp;amp; Vinokurova’s (2010) original theory, obviating the need for case-stacking by restricting the timing of application of the Dependent Case algorithm.

Sable Andrew Peters

Title Pending 8842

Title Pending 15297

I argue that particular restrictions on the recoverability of elided negation in fragment answers in negative-concord languages follow from the semantics of questions. Drawing parallels with other ellipsis phenomena, I also highlight the role of Agree in making certain heads recoverable. This invalidates a major argument against the analysis of negative-concord items as universal quantifiers scoping above negation.

Pavel Rudnev

Title Pending 10441

This paper develops a novel analysis of &amp;egrave;to copular constructions in Russian. First, we address&amp;nbsp;&amp;lsquo;NOMpre&amp;nbsp;&amp;egrave;to NOMpost&amp;rsquo; constructions, where NOM is a nominative noun phrase. We propose that&amp;nbsp;there are two predication relations established in such clauses: one on the clausal level, with&amp;nbsp;NOMpost being the subject of predication, and another one within the constituent headed by&amp;nbsp;&amp;egrave;to. The latter, we argue, constitutes a &amp;lsquo;big DP&amp;rsquo;: it contains NOMpre in the specifier position and&amp;nbsp;pro in the complement position of D0; a predication relation is established between the two&amp;nbsp;with the help of the predicativizer &amp;egrave;to. The analysis is extended to account for &amp;lsquo;&amp;egrave;to NOMpost&amp;rsquo;&amp;nbsp;constructions. The proposal goes against treating &amp;egrave;to in &amp;lsquo;(NOMpre) &amp;egrave;to NOMpost&amp;rsquo; constructions&amp;nbsp;as the subject of predication or as a dedicated functional head on the clausal spine; it also&amp;nbsp;explicitly rejects treating NOMpre in all &amp;lsquo;(NOMpre) &amp;egrave;to NOMpost&amp;rsquo; constructions as a hanging topic. The&amp;nbsp;proposed analysis captures all the relevant properties of &amp;egrave;to constructions and makes important&amp;nbsp;predictions about their distribution, the agreement pattern, and the properties of NOMpost. The&amp;nbsp;&amp;lsquo;big DP&amp;rsquo; approach also allows us to establish a link between &amp;egrave;to copular constructions and&amp;nbsp;specificational pseudo-clefts.

Irina Burukina

Lena Borise

Marcel den Dikken

Title Pending 9440

The present paper argues that seemingly erratic linearisation patterns of experiencer-object&amp;nbsp;verbs in German can be accounted for by considering well-known linearisation constraints.&amp;nbsp;The analysis is based on two Two-Alternative Forced-Choice experiments: The first study tests&amp;nbsp;experiencer-object verbs with inanimate subjects, the second one tests experiencer-object verbs&amp;nbsp;with animate subjects. If the subject is inanimate, experiencer-object verbs selecting a dative&amp;nbsp;object (e.g., behagen &amp;lsquo;to please&amp;rsquo;) prefer an object-before-subject linearisation while the ones&amp;nbsp;selecting an accusative object (e.g., bezaubern &amp;lsquo;to charm&amp;rsquo;) lean towards subject before object.&amp;nbsp;With animate subjects, accusative-object experiencer-object verbs prefer subject before object,&amp;nbsp;while there is no clear preference for dative-object experiencer-object verbs. An explorative&amp;nbsp;investigation reveals verb-specific differences that call into question the case-based classes. We&amp;nbsp;argue that linearisation preferences of experiencer-object verbs in German should be analysed&amp;nbsp;by coupling free base generation with violable linearisation constraints. We provide an analysis&amp;nbsp;along these lines, which is based on a semantic distinction and does not require case-based&amp;nbsp;constraints.

Simon Masloch

Johanna Marie Poppek

Tibor Kiss

Title Pending 10150

Emblems&amp;mdash;the THUMBS UP, the HEAD SHAKE, the PEACE SIGN, the SHHH&amp;mdash;are communicative gestures that have a conventional form and conventional meaning within a particular community. This makes them more &amp;ldquo;word-like&amp;rdquo; than other gestures and gives them a distinctive position at the interface between language and gesture. Here we provide an overview of emblems as a recurring feature of the human communicative toolkit. We first discuss the major defining features of these gestures, and their points of commonality and difference with neighbouring communicative phenomena. Next, we review efforts to document emblems around the world. Our survey highlights the patchiness of global coverage, as well as strengths and limitations of approaches used to date. Finally, we consider a handful of open questions about emblems, including how they mean, how they are learned, and why they exist in the first place. Addressing these questions will require collaboration among linguists, lexicographers, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and others. It will also deepen our understanding of human semiotic systems and how they interface with each other.

Lauren Gawne

Kensy Cooperrider

Title Pending 9705

Various approaches have been proposed regarding the ways of analyzing anaphors that allow long-distance binding, apparently violating Binding Condition A. A question that needs to be answered by any such analysis is as follows: why do only some anaphors allow long-distance binding? This paper tries to answer this question under a recent approach to long-distance binding (Charnavel 2020a; b; Baker &amp;amp; Ikawa 2024), which I refer to as the null mediator approach, focusing on Japanese data. In Japanese, it is known that morphologically simplex anaphors permit long-distance binding whereas morphologically complex ones do not. I argue that the effect of morphological complexity on the availability of long-distance binding can be readily explained through the null mediator approach, once the internal structure of the anaphors and the Phase Impenetrability Condition from Chomsky (2001) are taken into account. This lends additional credence to the null mediator approach to long-distance binding. I further demonstrate that this proposal makes an accurate typological prediction with regard to the correlation between anaphor complexity and long-distance binding.

