In this paper we bring together the results of our research into agreement in copular clauses in 4 four different Germanic languages—Dutch, German, Faroese, Icelandic—in order to provide an 5 overview of the results. These cases present a particularly interesting window into how verbal 6 agreement operates, since there are two potential controllers of agreement, which may disagree 7 in person and/or number (The source of the rumour BE the neighbours / you-SG / you-PL). We 8 will show that there (...) is variation at all levels in which nominal controls agreement: cross-linguistic, 9 inter-speaker within a single language, and intra-speaker. We argue that our data support the 10 following claims: (1) “Downward” agreement for person, as well as number, with a nominal that is 11 not in the canonical subject position is possible and in some cases preferred; (2) The agreement 12 patterns observed in Icelandic and Faroese support the hypothesis that in these languages there 13 are distinct Number and Person heads; (3) “Downward” agreement from a high position in the 14 left-periphery is a grammatically distinct phenomenon from agreement when the verb remains 15 in a lower position in the clause; (4) In some languages and some configurations, speakers 16 show a significant degree of indeterminacy in their judgments and production suggesting that 17 speakers use more than one grammar. We relate our findings to current discussions in the 18 generative literature on subject agreement and in particular differences between number and 19 person agreement, and possible connections to restrictions on object clitics, and we also discuss 20 questions that remain open, and invite new, cross-disciplinary research. (shrink)

This study investigates the extent to which there is individuality in how structural variation is conditioned over time. Earlier research already classified the diachronically unstable gerund variation as involving a high fraction of mixed-usage speakers throughout the change, whereby the proportion of the conservative variant versus the progressive variant as observable in the linguistic output of individual language users superficially resembles the mean proportion as observable at the population level. However, this study sets out to show that there (...) can still be heterogeneity within such a centralized population in terms of how each individual conditions the observed variation. A random forest and conditional inference tree analysis of over 14,000 gerunds uttered by nineteen seventeenth-century authors is presented to show that, while the most important language-internal factors conditioning the gerund variation are adopted by (and shared between) all authors, we can still attest inter-individual variation (i) at lower levels of variable importance, and (ii) in the breadth of the range of contexts individual authors employ to condition the attested variation. (shrink)

Is native speaker variation in understanding complex sentences due to individual differences in working memory capacity or in syntactic competence? The answer to this question has very important consequences for both theoretical and applied concerns in linguistics and education. This book is distinctive in giving an historical and interdisciplinary perspective on the rule- based and experience-based debate and in supporting an integrated account. In the study reported here, variation was found to be due to differences in (...) class='Hi'>syntactic competence and the author argues that sentence comprehension is a learned skill, displaying many of the general characteristics of cognitive skills. The book will be stimulating reading for psycholinguists, theoretical linguists, applied linguists and educators. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.

In this book, leading scholars consider the ways in which syntactic variation can be accounted for in a minimalist framework. They explore the theoretical significance, content, and role of parameters; whether or not variation should be strongly or weakly accounted for by syntactic factors; and the explicitness - or lack thereof - should be assumed with respect to the conditions imposed by narrow syntax.

Offers an overview of work on the biology of language - what is sometimes called the "biolinguistic approach." This book focuses on the interplay between variation and the universal properties of language. It provides case studies from the areas of syntactic variation, genetic variation, neurological variation and historical variation.

In Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture, the well-formed expressions of a language are licensed by correspondences between phonology, syntax, and conceptual structure. I show how this architecture can be used to make sense of the existence of parasitic gap constructions. A parasitic gap is one that is rendered acceptable because of the presence of another gap in the same sentence. Compare *a person whoi everyone who talks to ti likes Chris, which shows an illicit extraction from a relative clause, and a person (...) whoi everyone who talks to pgi likes ti, which shows a parasitic gap in the relative clause. Languages differ in terms of the range of configurations in which they allow parasitic gaps; these configurations appear to form a hierarchy. These observations raise some fundamental questions: Why do parasitic gaps exist at all? Why are different syntactic configurations possible for P-gaps and why just these configurations? Why is there a parasitic gap hierarchy? The answers that I propose make crucial use of constructional overgeneralization of across-the-board extraction in coordinate constructions, formulated straightforwardly in the framework of Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture. (shrink)

Previous work has reported that children creatively make syntactic errors that are ungrammatical in their target language, but are grammatical in another language. One of the most well‐known examples is medial wh‐question errors in English‐speaking children's wh‐questions (e.g., What do you think who the cat chased? from Thornton, 1990). The evidence for this non‐target‐like structure in both production and comprehension has been taken to support the existence of innate, syntactic parameters that define all possible grammatical variation, which (...) serve as a top‐down constraint guiding children's language acquisition process. The present study reports new story‐based production and comprehension experiments that challenge this interpretation. While we replicated previous observations of medial wh‐question errors in children's sentence production (Experiment 1), we saw a reduction in evidence indicating that English‐speaking children assign interpretations that conform to the medial wh‐question pattern (Experiment 2). Crucially, we found no correlation between production and comprehension errors (Experiment 3). We suggest that these errors are the result of children's immature sentence production mechanisms rather than immature grammatical knowledge. (shrink)

We show in rather informal terms how witness sets can be useful in both explicating some basic intuitions about scope and understanding how particular denotational semantic differences between noun phrases affect their abilities to bear out certain scopal patterns. More generally we suggest that the usual notion of scope needs to be factored into variation distributivity and maximality. This part lays some groundwork for several of the subsequent chapters and is thus of interest to all readers. The second part (...) shows that already in this initial raw form the above insights can be applied to make a novel claim concerning the availability of so-called branching readings. In logical terms a branching reading can be defined for any sentence with a subject and a direct object. However speakers of English accept only a fraction of these readings, so the question arises how the data can be predicted from the meanings of the participating quantifiers and the syntactic structure of the sentence. We propose that thinking about the behavior of quantifiers along the lines introduced in the first part leads to a simple answer to this question. (shrink)