Shiori Ikawa

Title Pending 11203

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.We examine an understudied class of multiple resultatives, resultatives which possess more than one result phrase, as in A guard shot him dead off his horse (Cappelle 2005). We propose that the eventuali- ties introduced by such resultatives are ordered in a nested causal chain, such that the manner event causes the first result state, and the first result state in turn causes the second result state. We implement this by adopting a rule of CAUSATIVE FORMATION, which relates the second result phrase to the first via the CAUSE relation. We contrast our analysis with a previous approach due to Ausensi & Bigolin (2021), which proposes that the second result phrase be analyzed as a low depictive. We show that the low depictive analysis makes incorrect predictions about the temporal and causal relations that must hold between the eventualities at play in a multiple resultative. The nested cause analysis, by contrast, correctly captures the properties of multiple resultatives. The proposal has implications for proposed constraints on the expression of resultativity, such as the UNIQUE PATH CONSTRAINT (Goldberg 1991), which restrict the theme of an event to holding one result state per clause. While we deny the existence of any independent restriction of result phrases to one per clause, on our approach, the purported effects of the UNIQUE PATH CONSTRAINT can be understood as arising from the interaction between the causal structure of multiple resultatives and world knowledge, such that examples motivating the UNIQUE PATH CONSTRAINT, e.g., *Sam kicked Bill black and blue out of the room (Goldberg 1991), involve states that cannot cause the state introduced by the second result phrase.

Title Pending 11126

This paper explores the ways in which insights from the two influential formal pragmatic theories of discourse&amp;nbsp;coherence, namely, Question Under Discussion (QUD) and Rhetorical Relation (RR) models, can be integrated to&amp;nbsp;build a more inclusive theory of discourse coherence. It proposes a simple and concrete procedure to derive the&amp;nbsp;hierarchical structure of discourse from the subquestion relations between implicit QUDs reconstructed using&amp;nbsp;informational structural principles (Riester, 2019; Reyle &amp;amp; Riester, 2016) and contextual entailment relations&amp;nbsp;(Roberts, 2012). It applies the procedure to discourse examples involving various RRs to determine subordinating&amp;nbsp;and coordinating relations and to create a parsimonious feature-based inventory of RRs with formal definitions. The&amp;nbsp;resulting theory shows that establishing the QUD-RR correspondence is possible, contrary to what has been claimed&amp;nbsp;(Hunter &amp;amp; Abrus&amp;aacute;n, 2017; Onea, 2019; Riester, 2019).

EunHee Lee

Title Pending 10356

We show that graphemic variation—at least in some writing systems—can be analysed in terms of grammatical variation given a usage- based probabilistic view of the grammar-graphemics interface. Concretely, we examine a type of noun+verb unit in German, which can be written as one word or two. We argue that the variation in writing is rooted in the units’ ambiguous status in between morphology (one word) and syntax (two words). The major influencing factors are shown to be the semantic relation between the noun and the verb (argument or oblique relation) and the morphosyntactic context. In prototypically nominal contexts, a reinterpretation of the unit as a noun+noun compound is facilitated, which favours spelling as one word, while in prototypically verbal contexts, a syntactic realisation and consequently spelling as two words is preferred. We report the results of two large-scale corpus studies and a controlled production experiment to corroborate our analysis.

Roland Schäfer

Ulrike Sayatz

Between syntax and morphology: German noun+verb units

We analyze an intransitive construction involving verbs like Spanish matarse &amp;lsquo;kill&amp;rsquo; whose subjects appear to have both internal and external argument properties. Examples include Juan se mat&amp;oacute; en un accidente de coche &amp;lsquo;Juan got himself killed in a car accident&amp;rsquo;, in which the subject&amp;rsquo;s referent shows hybrid behavior between agent and patient as it needs to be engaged in an action leading to its accidental death. We propose that the subject&amp;rsquo;s internal and external argument properties can be accounted for if subjects can bear two semantic roles by virtue of being associated with more than one distinct head in the syntax (Pineda &amp;amp; Berro 2020). We argue that such intransitive uses involve a distinct argument structure from transitive reflexives despite sharing the same surface form, cf., El sospechoso del homicidio se mat&amp;oacute; al estar rodeado por la polic&amp;iacute;a &amp;lsquo;The suspect killed himself when he was surrounded by the police&amp;rsquo;. The present account provides evidence that agents and external arguments do not always correlate since some verb classes can have identical surface form, despite involving underlyingly distinct argument alignment.

Josep Ausensi

Alessandro Bigolin

Title Pending 10710

Sociolinguists and lay people have long been interested in the mechanisms by which dialect and speaker identification occur. The current study aims to test whether realizational differences found in production studies are salient factors in identification of different lects, as well as to examine differences between groups in identification. In this study, listeners were instructed to match clips containing H* and L+H* pitch accents with specific personae who represented speakers of five lects of interest (African American English, Jewish English, Appalachian English, Southern English, and Midwestern English). Listeners from different groups (Appalachian, African American, Jewish, and those who were not from any of these groups) were presented with both low-pass filtered and unfiltered versions of the clips. Results indicate that listeners performed at or above chance in the unfiltered condition. However, we did observe a consistent pattern such that listeners confused AAE and JE voices, as well as Appalachian and Southern voices, indicating that listeners may struggle to differentiate lects with similar historical development and/or prosodic patterns. Additionally, listeners showed sensitivity to the original lect in selecting a persona in the filtered condition, though they were less accurate overall compared to the unfiltered condition. Overall, listeners appear to be more sensitive to segmental phonological than prosodic information in lect identification. Additionally, when presented with a personae matching task, listeners from a variety of backgrounds perform with a high degree of accuracy, though examining patterns of confusion help to shed light on the variables that are most salient.&amp;nbsp;

Nicole Holliday

Rachel Steindel Burdin

Paul Reed

Title Pending 10124

This paper provides a study of an impersonal type of dispositional middle construction that appears in Slovenian. This impersonal construction atypically contains an undemoted thematic external argument in syntax, but nevertheless ascribes a disposition to the internal one in semantics, which goes against previous assumptions about the way in which syntax and semantics interact in middles. On the basis of this Slovenian construction, the paper develops a new syntactic and semantic analysis of the modal phrase whose head contributes the dispositional interpretation and assigns it to the internal argument. The paper shows how such an analysis accounts for both non-canonical Slovenian middles with syntactically realised external arguments as well as the more prototypical middles without external arguments both in Slovenian and English. Finally, the paper proposes why the external argument in the Slovenian impersonal middle is – exceptionally – not an intervener for the dispositional assignment.

Jakob Lenardič

Title Pending 11123

Change of state expressions involving weak-endstate verbs such as wipe and drink exhibit variation in telicity. The present study is the first to experimentally investigate change of state expressions referred to as adjectival control resultatives (e.g., wipe the table clean) and the corresponding simple transitives (e.g., wipe the table) regarding their telicity readings. Based on their semantic properties, we ask whether German speakers interpret adjectival resultatives as telic and simple transitives as fluctuating between telic and atelic. Following an event-structural approach to telicity, we also seek to contribute to the issue of which event-semantic properties adjectival resultatives and simple transitives share: if it is the adjective that evokes a telic interpretation, then the possible telic interpretation of simple transitives must arise by different means, suggesting a non-uniform construal of telicity.&amp;nbsp;Twenty-one adults participated in a Truth-Value Judgment Task that varied Structure (resultative/transitive) and Event type (complete/incomplete). Generalized mixed effects logistic regression revealed a significant interaction between Event type and Structure. For complete events, acceptance was at ceiling for both structures. For incomplete events, acceptance was significantly lower for resultatives than for simple transitives. These results indicate that in adjectival resultatives telicity is construed semantically – via entailment – and in the corresponding simple transitives via a pragmatic inference, which is not computed very often. We propose that this type of simple transitives designates process events, exactly like their intransitive variant. Resultatives designate a transition event: the adjective and the main verb form a complex predicate; adjectives with closed scales like clean encode the prominent endstate subevent and the verb encodes the process subevent.

Merle Weicker

Lea Heßler-Reusch

Petra Schulz

Title Pending 10105

This paper tests the hypothesis that N-N combinations (N-N word compounds and phrasal compounds) share a common underlying structural symmetry that needs to be dissolved through movement of one of the nouns. Certain types of N-N combinations are in complementary distribution in Spanish and English: N-N compounds are more productive in English, N-preposition-N compounds more productive in Spanish, and certain N-N compounds with the meaning of coordination of the nouns are possible in both languages. Bilingual heritage speakers of Spanish with English as the majority language have access to the English-type N-N compound, the Spanish-type NPN phrasal compound and the coordinated N-N type in both languages. Assuming that all three types start out as symmetric mergers of two nouns, we test whether bilinguals will prefer one of the symmetry-breaking strategies by using an acceptability judgement task. First, we found a certain degree of cross-linguistic influence in the higher acceptance of N-N compounds in Spanish vs. English. Second, participants preferred structures that have P (de), which we interpreted as the most salient strategy to break the N-N symmetry. We conclude that symmetry-breaking is a highly ranked preference for bilinguals as a result of having two active grammars.

José Camacho

Title Pending 11055

Many varieties of Arabic display a causative construction that adds a causer to the argument structure of the underlying verb. When this verb is transitive, the causative derivative is ditransitive. In the Arabic varieties, these ditransitive causative verbs display a double object alternation fully parallel to the alternation that change of possession verbs like give display. I claim that two current analyses of the double object alternation do not extend naturally to Arabic causative constructions. Rather, the parallels between causative and change of possession ditransitives in Arabic implicate an analysis of change of possession verbs in which the recipient argument (parallel to the external argument of the underlying verb in causative ditransitives) is base generated syntactically superordinate to the theme (parallel to the internal argument of the underlying verb in causative ditransitives). The unifying analysis I propose draws on certain elements of the ‘VP-shell’ analysis of Larson (1988) as well as the ‘neo-constructionist’ approach of Ramchand (2008; 2018) regarding the syntactic instantiation of argument structure. The Arabic variety I take as an exemplar of the Arabic causative construction is Syrian.