Aravind Joshi famously hypothesized that natural language syntax was characterized (in part) by mildly context-sensitive generative power. Subsequent work in mathematical linguistics over the past three decades has revealed surprising convergences among a wide variety of grammatical formalisms, all of which can be said to be mildly context-sensitive. But this convergence is not absolute. Not all mildly context-sensitive formalisms can generate exactly the same stringsets (i.e. they are not all weakly equivalent), and even when two formalisms can both generate a (...) certain stringset, there might be differences in the structural descriptions they use to do so. It has generally been difficult to find cases where such differences in structural descriptions can be pinpointed in a way that allows linguistic considerations to be brought to bear on choices between formalisms, but in this paper we present one such case. The empirical pattern of interest involves wh-movement dependencies in languages that do not enforce the wh-island constraint. This pattern draws attention to two related dimensions of variation among formalisms: whether structures grow monotonically from one end to another, and whether structure-building operations are conditioned by only a finite amount of derivational state. From this perspective, we show that one class of formalisms generates the crucial empirical pattern using structures that align with mainstream syntactic analysis, and another class can only generate that same string pattern in a linguistically unnatural way. This is particularly interesting given that (i) the structurally-inadequate formalisms are strictly more powerful than the structurally-adequate ones from the perspective of weak generative capacity, and (ii) the formalism based on derivational operations that appear on the surface to align most closely with the mechanisms adopted in contemporary work in syntactic theory (merge and move) are the formalisms that fail to align with the analyses proposed in that work when the phenomenon is considered in full generality. (shrink)

Through a number of illuminating cases studies which draw in large part on the largely under-utilized data of Romance dialectal varieties, the present article sets out to highlight the importance that Romance data, especially those of non-standard varietites, can play in testing and enriching currents theories of syntax. In particular, we shall show that dialectal varieties, although frequently overlooked in the past, offer an immensely fertile and still relatively unexplored experimental territory in which to profitably investigate new ideas about language (...) structure, change and variation. At the same time, we champion the mutual benefits for theoretical linguists and Romanists of adopting a more integrated and reciprocally-informed approach in their respective treatments of linguistic evidence, highlighting how a familiarity with the key tools and ideas established in both fields has the potential to enrich linguistic and empirical analyses considerably. (shrink)

This paper looks at one area of potential crosslinguistic variation in comparatives. It has recently been claimed that Japanese clausal comparatives lack degree abstraction structures in the complement of yori ‘than’. Based on data from several empirical domains such as predicative adjectival comparatives, intensional contexts, and negative islands, this paper shows that Japanese clausal comparatives do not in general contrast with their English counterparts in the way predicted by the above claim. The syntactic and semantic phenomena observed in (...) Japanese clausal comparatives receive straightforward accounts if we assume that they do involve degree abstraction and degree comparison, along the lines familiar from analyses of their English counterparts. (shrink)

Based on the novel data collected through original fieldwork on five syntactic phenomena (the position of the finite verb in embedded clauses, in sentences with a modal verb, negative concord, position of focused light/heavy objects in main clauses with a complex tense, scrambling) in the heritage language Mòcheno, we show that i) there exist two populations – one exhibiting intra-speaker variation between German and Italian word orders, and one lacking it; ii) these two populations are the result of (...) diatopic variation and, to a lesser extent, of diastratic variation. The results reached through quantitative statistical analysis are partially convergent with those arrived at by traditional theoretical syntax on Mòcheno, but our analysis has allowed us to shed new light on a series of so-far neglected or poorly understood phenomena. More specifically, we discovered that there exists micro-variation fed by diastratic (age) variation within the Roveda variety, which represents the only case in Mòcheno in which age is a relevant factor in determining variation. We also showed that the traditional claim that the Palù variety is “more German” than the other Mòcheno variety is surely to be confirmed, but we could refine it by showing that German word orders are also accepted by speakers of other varieties and that the acceptability of these word orders in competition with the Italian syntax is not fed by the age of speakers (no diastratic variation). Finally, we showed that the acceptance of German word orders across speakers varies according to the phenomenon investigated: negation is the phenomenon in which German word orders are more likely to be accepted, whereas embedded clauses are the phenomenon in which German word orders are more likely to be rejected. (shrink)

This article discusses language universality and language variation, and suggests that there is no feature variation in initial syntax, featural variation arising by metamorphosis under transfer from syntax to PF-morphology. In particular, it explores the Zero Hypothesis, stating that Universal Grammar, UG, only provides two building elements, Root Zero and Edge Feature Zero, zero, as they are purely structural/formal elements with no semantic content in UG. Their potential content is provided by the Concept Mine, a mind-internal but (...) language-external department. UG and narrow syntax has access to the Concept Mine, and this Syntax-Concept Access is unique to humans, a prerequisite for the evolution of language (Section 1). A related idea (also inSection 1) is coined the Generalized Edge Feature Approach, GEFA. It states that Merge always involves at least one edge feature, which precludes symmetric structures and enables Simplest Merge (no Pair-Merge, no Hilbert epsilon operator). The article advocates that there is no syntactic feature selection (Section 2), all syntactic features being universally accessible in the Concept Mine, via Root Zero and Edge Feature Zero. In contrast, there is feature selection in PF (including morphology), yielding variation (Section 3), Gender being a clear example (Section 4). However, there is a widely neglected syntax-to-PF-morphology metamorphosis (Section 5), such that morphological features like [past] are distinct from albeit related to syntactic features like Speech Time. Parameters operate on selected PF features, and not on purely syntactic features, so parameter setting is plausibly closely tied to the syntax-to-PF-morphology metamorphosis (the concludingSection 6). It is suggested that parameters are on the externalization side of language, part of or related to the sensory-motor system, facilitating motoric learning in language acquisition. (shrink)