Peter Hallman

Title Pending 9110

This study examines apparent-time variation in the use of multiple acoustic cues present on coarticulatorily nasalized vowels in California English. Eighty-nine listeners ranging in age from 18-58 (grouped into 3 apparent-time categories based on year of birth) performed lexical identifications on syllables excised from words with oral and nasal codas from six speakers who produced either minimal (n=3) or extensive (n=3) anticipatory nasal coarticulation (realized by greater vowel nasalization, F1 bandwidth, and diphthongization on vowels in CVN contexts). Results showed no differences across listeners’ identification for Extensively coarticulated vowels, as well as oral vowels by both types of speakers (all at-ceiling). Yet, performance for the Minimal Coarticulators’ nasalized vowels was lowest for the older listener group and increased over apparent-time. Perceptual cue-weighting analyses revealed that older listeners rely more on F1 bandwidth, while younger listeners rely more on acoustic nasality, as coarticulatory cues providing information about lexical identity. Thus, there is evidence for variation in apparent- time in the use of the different coarticulatory cues present on vowels. Younger listeners’ cue weighting allows them flexibility to identify lexical items given a range of coarticulatory variation across (here, younger) speakers, while older listeners’ cue weighting leads to reduced performance for talkers producing innovative phonetic forms. This study contributes to our understanding of the relationship between multidimensional acoustic features resulting from coarticulation and the perceptual re-weighting of cues that can lead to sound change over time.

Georgia Zellou

Michelle Cohn

Apparent-time variation in the use of multiple cues for perception of anticipatory nasal coarticulation in California English

This paper presents novel data from a Yorùbá language game called Ẹnà, an iterative affixation game that typically involves copying of vowels and tones onto a dummy syllable. Yorùbá VV sequences are all analyzed as disyllabic in existing literature, yet we find that Ẹnà treats them differently depending on their provenance: underlying VV sequences, those created from pronouns, and those derived through floating tone are treated as a single locus of insertion, as variably are those that share tone, while VV sequences derived through consonant deletion or compounding are generally treated as two separate loci. We argue that the difference indicates that Yorùbá in fact has long vowels, contrary to previous assumptions. We analyze the pattern in Optimality Theory, following Krämer &amp;amp; Vogt’s (2018) analysis of reduplicative language games but adding a reduplicative template and back-copying, and we consider the implications of the pattern and analysis to the study of Yorùbá and the study of language games.

Avery Ozburn

Samuel Kayode Akinbo

Murray Schellenberg

Title Pending 10429

Emojis, introduced in the US in 2011 and now ubiquitous, are a set of iconic expressive symbols that are incredibly widespread in computer-mediated communication (CMC), especially among young people. The majority of linguistic research on emojis focuses only on the semantics; however, emerging data suggest that emojis are far more linguistically interesting than merely their semantic contributions to a sentence. Data from Twitter demonstrate that emojis can actually appear as contentful morphological units that behave according to regularly predictable morphosyntactic rules. In this paper I analyze data from several languages including English, German, and Spanish and reach several conclusions about emojis that appear as words. First, these emojis are not merely replacements in text for existing words in a language, but rather they represent the morphosyntactic of a lexically-typed stem, to which inflectional and derivational affixes can be productively added. Second, these emoji stems can undergo morphological changes such lexicalization and grammaticalization. Within pro-speech emojis, I also differentiate two sub-categories of emoji according to how they are interpreted: emojis which have both an iconic and symbolic mechanism of interpreted, and emojis that are interpreted iconically. This work introduces and strengthens the idea that pictures can be part of the morphosyntactic derivation of an utterance and that they can be represented in a language user’s lexicon.

John David Storment

Title Pending 10449

My main goal in this paper is to examine agreement in relative clauses with conjoined heads. Since there are many elements that can potentially agree with the conjoined head (i.e., the relative pronoun, the verb, nominal modifiers if present), there are many logically possible agreement patterns, only a subset of which is attested. I focus on the question of what the available (and unavailable) patterns tell us about the nature of the Agree, the mechanism responsible for agreement. The more theoretical question I examine is why sometimes Agree between a single Probe and multiple Goals surfaces as Resolved Agreement, and other times as agreement with a single Goal. Focusing on coordinate structures, I argue that Agree between a single Probe and multiple Goals in a Parallel Merge structure obligatorily leads to Single Conjunct Agreement, whereas Agree between a single Probe and multiple Goals in a non-Parallel Merge structure can result in either Single Conjunct Agreement or Resolved Agreement. This proposal has implications that go beyond Polish relative clauses, which I also discuss in the paper.

Barbara Citko

Title Pending 8754

Theories of morphology must account for lexicalized variation: lexical items that differ unpredictably in their inflection must be memorized individually and differ in their stored representation. When tested on such cases, adult speakers usually follow the Law of Frequency Matching (Hayes et al. 2009), extending gradient phonological patterns from the lexicon. This paper looks at lexicalized variation in the Hungarian possessive: first, I show that a noun’s choice of possessive is partially predicted by its plural form as well as its phonological shape. Then, using a novel nonce word paradigm, I show that Hungarian speakers productively apply this cooccurrence pattern between the plural and possessive. I handle lexicalized variation with diacritic features marking lexical entries and propose that Hungarian speakers have learned a gradient cooccurrence relation between diacritic features indexing their plural and possessive forms, extending the sublexicon model of Gouskova et al. (2015). In this proposal, morphological knowledge is distributed across rules in a generative grammar, individual lexical items indexed for their morphological properties, and pattern-matching grammars storing generalizations over those indexed lexical items.