In Jeffrey King’s theory of structured propositions, propositional structure mirrors the syntactic structure of natural language sentences that express it. I provide cases where this claim individuates propositions too finely across languages. Crucially, King’s paradigmatic proposition-fact ^that Dara swims^ cannot be believed by a monolingual Greek speaker, due to Greek syntax requiring an obligatory article in front of proper names. King’s two possible replies are: (i) to try to streamline the syntax of Greek and English; or (ii) to insist (...) that English speakers can believe propositions inexpressible in Greek. I argue that the former option entails giving up a neo-Russelian framework, and the latter makes King’s account arbitrary or trivial. I conclude that the mirroring claim is untenable. (shrink)

In this pioneering study, a world-renowned generative syntactician explores the impact of phenomena known as 'third factors' on syntactic change. Generative syntax has in recent times incorporated third factors – factors not specific to the language faculty – into its framework, including minimal search, labelling, determinacy and economy. Van Gelderen's study applies these principles to language change, arguing that change is a cyclical process, and that third factor principles must combine with linguistic information to fully account for the cyclical (...) development of 'optimal' language structures. Third Factor Principles also account for language variation around that-trace phenomena, CP-deletion, and the presence of expletives and Verb-second. By linking insights from recent theoretical advances in generative syntax to phenomena from language variation and change, this book provides a unique perspective, making it essential reading for academic researchers and students in syntactic theory and historical linguistics. (shrink)

This article illustrates how language variation and the limits of variation are given a shared and principled explanation in Optimality Theory. It shows that languages can be ‘uniform’, choosing the same grammatical structures in three different sentence types. They can also be ‘non-uniform’, but the combinations of grammatical structures that they can exhibit are extremely restricted. The theory characterizes possible and impossible grammatical systems without special stipulations or additional theoretical machinery.

Male white-rumped munias sing syntactically simpler songs than their domestic counterparts, Bengalese finches. The differences in song structure may reflect differences in natural selection pressures between wild and domestic environments. Deacon proposed song simplicity of the wild strain could be subject to natural selection. We hypothesized the selection pressure may be species identification. Thus, we compared song variations in relation to ecological factors and dispersal history of white-rumped munias to understand song evolutionary processes. We found geographic variations of song syntactical (...) complexity. The difference of song syntactical complexity did not corresponded to genetic distance, but did to that of the proportion of mixed flocks with sympatric related species. Birds that inhabited the areas with more mixed flocks sang simpler songs. The song complexity might be constrained to intensify distinct conspecific signals from related species. Our field work provided empirical evidence supporting a proposal made by Deacon. Keywords: birdsong; evolution; masking hypothesis; Bengalese finches; song geographic variation; genetic variation. (shrink)

Male white-rumped munias sing syntactically simpler songs than their domestic counterparts, Bengalese finches. The differences in song structure may reflect differences in natural selection pressures between wild and domestic environments. Deacon (2010) proposed song simplicity of the wild strain could be subject to natural selection. We hypothesized the selection pressure may be species identification. Thus, we compared song variations in relation to ecological factors and dispersal history of white-rumped munias to understand song evolutionary processes. We found geographic variations of song (...) syntactical complexity. The difference of song syntactical complexity did not corresponded to genetic distance, but did to that of the proportion of mixed flocks with sympatric related species. Birds that inhabited the areas with more mixed flocks sang simpler songs. The song complexity might be constrained to intensify distinct conspecific signals from related species. Our field work provided empirical evidence supporting a proposal made by Deacon (2010). Keywords: birdsong; evolution; masking hypothesis; Bengalese finches; song geographic variation; genetic variation. (shrink)

The interpretation of `much/many' has been argued to be regulated by Uniform Dimensionality (Hackl 2000; Solt 2009): `much' is underspecified but `many' encodes cardinality. However, given some data where `many' denotes ‘volume’, Snyder (2021) proposes the need for Multiform Dimensionality: both `much' and `many' are underspecifed. After reviewing the English data, and in light of novel cross-linguistic data, we argue that neither generalization is fully accurate. Instead, following Wellwood (2015, 2018), we argue for an alternative, Abstract Uniform Dimensionality, which we (...) propose to be universal: MUCH always measures cardinality when it scopes over semantically interpretable plural. We derive the universal by proposing that MUCH can occupy different positions in the NP, only one of which has semantic plural in its scope. Variation is thus not semantic, but morpho-syntactic. (shrink)

Overview A scope marking structure is characterized by the fact that it has two clauses, each of which contains wh expressions [CP-1...wh1...][CP-2...wh2(...whn)...]. While wh- 1 is a fixed lexical item, wh-2...wh-n are not. A possible answer to the question seems to specify values not for wh1 but for wh2...whn. In recent years such structures have come under a lot of scrutiny and various analyses have been proposed to account for their properties. In spite of differences in detail, these analyses can (...) be classified into two groups on the basis of the status they accord to the wh expressions. The direct dependency approach treats wh-1 as semantically inert and assigns matrix scope to wh- 2...wh-n. The indirect dependency approach, on the other hand, takes wh-1 to play a crucial role in determining what the question quantifies over. Wh-2...wh-n do not have matrix scope but play an indirect role in matrix quantification because CP-2 forms the restriction of wh-1. Seen in this light, the direct and indirect dependency approaches are not tied to particular syntactic claims about the relation between CP-1 and CP-2. Whether a particular analysis can be characterized as direct or indirect depends solely on the status of the wh expressions at transparent LF, von Stechow’s term for the level of syntactic representation that feeds into the interpretive module. (shrink)

A number of studies report that frequency is a poor predictor of acceptability, in particular at the lower end of the frequency spectrum. Because acceptability judgments provide a substantial part of the empirical foundation of dominant linguistic traditions, understanding how acceptability relates to frequency, one of the most robust predictors of human performance, is crucial. The relation between low frequency and acceptability is investigated using corpus- and behavioral data on the distribution of infinitival and finite that-complements in Polish. Polish verbs (...) exhibit substantial subordination variation and for the majority of verbs taking an infinitival complement, the that-complement occurs with low frequency. These low-frequency that-clauses, in turn, exhibit large differences in how acceptable they are to native speakers. It is argued that acceptability judgments are based on configurations of internally structured exemplars, the acceptability of which cannot reliably be assessed until sufficient evidence about the core component has accumulated. (shrink)

A number of studies report that frequency is a poor predictor of acceptability, in particular at the lower end of the frequency spectrum. Because acceptability judgments provide a substantial part of the empirical foundation of dominant linguistic traditions, understanding how acceptability relates to frequency, one of the most robust predictors of human performance, is crucial. The relation between low frequency and acceptability is investigated using corpus‐ and behavioral data on the distribution of infinitival and finite that‐complements in Polish. Polish verbs (...) exhibit substantial subordination variation and for the majority of verbs taking an infinitival complement, the that‐complement occurs with low frequency (<0.66 ipm). These low‐frequency that‐clauses, in turn, exhibit large differences in how acceptable they are to native speakers. It is argued that acceptability judgments are based on configurations of internally structured exemplars, the acceptability of which cannot reliably be assessed until sufficient evidence about the core component has accumulated. (shrink)

The contentious question of bilingual processing cost may be recast as a fresh question of code-switching (CS) strategies—quantitative preferences and structural adjustments for switching at particular junctures of two languages. CS strategies are established by considering prosodic and syntactic variables, capitalizing here on bidirectional multi-word CS, spontaneously produced by members of a bilingual community in northern New Mexico who regularly use both languages (Torres Cacoullos and Travis, 2018). CS strategies become apparent by extending the equivalence constraint, which states that (...) bilinguals avoid CS at points of word placement conflict (Poplack, 1980), to examine points of inconsistent equivalence between the languages. Such sites of variable equivalence are junctures where the word strings of the two languages are equivalent only sometimes due to language-internal variable structures. A case in point for the English-Spanish language pair is the boundary between main and complement clauses, where a conjunction occurs always in Spanish but variably in English. The prosodic distancing strategy is to separate the juncture of the two languages. Here the complement clause appears in a different prosodic unit from the main clause, disproportionately as compared both with monolingual benchmarks and with bilinguals' own unilingual English and Spanish. Prosodic distancing serves to mitigate variable equivalence. The syntactic selection strategy is to opt for the variant that is more quantitatively available and more discourse neutral. Here the preference is for the Spanish complementizer que—regardless of main or complement clause language— which is the more frequent option in bilinguals' combined experience in both their languages, whereas English complementizer that is subject to a number of conditioning factors. Syntactic selection serves to restore equivalence at sites of variable equivalence. Discovery of community CS strategies may spur reconsideration of processing cost as a matter of relative difficulty, which will depend on bilinguals' prosodic and syntactic choices at particular CS sites. (shrink)

La base de données orales de français de Suisse romande (OFROM) contient des transcriptions d’enregistrements auxquels ont participé des locuteurs nés et vivant en Suisse. Elle a été créée par des linguistes soucieux de documenter les usages oraux du français en Suisse romande, et de combler ainsi le retard dans la description des usages oraux de la langue parlée dans cette partie de la francophonie, notamment sur le plan du lexique, de la syntaxe et de la phonologie. La base de (...) données OFROM a été mise en ligne en décembre 2012 ; elle est encore jeune et d’ampleur modeste (65 heures de parole pour près de 410 000 mots transcrits, au moment où nous écrivons), mais il est prévu de l’enrichir et de la diversifier régulièrement au cours des années à venir. La première partie de cet article présente les principes fondamentaux qui ont guidé la constitution de la base (choix des locuteurs, des supports et conventions de transcription, annotations, etc.). La seconde partie contient les résultats obtenus à l’issue d’études en cours ou de sondages prospectifs, portant sur la variation lexicale et la variation syntaxique. Ils permettront d’illustrer quelques-unes des potentialités qu’offrent la base et son moteur de recherche. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

This paper explores the added value of studying intra- and inter-speaker variation in grammaticalisation based on idiolect corpora. It analyses the usage patterns of the English let alone construction in a self-compiled William Faulkner corpus against the backdrop of aggregated community data. Vast individual differences (early Faulkner vs. late Faulkner vs. peers) in frequencies of use are observed, and these frequency differences correlate with different degrees of grammaticalisation as measured in terms of host-class and syntactic context expansion. The (...) corpus findings inform general issues in current cognitive-functional research, such as the from-corpus-to-cognition issue and the cause/consequence issue of frequency. They lend support to the usage-based view of grammaticalisation as a lifelong, frequency-sensitive process of cognitive automation. To substantiate this view, this paper proposes a self-feeding cycle of constructional generalisation that is driven by the interplay of frequency, entrenchment, partial sanction and habituation. (shrink)

Persian possesses a number of stative complex predicates with _dâshtan_ ‘to have’ that express certain kinds of mental state. I propose that these _possessive experiencer complex predicates_ be given a formal semantic treatment involving possession of a portion of an abstract quality by an individual, as in the analysis of property concept lexemes due to Francez and Koontz-Garboden (Language 91(3):533–563, 2015 ; Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 34:93–106, 2016 ; Semantics and morphosyntactic variation: Qualities and the grammar of property (...) concepts, Oxford University Press, 2017 ). Augmented with an analysis of prepositional phrases introducing the target of the mental state and an approach to gradability in terms of measure functions (Wellwood in Measuring predicates, PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2014 ), the analysis explains various properties of possessive experiencer complex predicates, including the behavior of target phrases, the ability of the non-verbal element to be modified by a range of adjectives, the direct participation of the non-verbal element in comparative constructions, and the ability of degree expressions to modify both the non-verbal element and the VP containing the complex predicate. Theoretically, the analysis ties transitive mental state expressions to the grammar and semantics of property concept sentences, which are expressed via possessive morphosyntax cross-linguistically, and connects with syntactic proposals that independently argue for a universal underlyingly possessive morphosyntax for mental state predicates (Noonan in Case and syntactic geometry, PhD dissertation, McGill University, 1992 ; Hale and Keyser in Prolegomenon to a theory of argument structure, MIT Press, 2002 ). The work here also motivates modifications to Francez and Koontz-Garboden’s original proposal, and opens new questions in the original empirical domain of the analysis of possessive predicating strategies for the expression of property concept sentences. (shrink)