Guy Tabachnick

Title Pending 10260

It is sometimes argued that (certain types of) lexical frequency and constructional frequency determine how easy sentences are to process and hence, how acceptable speakers find them. Others have argued that grammatical principles interact with and often override such effects. Here, we present the results from a survey on Danish with more than 200 participants. We asked people to provide acceptability ratings of a number of sentences with varying levels of complexity, with and without extraction, including complement clauses, relative clauses, parasitic gaps, and ungrammatical sentences. We predicted structural complexity and acceptability to be negatively correlated (the more complex, the less acceptable). The results show that construction frequency and acceptability are correlated, but that zero and near-zero frequencies do not predict acceptability. However, there is indeed an even stronger inverse correlation between acceptability and structural complexity, defined as a function of independently motivated factors of syntactic structure and processing, including embedding, adjunction, extraction, and distance between filler and gap. Lexical frequency also affects acceptability, but the effects are small, and, crucially, there is no evidence in our data that ungrammatical sentences are affected by such frequency effects. Furthermore, the acceptability patterns seem to be fairly stable across participants. The results show a pattern that is consistent with an approach based on grammatical principles and processing constraints, rather than based on stochastic principles alone.

Ken Ramshøj Christensen

Anne Mette Nyvad

Title Pending 10618

This paper delves into the semantics of the reciprocal construction recognized in the literature as "verbal" or "lexical" reciprocals. A common assumption is that predicates of this construction inherently encode a symmetric meaning, often marked morphologically in many languages. This paper advocates for a crucial distinction between two types of predicates: rec-predicates (e.g., the Hebrew verb hitnašek 'kiss') - a class of predicates that do not inherently denote symmetry but carry an underspecified meaning, so that in specific defined contexts, they can induce a symmetric reading. In contrast, sym-predicates (e.g., the Hebrew attribute zehe 'be identical') - this class of predicates inherently encodes symmetric relations. Drawing upon Winter’s (2002) typology of verbs, it is posited that rec-predicates are dyadic, taking two atoms as their arguments, while sym-predicates are monadic, with a single argument denoting a set. The analysis in this paper adopts Bar-Asher Siegal’s (2020) methodology for identifying strategies expressing reciprocity and is substantiated with a survey of the various syntactic structures in which the relevant predicates manifest, along with their diverse interpretations. The paper critically examines previous analyses of these predicates, scrutinizing both empirical and theoretical challenges encountered by these analyses. With a specific focus on verbal strategies for expressing reciprocity in Hebrew, the study, informed by the shared characteristics identified in previous research, suggests that the conclusions drawn for Hebrew may be applicable to other languages as well.

Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal

Title Pending 10274

(Bale 2007) argues, on the basis of the differential availability of subjectless repetitive presuppositions with again with certain verb classes, that the agent argument of eventive transitive verbs is introduced VP-externally (Kratzer 1996), but that the agent argument of intranstive and stative transitive verbs must be taken as a true argument by the verb. We challenge Bale’s claim from two directions. First, we observe that two classes of eventive transitive verbs, resist subjectless presuppositions with again. Second, we show that the unavailability of subjectless presuppositions with these and other verb classes is not an ironclad argument against severing agents from their verbs generally, and, develop a semantic analysis, inspired by an analysis of stative transitive verbs due to Hale &amp;amp; Keyser (2002), on which the relevant classes of verbs inherently make reference to the agent of their event argument in the form of an anaphoric index. This index is subsequently bound by a functional head that introduces the agent argument. The facts and analysis proposed here have wider theoretical implications for the way agents qua external arguments are introduced in general, suggesting that verbs of certain classes and VP-external functional heads may both play crucial roles in the syntactic introduction of the agent argument and its interaction with sublexical modifiers like again.

Ryan Walter Smith

Jianrong Yu

Introducing agents by binding indices: Implications for subjectless presuppositions and agent entailments.

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.In this paper, we look at the properties of the clausal coordinator sì in Yorùbá. We will show that despite its unusual surface position in the middle field of the second conjunct, the element should still be treated as a proper coordinator and not, as sometimes claimed, as an adverb. We then go on to fully describe the distribution of sì in simple clauses as well as in complex constructions involving focus movement, adverbial or relative clauses. Based on these configurations, we argue that a search for a uniform syntactic position of sì is bound to be unsuccessful. Rather, we claim that the uniform underlying factor in all of these constructions is that sì always right-attaches to the first phonological phrase of the second conjunct clause irrespective of syntactic constituents or islands. We provide evidence for this claim from various phonological processes such as (i) phonological fusion, (ii) the association of floating tones, (iii) assimilation, (iv) tonal OCP-effects, and (v) allomorphy. The present study thus not only solves a curious language-specific puzzle in Yorùbá but also provides a convincing case of prosodically driven clitic displacement to a position after the first phonological/prosodic phrase. In doing so, it falls nicely into emerging typologies of clitic placement patterns in the world's languages.

Title Pending 10899

Grammatical accounts of na in Akan identify two different forms: nà with a low tone (LT-na) and ná with a high tone (HT-na). LT-na functions in two ways: as a focus marker or a conjunction, the latter of which can take a prefix and be realized as ɛna. While some scholars treat them as two different na’s, others point to a commonality between the two.&amp;nbsp;HT-na has been analyzed as functioning as past and future tenses, and a logical connector. We argue that these three HT-na along with the two LT-na are subcategories of a super-category. We propose that the super-category is a non-tonal na (call it Root-na), with a common basic meaning which explains all five seemingly unrelated interpretations. Root-na links the na-clause with something in the common ground, i.e., to something that appeared in the previous context or is presupposed. It is spelled out as a LT-na or HT-na, depending on the kind of linking. LT-na marks discourse coherence relations such as focus and narrative-sequence, both of which are shown in the linguistics literature to be anaphoric. HT-na is an intensional marker which links times or possible worlds.