Points of variation manifested by adjectives crosslinguistically have received much recent attention in the literature. This paper argues that one way in which adjectives may differ is in their projection of a degree argument position in the syntax. Under standard analyses of adjectival meaning, semantic transitivity implies syntactic transitivity. However, the Navajo data presented in this paper suggests that while all Navajo adjectives have a degree argument in their semantics, syntactic projection of the degree argument is only (...) licensed by special morphology on the adjective. (shrink)

In Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture, the well-formed expressions of a language are licensed by correspondences between phonology, syntax, and conceptual structure. I show how this architecture can be used to make sense of the existence of parasitic gap constructions. A parasitic gap is one that is rendered acceptable because of the presence of another gap in the same sentence. Compare *a person who everyone who talks to likes Chris, which shows an illicit extraction from a relative clause, and a person everyone (...) who talks to likes, which shows a parasitic gap in the relative clause. Languages differ in terms of the range of configurations in which they allow parasitic gaps; these configurations appear to form a hierarchy.These observations raise some fundamental questions: Why do parasitic gaps exist at all?Why are different syntactic configurations possible for P-gaps and why just these configurations?Why is there a parasitic gap hierarchy?The answers that I propose make crucial use of constructional overgeneralization of across-the-board extraction in coordinate constructions, formulated straightforwardly in the framework of Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture. (shrink)

Studies of native syntactic processing often target phrase structure violations that do not occur in natural production. In contrast, this study examines how variation in basic word order is processed, looking specifically at structures traditionally labelled as violations but that do occur naturally. We examined Swedish verb-second and verb-third word order processing in adult native Swedish speakers, manipulating sentence-initial adverbials in acceptability judgements, in simultaneously recorded event-related potentials to visually presented sentences and in a written sentence completion task. (...) An initial corpus study showed that the adverbials differ in frequency in fronted position, and although all occur mainly with V2 word order, kanske occurs more frequently with V3 in natural production than both idag and hemma. The experimental results reflected these patterns such that V2 sentences were overall more frequently produced and were deemed more acceptable than V3 sentences. The ERP results consisted of a biphasic N400/P600 response to V3 word order that indicated effects of word retrieval and sentence reanalysis. We also found consistent effects of adverbials. As predicted, V3 was produced more frequently and judged as more acceptable in Kanske sentences than in sentences with the other two adverbials. The ERP analyses showed stronger effects for idag and hemma with V3, especially regarding the P600. The results suggest that the naturally occurring word order ‘violation’, V3 with kanske, is processed differently than V3 with other adverbials where the V2 norm is stronger. Moreover, these patterns are related to individuals’ own production patterns. Overall, the results suggest a more varied native word order processing than previously reported. (shrink)

This paper contains a discussion of how the concept of compositionality is to be extended from context invariant to context dependent meaning, and of how the compositionality of natural language might conflict with context dependence. Several new distinctions are needed, including a distinction between a weaker (e-) and a stronger (ec-) concept of compositionality for context dependent meaning. The relations between the various notions are investigated. A claim by Jerry Fodor that there is a general conflict between context dependence and (...) compositionality is considered. There is in fact a possible conflict betwee ec-compositionality and context dependence, but not of the kind Fodor suggests. It turns on the presence of so-called unarticulated constituents, in John Perry’s sense. Because of this phenomenon, on some semantic accounts there might be a variation in the meaning of a complex expression between contexts without any corresponding variation in any of the syntactic parts of that complex. The conflict can be resolved in several ways. One way is to make the unarticulated context dependence explicit only in the meta-language, which makes it into an unarticulated constituent account. A recent argument by Jason Stanley against such accounts is discussed. According to Stanley, certain readings of English sentences involving binding of contextual variables, are unavailable in these theories. After considering a reply to Stanley by François Recanati, I present an outline of a fully compositional theory, of the unarticulated constituent variety, which does deliver these readings. Concluding remarks on, inter alia, the semantics/pragmatics distinction. (shrink)

We prove an institutional version of A. Robinson ’s Consistency Theorem. This result is then appliedto the institution of many-sorted first-order predicate logic and to two of its variations, infinitary and partial, obtaining very general syntactic criteria sufficient for a signature square in order to satisfy the Robinson consistency and Craig interpolation properties.

Languages are complex systems that allow speakers to produce novel grammatical utterances. Yet, linguists differ as to how general and abstract they think the mental representation of speakers have to be to give rise to this grammatical creativity. In order to shed light on these questions, the present study looks at one specific construction type, English comparative correlatives, that turns out to be particularly interesting in this context: on the one hand it has been described in terms of one of (...) the most abstract and general syntactic rules, on the other hand it shows specific idiomatic structures that are often produced without any variation. While the syntax and semantics of the English Comparative Correlative construction have received considerable attention in the literature, so far only a small number of usage-based analyses have been published on the topic. These either only relied on small databases or focussed only on the productivity of one slot in the construction. In contrast to this, the present study analyses more than 1,400 CC tokens sampled from COCA. The results of the present study yield important results concerning English CC constructions, including the schematicity and generality of their mental representations. (shrink)

The necessary but not sufficient conditions for biological informational concepts like signs, symbols, memories, instructions, and messages are (1) an object or referent that the information is about, (2) a physical embodiment or vehicle that stands for what the information is about (the object), and (3) an interpreter or agent that separates the referent information from the vehicle’s material structure, and that establishes the stands-for relation. This separation is named the epistemic cut, and explaining clearly how the stands-for relation is (...) realized is named the symbol-matter problem. (4) A necessary physical condition is that all informational vehicles are material boundary conditions or constraints acting on the lawful dynamics of local systems. It is useful to define a dependency hierarchy of information types: (1) syntactic information (i.e., communication theory), (2) heritable information acquired by variation and natural selection, (3) non-heritable learned or creative information, and (4) measured physical information in the context of natural laws. High information storage capacity is most reliably implemented by discrete linear sequences of non-dynamic vehicles, while the execution of information for control and construction is a non-holonomic dynamic process. The first epistemic cut occurs in self-replication. The first interpretation of base sequence information is by protein folding; the last interpretation of base sequence information is by natural selection. Evolution has evolved senses and nervous systems that acquire non-heritable information, and only very recently after billions of years, the competence for human language. Genetic and human languages are the only known complete general purpose languages. They have fundamental properties in common, but are entirely different in their acquisition, storage and interpretation. (shrink)

This book is the most comprehensive, integrated explanatory account yet published of the properties of question formations and their variation across languages. It makes an important contribution to the current debate over whether syntax should be understood derivationally, arguing that the best model of language is one in which sentences are constructed in a series of operations that precede or follow each other in time. The central problem it addresses is the nature of the difference between languages in which (...) all wh-words move overtly to a clause-initial position ; languages in which one wh-phrase moves per clause but all others remain in situ ; and languages in which there is no overt movement at all. Professor Richards focuses on the nature of syntactic movement in order to see what this reveals about the syntactic derivation. He considers the nature of interactions between movement operations and investigates the behaviour of multiple overt wh-movement, scrambling, cliticization, and object shift. His general conclusions about the relationship between movement and multiple specifiers follow straightforwardly from basic principles of Shortest Move and Shortest Attract. He develops a PF-imposed well-formedness condition on movement chains, which allows for the development of theories of anti-agreement, the that-trace effect, and the conditions on participial agreement in Romance, among other phenomena. He defends the claim that well-formed dependencies can improve the status of ill-formed dependencies created later in the derivation, illustrating the explanatory power, under certain structural conditions, of his Principle of Minimal Compliance. He uses data on the locality of wh-movement to argue that the Principle of Minimal Compliance is responsible for a number of the apparent distinctions between overt and covert movement. This book will interest syntacticians at graduate level and above as well as linguistic theorists concerned with the syntax-semantics interface. (shrink)

This meta-study of animal semantics is anchored in two claims, seemingly creating a fuzzy mismatch, that animal utterances generally appear to be simple in structure and content variation and that animals’ communicative understanding seems disproportionally more advanced. A set of excerpted, new studies is chosen as basis to discuss whether the semantics of animal uttering and understanding can be fused into one. Studies are prioritised due to their relatively complex designs, giving priority to dynamics between syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and (...) between utterers and receivers in context. A communicational framework based on utterance theory is applied as a lens for inspection of how these aspects relate to the assumed mismatch. Inspection and discussions of the studies bring several features to surface of which five are stressed in the following. Firstly, both syntactic structures and possible semantic content are seen as lean, although richer than earlier believed, and research continues to reveal new complexities in utterances. Secondly, there is a clear willingness to broaden the perception of animals’ semantic capacity to comprehend communication both by arguing theoretically and by generating empirical research in new contexts. Thirdly, the ambition to make sense of these tendencies is still often motivated by an evolutionary search for early building blocks for verbal language, with the pro et cons that such a position can have. Fourthly, the ‘allowed’ scientific frame for studying semantic capacity among animals is extended to new fields and contexts challenging the only-in-the-wild norm. Fifthly, the dilemma of integrating uttering and understanding as aspects of an after all functional communicational system, calls for new epistemological concepts to make sense of the claimed mismatch. Affordances, abduction, life-genre, and lifeworld are suggested. (shrink)

This paper argues for the hypothesis of direct compositionality (as in, e.g., Montague 1974), according to which the combinatory syntactic rules specify a set of well-formed expressions while the semantic combinatory rules work in tandem to directly supply a model-theoretic interpretation to each expression as it is "built" in the syntax. (This thus obviates the need for any level like LF and, concomitantly, for any rules mapping surface structures to such a level.) I focus here on one related group (...) of phenomena: the interaction of "paycheck" pronouns with Weak Crossover effects and i-within-i effects. These interactions were studied in Jacobson (1977) as they show up in Back-Peters sentences. There I argued that these interactions show that paycheck pronouns have a complex representation at LF; here I show that all of the observations in this earlier work are compatible with the hypothesis of direct compositionality. The key tool is the adoption of a variation-free semantics (a semantics which makes no use of variables as part of the semantic machinery). In addition to the general consequences for the syntax/semantics interface, there are two other main results. First, I provide new arguments for a variable-free semantics. For example, it will be shown that under this view the paycheck reading of a pronoun comes for free; most other theories posit additional mechanisms and/or an additional lexical meaning for pronouns, and thus paycheck and regular pronouns are only accidentally homophonous. Second, I reiterate one of the central points in Jacobson (1977): this is that the first pronoun in a Bach-Peters sentence is indeed a paycheck pronoun, and hence nothing special needs to be said about these sentences nor does any new machinery need to be invoked for them. (shrink)

Lexicalized theories of syntax often assume that verb-structure regularities are mediated by lemmas, which abstract over variation in verb tense and aspect. German syntax seems to challenge this assumption, because verb position depends on tense and aspect. To examine how German speakers link these elements, a structural priming study was performed which varied syntactic structure, verb position, and verb overlap.structural priming was found, both within and across verb position, but priming was larger when the verb position was the (...) same between prime and target. Priming was boosted by verb overlap, but there was no interaction with verb position. The results can be explained by a lemma model where tense and aspect are linked to structural choices in German. Since the architecture of this lemma model is not consistent with results from English, a connectionist model was developed which could explain the cross-linguistic variation in the production system. Together, these findings support the view that language learning plays an important role in determining the nature of structural priming in different languages. (shrink)