Galia Hatav

James Essegbey

Title Pending 10082

It is cross-linguistically common to find a distinction between “temporary” vs. “permanent” states in copular verbs, e.g., Spanish estar and ser (see Deo et al. 2017). In Mashi [shr] (Bantu, JD53; Maho 2009), a similar temporary-permanent distinction holds not only of the two copular be-verbs in the language, -li (temporary state) and -ba (permanent state), but also of the two possessive have-verbs, -dwiire and -jira; -dwiire indicates temporary possession, while -jira instead indicates permanent possession. This parallelism provides a novel argument in favor of a decompositional approach to possessive verbs (Freeze 1992, Kayne 1993, Harley 1998). The analysis is further supported through patterns of allomorphy where HAVE is realized in its decomposed form, BE + comitative, in Mashi. I analyze the patterns using a Spanning Insertion analysis (Williams 2003, Svenonius 2012, 2016, Merchant 2015).

Aron Finholt

Title Pending 9977

This paper focuses on the Experiencer Object (EO)/Experiencer Subject (ES) alternation in Polish. This alternation is viewed here as distinct from the causative/anticausative alternation, because eventive EO verbs do not pattern like change of state (COS) verbs, and their reflexive ES alternants are unergative, not unaccusative. Eventive EO verbs share a common base with their ES counterparts, which corresponds to an unergative vP, with the experiencer merged in a low external argument position, viz. Spec, vP (Tollan 2018), not in Spec, VoiceP. The difference between causative EO verbs and their ES cognates lies in the Voice layer; in the former, the causer argument occupies the specifier of thematic VoiceP, while in the latter the Voice is expletive, filled with the reflexivemarker się. Despite sharing the common base, eventive EO verbs and their reflexive ES variantsare not derivationally related by a syntactic rule, as neither of the two structures can be treated as the basic one. The same reflexive marker with the same function and structural position is foundin Polish anticausatives, which also share a common base with their causative counterparts. The common base, this time, however, corresponds to an unaccusative, not unergative, vP.

Anna Bondaruk

Bożena Rozwadowska

Title Pending 9071

Gradable adjectives have recently drawn a lot of attention in experimental semantics/pragmatics regarding the different interpretations they trigger depending on scale structure, polarity, extremeness, and presence of negation (e.g., Gotzner et al. 2018b; a; Leffel et al. 2019). The current study investigates the interpretation of relative and absolute gradable adjectives in the scope of negation (e.g.,&amp;nbsp;not large and not clean, respectively) capitalizing on the role of competition between alternative expressions in adjective interpretation. Our experimental results show that contextual competition between adjective expressions affects the interpretative asymmetry characteristic of positive and negative relative adjectives in the scope of negation (not large vs. not small; see Horn 1989). However, we do not find evidence that contextual competition affects the symmetric interpretation patterns of positive (not clean) and negative absolute adjectives (not dirty) under negation, or that potential relative-like interpretations of negated absolute adjectives hinge on the availability of overt contextual competition. The attested polarity asymmetry of negated relative adjectives is captured by Horn&amp;rsquo;s pragmatic theory. The apparent availability of relative-like interpretations of negated absolute adjectives are hypothesized to result from a reasoning akin to Horn&amp;rsquo;s division of pragmatic labor.

Stavroula Alexandropoulou

Nicole Gotzner

Title Pending 9919

Final nasalization of voiced stops is phonetically unmotivated (i.e. not a consequence of universal articulatory or perceptual tendencies). As such, final nasalization has been deemed an impossible sound change. Nonetheless, Blust (2005; 2016) proposes that final nasalization took place in four Austronesian languages: Kayan-Murik, Berawan dialects, Kalabakan Murut, and Karo Batak. In this paper, we argue final nasalization in these languages is not a single sound change and reduce it to a combination of phonetically grounded changes. We demonstrate that in Austronesian, final nasalization involved four steps: (i) fricativization of voiced stops, (ii) devoicing of the fricatives, (iii) spontaneous nasalization before voiceless fricatives, and (iv) occlusion of the nasalized fricatives to nasal stops. Finally, we extend our account to final nasalization in Dakota (Siouan) and propose a new explanation for the development of the unnatural final voicing in the related Lakota language. Our results shed light on the role of phonetic naturalness in diachrony and synchrony. We maintain that while phonetically unnatural phonological processes may arise via a sequence of sound changes or analogical extension, sound changes are always natural and phonetically grounded.