While it would be difficult to dispute that individuals vary in their facility with both their native language and with foreign languages, a central tenet of modern linguistics has been that such variation is secondary, and there is a primary level of equality across all individuals. Syntactic theory and sociolinguistic theory have both contributed to the maintenance of this view, and it provides a socially acceptable approach to studying language form and function. However, genes are the authors of (...) both similarity and difference, making their role in language complicated to unpick. The proposed syntactic basis for equality has been a genetically-determined 'language faculty', which presumably arose early in the modern species and has reliably persisted in all individuals until today. How much fundamental uniformity of language knowledge is there, though? Does it matter if a key feature is not observed in unwritten languages, if there are languages that permit structures that should be prohibited, or if some individuals are less adept at managing purportedly universally understood configurations than others? How might culturally augmented features in language structure be inappropriately influencing claims about what all languages are like? These questions are directly relevant to those engaging with genetics because of the growing opportunities to explore the relative roles of environment and genes in determining aspects of our language knowledge and performance. More generally for society, they present an uncomfortable challenge for how we should handle evidence of genetically-based differences in fundamental language ability, should we find it. (shrink)

Structuring Sense explores the difference between words however defined and structures however constructed. It sets out to demonstrate over three volumes, of which this is the first, that the explanation of linguistic competence should be shifted from lexical entry to syntactic structure, from memory of words to manipulation of rules. Its reformulation of how grammar and lexicon interact has profound implications for linguistic, philosophical, and psychological theories about human mind and language. Hagit Borer departs from both language specific constructional (...) approaches and lexicalist approaches to argue that universal hierarchical structures determine interpretation, and that language variation emerges from the morphological and phonological properties of inflectional material. In Name Only applies this radical approach to nominal structure. Integrating research in syntax, semantics, and morphology, the author argues that nominal structure is based on the syntactic realization of semantic notions such as classifier, quantity, and reference. In the process she seeks to do away with lexical ambiguity and type-shifting. Among the topics she considers are the interpretation of proper names, the mass-count distinction, the weak-strong interpretation of quantifiers, partitive and measure phrases, and the structural representation of the definite article. In the process she explores inter-language variation through the properties of the morpho-phonological system. The languages discussed include English, Chinese, Italian, and Hebrew. (shrink)

Distributional semantic models (DSMs) are a primary method for distilling semantic information from corpora. However, a key question remains: What types of semantic relations among words do DSMs detect? Prior work typically has addressed this question using limited human data that are restricted to semantic similarity and/or general semantic relatedness. We tested eight DSMs that are popular in current cognitive and psycholinguistic research (positive pointwise mutual information; global vectors; and three variations each of Skip-gram and continuous bag of words (CBOW) (...) using word, context, and mean embeddings) on a theoretically motivated, rich set of semantic relations involving words from multiple syntactic classes and spanning the abstract–concrete continuum (19 sets of ratings). We found that, overall, the DSMs are best at capturing overall semantic similarity and also can capture verb–noun thematic role relations and noun–noun event-based relations that play important roles in sentence comprehension. Interestingly, Skip-gram and CBOW performed the best in terms of capturing similarity, whereas GloVe dominated the thematic role and event-based relations. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our results, make recommendations for users of these models, and demonstrate significant differences in model performance on event-based relations. (shrink)

Results from a crowdsourced audio questionnaire show that inflected infinitives in Galician are still acceptable in a broad range of contexts, different from those described for European Portuguese. Crucially, inflected infinitives with referential subjects are widely accepted only inside strong islands in Galician (complements of nouns, adjunct clauses). They are widely rejected in non-islands, notably in the complements of epistemic/factive verbs, in contrast with Portuguese and older varieties of Galician (Gondar 1978, Raposo 1987). Statistical analysis shows, however, that, in the (...) complements of epistemic/factive (and desiderative) verbs, inflected infinitives are significantly more acceptable in instances of control, whether partial or exhaustive. In fact, there is no significant difference between these two types of control in Galician, unlike in Portuguese, where inflection is generally better in instances of partial control and is not acceptable in instances of exhaustive local subject control (Modesto 2010, Sheehan 2018). We propose an analysis of this pattern in terms of phase theory. The inflectional domain of non-finite clauses remains visible to the thematic domain of the next clause up, according to the less strict version of the Phase Impenetrability Condition (Chomsky 2001), allowing control to take place. Pronouns/or pronominal inflections in the inflectional domain of visible non-finite clauses therefore get controlled. In islands, however, material in the inflectional domain remains free/referential. Despite this basic pattern, the data are characterized by substantial interspeaker variation. Statistical analysis shows that gender, urban/rural birthplace and mother tongue are all significant factors in this variation, while age and region of birth are not. Most notably, urban-born male bilinguals with Spanish as their mother tongue consistently rate the sentences higher on the Likert scale. Overall, the results show that crowdsourcing can lead to empirically robust syntactic descriptions of minority languages which are likely to be subject to substantial sociolinguistic variation and where judgements from a single social group may be misrepresentative of the general picture. The study also highlights, however, the challenges associated with using crowd-sourced audio-questionnaires of this kind in languages of this kind and the need for statistical analysis of results to control for substantial amounts of variation. (shrink)

This paper takes a cross-linguistic look at two notorious examples of contemporary slang: American English dude and German Alter. Both have received considerable attention in the media and some initial sociolinguistic inquiry. It is shown here that both items share a number of properties, some quite obvious, others subtler and possibly less stable. This includes features from all levels of linguistic analysis and covers both formal and functional aspects. The seminal similarity between dude and Alter is of a syntactic (...) nature: while both NPs can occur within argument structure, their default is in vocative position. Based on this structural parallelism, other domains are analyzed, including semantics and bleaching effects, phonological and orthographic variation. Particular attention is given to the sociocultural and sociopragmatic potential of dude and Alter, including their role as indexicals for certain youth groups and their subsequent stereotypization. This paper tracks both the similarities and the subtle differences in the usage and function of dude and Alter. It is argued that this lexical parallelism, albeit coincidental, highlights the role of vocative forms in the discursive makeup of both English and German. (shrink)

Using the LDSNL model of utterance interpretation being developed by Gabbay and Kempson , this paper demonstrates how the dynamics of the proof process adopted explains configurational restrictions imposed on the interpretation of elliptical fragments. The blurring of traditional semantic and syntactic dichotomies in the LDSNL proof-theoretic reconstruction of interpretation successfully provides a basis for predicting the array of variation displayed by different elliptical forms. The logic adopted is a composite system of a type logic nested within a (...) database logic. Two resource-sensitive sub-types of Conditional Introduction form the basis for explaining the ellipsis data. The result is a demonstration of how the simple device of adding labels to an inference system can provide a useful tool not only at the meta-logic level of comparing alternative logic and grammar formalisms, but also at the level of explaining natural language data. (shrink)