Maksymilian Dąbkowski

Gašper Beguš

Title Pending 10779

Mastering the semantics of gradable adjectives is a complex acquisition task, since their interpretation requires the calculation of a threshold relative to a comparison class. Context plays a role in determining the comparison class in multiple ways; empirical research has focused on non-linguistic cues, such as world knowledge and visual context, and less on linguistic cues, such as the modified head noun. The present study is the first to examine how preschoolers and adults use the taxonomic category encoded by the modified head noun as well as visual cues to interpret relative (big, small) and absolute (clean, dirty) gradable adjectives. Using existing objects from different taxonomic categories (basic-level and superordinate-level), we developed a picture-choice task that allowed us to infer the comparison class and the threshold from participants’ choices. Forty-three children (aged 3 to 5) and 26 adults, all monolingual German-speaking, were tested. Confirming previous research, children, like adults, showed a context-sensitive interpretation of relative but not of absolute gradable adjectives. The taxonomic label was preferred to visual cues in creating the comparison class already by age three; this advantage of linguistic over non-linguistic information was also present in the adults. We explain this finding with the privileged role of information provided by the taxonomic label: the modified head noun encodes the cognitive representation of an object category and the corresponding taxonomic hierarchy. Accordingly, this representation is easily accessible while creating the comparison class, which provides further evidence that language is a powerful tool to modulate our mental computations.

Children and adults privilege linguistic over visual information when creating comparison classes for prenominal gradable adjectives

A highly productive debate has arisen over the past two decades concerning the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics in building meaning (Potts 2005; Kennedy and McNally 2005; Sauerland 2012; Roberts 2012; Coppock and Beaver 2014; Gutzmann 2019 i.a.). In this article we illustrate the depth of integration of context-independent and context-dependent meaning through a close analysis of the exclusive operator (EO) just. Recent accounts of the many distinct guises of EO just have proposed a unified shared function: quantification over sets of alternatives (Horn 2000; Orenstein 2015; Wiegand/Windhearn 2017, 2021; Beltrama 2021). We identify here an entirely new surface manifestation of just in the StoryListening Corpus (a set of bereavement narratives elicited during the COVID-19 pandemic), which we term ‘ineffability just’ and argue it serves as a mixed expressive (McCready 2010; Gutzmann 2012). It encodes both descriptive content as a new flavor of exclusive operator (Beltrama 2021), and simultaneously expressive content (Potts 2005, 2007) signaling that the speaker is at a loss for words in the moment to describe an experience more completely because of their affective response to its profound nature.

Emily Walker Manetta

Ian Bhatia

Title Pending 10362

We present novel evidence for iconicity in core morphophonological grammar by documenting, describing, and analysing two patterns of tonal alternation in Tal (West Chadic, Nigeria). When a non-proximal deixis modifies a noun in Tal, every tone of the modified noun is lowered. When the nominal modifier is a proximal deixis, the final tone of the modified noun is raised. The tone lowering and raising are considered the effects of non-proximal and proximal linkers, which have the tone features [–Upper, –Raised] and [+Raised] as their respective exponents. The realisation and maximal extension of the non-proximal tone features are considered effects of morpheme-specific featural correspondence constraints. Similarly, the exponent of the proximal linker docking on the final TBU is due to the relative ranking of the proximal-specific correspondence constraints. The association of the tone features [–Upper, –Raised] and [+Raised] with non-proximal and proximal linkers, respectively, is in line with crosslinguistic patterns of magnitude iconicity. Given that the local and long-distance realisations of the proximal and non-proximal featural affixes respectively are perceptually similar to deictic gestures, the locality of the featural affixation is considered a novel pattern of iconicity. To motivate this pattern of iconicity, we extend the notion of perceptual motivation in linguistic theory to include the crossmodal depiction of sensory imagery. Consequently, Tal presents evidence for iconicity as a motivation for morphophonological grammar.

Michael Bulkaam

Iconicity as the motivation for the signification and locality of deictic grammatical tones in Tal

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This paper builds a systematic argument against the existence of semantic features, although these would in principle conform with the understanding of features in Chomsky (1995) as instructions to the interfaces, to the Conceptual-Intentional Interface in this case. I first lay out their superfluous character as well as their redundancy in separationist / realisational approaches, and in non-lexicalist models of grammar, more generally. Under the assumption that lexical meaning in natural language is mediated by grammatical structure containing roots, (purely) semantic features would inevitably be restricted to “non-lexical” elements only, i.e. those derivational affixes that encode rich conceptual content. This makes the positing of semantic features methodologically suspect and, ultimately, redundant.Accordingly, the rich content of derivational affixes, which can involve pretty much any nominal concept (as in Acquaviva 2009) from ‘profession’, ’tree’, and ‘place’ to body parts, will be argued not to be encoded in terms of semantic features. On the contrary, this paper makes the case for derivational affixes not belonging to a unitary syntactic category, with some derivational affixes actually being roots interpreted in particular structural contexts, as has been argued already since De Belder (2011). The chapter closes by offering a taxonomy of the elements that grammar manipulates and sketches the division of labour between root structures and formal features.

Phoevos Panagiotidis

Title Pending 10876

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.In this article, I argue that Spanish has three distinct classes of prefixes according to their grammatical category: relational, adjectival and quantifier prefixes. The first are truncated prepositional structures that act as modifiers of any lexical category; the second are truncated adjectival structures that can only modify nouns, and the third are quantifiers that bind a variable, require combination with two predicates at a low syntactic level and only pick nominal categories. I show that each class displays a different set of empirical properties with respect to recursivity and category change, among other aspects of their behaviour, and provide a syntactic and semantic analysis of the structures that they produce.