This paper establishes model-theoretic properties of \, a variation of monadic first-order logic that features the generalised quantifier \. We will also prove analogous versions of these results in the simpler setting of monadic first-order logic with and without equality and \, respectively). For each logic \ we will show the following. We provide syntactically defined fragments of \ characterising four different semantic properties of \-sentences: being monotone and continuous in a given set of monadic predicates; having truth preserved (...) under taking submodels or being truth invariant under taking quotients. In each case, we produce an effectively defined map that translates an arbitrary sentence \ to a sentence \ belonging to the corresponding syntactic fragment, with the property that \ is equivalent to \ precisely when it has the associated semantic property. As a corollary of our developments, we obtain that the four semantic properties above are decidable for \-sentences. (shrink)

We generalise the Blok–Jónsson account of structural consequence relations, later developed by Galatos, Tsinakis and other authors, in such a way as to naturally accommodate multiset consequence. While Blok and Jónsson admit, in place of sheer formulas, a wider range of syntactic units to be manipulated in deductions (including sequents or equations), these objects are invariablyaggregatedvia set-theoretical union. Our approach is more general in that nonidempotent forms of premiss and conclusion aggregation, including multiset sum and fuzzy set union, are (...) considered. In their abstract form, thus,deductive relationsare defined as additional compatible preorderings over certain partially ordered monoids. We investigate these relations using categorical methods and provide analogues of the main results obtained in the general theory of consequence relations. Then we focus on the driving example of multiset deductive relations, providing variations of the methods of matrix semantics and Hilbert systems in Abstract Algebraic Logic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 416-417 [Access article in PDF] Jean-Baptiste Rauzy. La Doctrine leibnizienne de la vérité. Aspects logiques et ontologiques. Paris: Vrin, 2001. Pp. vii + 353. Paper, FF 170,55.This important book provides a reappraisal of Leibniz's philosophy of logic and epistemology based on a close scrutiny of the recently edited manuscripts in the Akademie-Ausgabe, and a reconstitution of Leibniz's sequential investigations. The author (...) displays an exceptional knowledge of the Leibnizian corpus, the ancient and medieval sources for the various doctrines he analyzes, and the contemporary issues underpinning Leibniz's investigations. He aims at rectifying misconceptions that stemmed originally in Couturat's La Logique de Leibniz (1901) and have since affected several studies. Three methodological statements set the ground for Rauzy's analysis: (1) Leibniz's notion of truth concerns in unified fashion all the elements of discourse: terms, concepts, and propositions. (2) Leibniz did not restrict his doctrine of truth to consistency relations, but yielded a complex, well-articulated conception of truth as correspondence, as evidenced in New Essays on Human Understanding, IV, v, sect. 11; yet, at the same time, his doctrine focused on conceptual relations which specify an order of reasons deserving to be analyzed for their own sake: "Dans la doctrine leibnizienne de la vérité, l'adaequatio rei constitue encore le cadre général en dehors duquel le prédicat de vérité n'a pas de sens. Mais les concepts et les liaisons conceptuelles donnent désormais la raison pour laquelle telle phrase particulière est vraie..." (47). And (3) one should resist attributing to Leibniz a purely syntactic conception of truth since the semantic dimension of his logical analyses deserves to be reconstituted and due consideration should be given to the evolution of his thoughts on central philosophical issues, which occasioned significant variations in the elements and formulas of his calculus rationis.It is merely possible to render the rich contents of the book by mentioning some of its more striking features. In Chapter 1, the inesse principle (Praedicatum inestsubjecto) is shown to serve grammatical, logical, and conceptual functions. The doctrine of expression is finely analyzed: expression is shown to provide the major translation tool between characters and thoughts and to condition the combinatorial treatment of rational discourse. In Chapter 2, the distinction between concept and object is shown to involve some relativity, even if the understanding of complete notions is supposed to entail real knowledge of the corresponding realities. Leibniz is thus justified to represent the manifold of ontological relations, including the requisites of actual existence, in a tentatively unified logical way: "Que [End Page 416] l'existence soit une propriété relationnelle complexe, conçue tantôt par la relation de compatibilité, tantôt par une relation à l'esprit en général—et éventuellement [...] par un mixte des deux—n'interdit nullement de maintenir que la vérité de toutes les propositions dépend de relations conceptuelles" (124-5). In Chapter 3, the project of a calculus based on concepts is shown to entail a special relation, hardly dealt with in the literature, between intension and extension (cf. for instance New Essays, IV, xvii, sect. 8). Rauzy reassesses in particular Leibniz's critical revision of nominalism and of inductive procedures as these require universal propositions to ground rational presumptions. The extensional notion of class is considered an abstraction: a class presupposes therefore the extension of a concept in order to become an object of thought. The principle of conceptual inherence requires to be interpreted as stating the equipollence between the requisites of subject and predicate; if such an equipollence may be reached a priori in exceptional cases, most of the time it will require various kinds of additions and derivations to yield sufficient congruence between the related terms. Chapter 4 is devoted to substitutions, more precisely to the theory of definition and the context, at once logical and discursive, from which a potential Leibnizian theory of communication might be derived. Rauzy notes that substitutive equivalences... (shrink)

Semantical arguments, based on the completeness theorem for first-order logic, give elegant proofs of purely syntactical results. For instance, for proving a conservativity theorem between two theories, one shows instead that any model of one theory can be extended to a model of the other theory. This method of proof, because of its use of the completeness theorem, is a priori not valid constructively. We show here how to give similar arguments, valid constructively, by using Boolean models. These models are (...) a slight variation of ordinary first-order models, where truth values are now regular ideals of a given Boolean algebra. Two examples are presented: a simple conservativity result and Herbrand's theorem. (shrink)