Antonio Fábregas

Title Pending 10834

The present study provides a formal account for three types of experimental findings recurrently reported in the literature, yet not integrated into current L2 speech theories, namely individual variability, syllable-position effects and orthographic influences. By analysing examples from L2 acquisition of Portuguese, we show that all these L2 speech patterns can be formalised within a single generative linguistic model, the Harmonic-Grammar version of&amp;nbsp;Bidirectional Phonology and Phonetics Model,&amp;nbsp;which was&amp;nbsp;originally proposed for native speech perception and production.&amp;nbsp;Without resorting to any mechanism specific to L2 acquisition,&amp;nbsp;our formal modelling suggests that L2 speech data can be&amp;nbsp;addressed in a broader context, benefiting from well-developed formal phonological theories.

Chao Zhou

Silke Hamann

Title Pending 9692

One structural dimension that varies across languages is the simultaneous or sequential expression of meaning. Complex predicates can layer meanings together simultaneously in a single-verb predicate (SVP) or distribute them sequentially in a multiple-verb predicate (MVP). We ask whether typological variability in this dimension might be a consequence of systematic patterns of diachronic change. We examine the distribution of markers of agency and number within the verb phrase (the predicate) in the earliest stages of a young, emerging sign language in Nicaragua, Lengua de Señas Nicaragüense (LSN), beginning with homesign systems like those from which LSN originated, and progressing through two decades of transmission to new learners. We find that: (i) LSN2 signers are more likely to produce MVPs than homesigners or LSN1 signers; (ii) in the MVPs they do produce, homesigners and LSN1 signers are more likely to produce predicates that mark both agency and number simultaneously on at least one of the verbs; LSN2 signers are just as likely to produce sequences with verbs that mark agency and number in sequentially separate verbs. We discuss how language acquisition, modality, and structure, as well as specific social factors associated with each of the groups, play a role in driving these changes, and how, over time, these patterns of change might yield the diversity of forms observed across spoken and signed languages today.

Diane Brentari

Susan Goldin-Meadow

Laura Horton

Ann Senghas

Marie Coppola

Title Pending 10342

This paper explores the syntax of HAVE, with a focus on Greek stative (existential and possessive) sentences, and argues against the need to postulate multiple BEs and HAVEs in this context, on the grounds that HAVE, in all its guises, behaves as a transitive verb, whereas BE behaves as an unaccusative. By adopting Myler’s (2016; 2018) proposal, which comprises an analysis based on suppletive allomorphy, I maintain that BE and HAVE are PF-exponents of the same semantically vacuous v-head, i.e., vBE, and the choice between them is determined by transitivity: HAVE realizes vBE when the structure is transitive, whereas BE does so when the structure is intransitive. By relating transitivity to Voice, as per Kratzer (1996), this translates into the assumption that HAVE appears when a transitive Voice head is projected in the structure, whereas BE is merged in the absence of this projection.

Anna Kampanarou

Title Pending 10202

The proper analysis of English middles (Politicians bribe easily) has always been a matter of debate. I argue that they involve three crucial components: (1) A base-generated subject that is interpreted as the logical internal argument; (2) a logical external argument that is not syntactically projected at all; (3) the semantics of an ability modal. Regarding (1), I provide new data indicating that the surface subject of the English middle is not derived by A-movement and has no representation in the VP. I propose that the subject is interpreted as the logical internal argument by means of two mechanisms independently proposed to account for other facts: (a) a head that binds a verb’s internal argument, proposed for implicit arguments by Bruening (2021); and (b) an abstraction rule triggered by certain varieties of Voice in English, proposed to account for properties of the verbal anaphor do so by Bruening (2019). The abstraction rule causes the unexpressed internal argument of the verb to be bound by the base-generated surface subject of the middle. As for the logical external argument, I show that it is present only semantically and not syntactically. Putative binding in both short passives and middles is logophoric, not syntactic. The final component of the analysis is the semantics of an ability modal. English middles are not necessarily generic, they are not necessarily dispositional, they are not necessarily stative, and they do not require adverbs. The middle, like the passive, is a morphosyntactic category, and it is not useful to try to define a “middle semantics” cross-linguistically.

Benjamin Bruening

English middles and implicit arguments

While phonological change has played a central role in assessing linguistic relatedness since the nineteenth century, the usefulness of syntactic change for this purpose has remained debated – despite recent work on the question with a variety of results. In our study, we analyze the phylogenetic signal of syntactic data using state-of-the-art Bayesian algorithms and the SSWL database (Koopman 2012–). With the phylogenetic model, we infer a minimally biased family tree. We find that, generally, the phylogenetic signal in the syntactic dataset is low. The model fails to infer larger-order subgroupings that would be found further back in time. This is in contrast to the clear-cut groupings we can obtain from running this type of model on phonological databases. This raises the question how well these syntactic properties encode phylogenetic information. As it stands, the model fails to provide evidence for strong phylogenetic signal despite the rich dataset and methods.

短名	Glossa
Journal Impact	1.05
国际分区	LINGUISTICS(Q2)
期刊索引	SCI Q3中科院 2 区

ISSN	2397-1835
h-index	22
国内分区	文学(2区)文学语言与语言学(3区)文学语言学(3区)

涉及主题	哲学语言学计算机科学人工智能自然语言处理心理学数学生物程序设计语言物理认识论历史地理语法艺术考古
出版信息	出版商: Open Library of Humanities，出版周期: ，期刊类型: journal
基本数据	创刊年份: 2016，原创研究文献占比: 100.00%，自引率:11.10%， Gold OA占比: 97.06%
平均审稿周期	网友分享经验：62 Weeks

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