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The adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN; Gagarina, et al., 2019) to Catalan contributes to advancing our knowledge of the development of children’s narrative skills in a diversity of languages using the same protocol, making it possible to evaluate narratives also in Catalan-speakers. The adaptation of MAIN will be very useful in Catalonia, because it is a region where two official languages (Catalan and Spanish) coexist, Catalan being the language of schooling, so that most of the population is bilingual. However, currently there is no instrument for assessing narrative skills that allows for parallel assessment of Catalan in bilingual children. For these reasons, this adaptation will be of great value to promote the study of narratives in the bilingual population considering Catalan within the possible language combinations. The present paper describes the process of adapting MAIN to Catalan and reports results from the first pilot study using the Catalan MAIN.
This paper gives an introduction to the Cantonese adaptation of Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), which is part of the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery. We here discuss the motivation for adapting this assessment instrument into Cantonese, the adaptation process itself and potential contexts for use of the Cantonese MAIN.
Bulgarian belongs to the South Slavic language group but exhibits specific linguistic features shared with the non-Slavic languages of the Balkan Sprachbund. In this paper, we discuss linguistic and cultural aspects relevant for the Bulgarian adaptation of the revised English version of The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). We address typological properties of the verbal system pertaining to a differentiated aspectual system and to a paradigm of verbal forms for narratives grammaticalized as renarrative mood in Bulgarian. Further, we consider lexical, derivational and discourse cohesive means in contrast to the English markers of involvement and perspective taking in the MAIN stories.
Adapting MAIN to Arabic
(2020)
Preface: New language versions of MAIN: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives - revised
(2020)
This paper is about what Ninan (2014) (following Wollheim 1980) calls the Acquaintance Inference (AI): a firsthand experience requirement imposed by several subjective expressions such as Predicates of Personal Taste (PPTs) (delicious). In general, one is entitled to calling something delicious only upon having tried it. This requirement can be lifted, disappearing in scope of elements that we will call obviators. The paper investigates the patterns of AI obviation for PPTs and similar constructions (e.g., psych predicates and subjective attitudes). We show that the cross-constructional variation in when acquaintance requirements can be obviated presents challenges for previous accounts of the AI (Pearson 2013, Ninan 2014). In place of these, we argue for the existence of two kinds of acquaintance content: (i) that of bare PPTs; and (ii) that of psych predicates, subjective attitudes and overt experiencer PPTs.
For (i), we propose that the AI arises from an evidential restriction that is dependent on a parameter of interpretation which obviators update. For (ii), we argue that the AI is a classic presupposition. We model both (i) and (ii) using von Fintel and Gillies’s (2010) framework for directness and thus connect two strands of research: that on PPTs and that on epistemic modals. Both phenomena are sensitive to a broad direct-indirect distinction, and analyzing them along similar lines can help shed light on how natural language conceptualizes evidence in general.
Imposters are grammatically third-person expressions used to refer to the firstperson speaker or second-person addressee (e.g. ‘the present authors’ when used to refer to the first-person writer, ‘Mommy’ or ‘Daddy’ when used by parents for self-reference in child-directed speech). Current analyses of imposters differ in whether they derive the unusual referential properties of imposters using syntactic means or attribute them to semantic and pragmatics. We aim to shed light on these competing approaches by means of a psycholinguistic experiment focusing on first-person imposters that investigates the kinds of pronouns (first-person vs. third-person) used to refer to imposter antecedents. Our results show that manipulating the prominence of the first-person speaker does not significantly boost the acceptability of first-person pronouns in imposter-referring contexts. However, our results suggest that a purely syntactic approach may not be sufficient either, as psycholinguistic processing factors also appear to be relevant.
The Epistemic Containment Principle (ECP) requires that epistemic modals take wider scope than strong quantifiers such as every or most (von Fintel and Iatridou, 2003). Although fairly robust in its realization, a few systemic classes of counterexamples to the ECP have been noted. Based on these, previous work has argued for two claims: subjective modals obey the ECP, whereas objective ones don’t (Tancredi, 2007; Anand and Hacquard, 2008); and every respects the ECP, whereas each violates it (Tancredi, 2007). This paper argues that explicit Questions Under Discussion (QUDs; Roberts, 1996; Ginzburg, 1996) also systematically influence the ECP: scopal orderings that provide relevant answers to the given QUDs are preferred, and this tendency can override the ECP. To support this claim, the paper presents an experimental study. The results corroborate the existence of systematic QUD effects on the ECP, and support the view that the ECP is derived from a confluence of various pragmatic and lexical biases.
The goal of this paper is to evaluate two approaches to quantification in event semantics, namely the analysis of quantificational DPs in terms of generalized quantifiers and the analysis proposed in Schein (1993) according to which quantifiers over individuals contain an existential quantifier over sub-events in their scope. Both analyses capture the fact that the event quantifier always takes scope under quantifiers over individuals (the Event Type Principle in Landman (2000)), but the sub-events analysis has also been argued to be able to account for some further data, namely for adverbs qualifying ‘ensemble’ events and for mixed cumulative/ distributive readings. This paper shows that the sub-events analysis also provides a better account of the Event Type Principle if a broader range of data is considered, including cases with non-existential quantifiers over events: unlike the generalized quantifiers analysis, it can successfully account for the interpretation of indefinites in bare habituals and sentences that contain overt adverbs of quantification.
Korean is a generalized classifier language where classifiers are required for numerals to combine with nominals. This paper presents a number construction where the classifier is absent and the numeral appears prenominally. This construction, which I call the classifier-less number construction (Cl-less NC), results in a definite or a partitive reading where the referent must be familiar: ‘the two women’ or ‘two of the women’. In order to account for this, I argue that Korean postnominal number constructions are ambiguous between a plain number construction and a partitive construction. After motivating and proposing an analysis for the partitive structure, I argue that Cl-less NC is derived from the partitive construction, explaining its distributional restriction and the interpretation.
Counter to the often assumed division of labour between content and function words, we argue that both types of words have lexical content in addition to their logical content. We propose that the difference between the two types of words is a difference in degree. We conducted a preliminary study of quantificational determiners with methods from Distributional Semantics, a computational approach to natural language semantics. Our findings have implications both for distributional and formal semantics. For distributional semantics, they indicate a possible avenue that can be used to tap into the meaning of function words. For formal semantics, they bring into light the context-sensitive, lexical aspects of function words that can be recovered from the data even when these aspects are not overtly marked. Such pervasive context-sensitivity has profound implications for how we think about meaning in natural language.
Wer waren die Literaturwissenschaftler, die bei der Gründung 1914 an die Universität Frankfurt am Main berufen wurden, die das akademische Leben der Stadt Frankfurt in der Weimarer Republik mitprägten, die nach 1933 in Frankfurt weiterhin Literaturwissenschaft betrieben oder die vertrieben wurden? Ein zweisemestriges interdisziplinäres Lehrforschungsseminar am Fachbereich 10 (Neuere Philologien) hat anlässlich des Jubiläums zum 100-jährigen Bestehen der Universität im Jahr 2014 Antworten auf diese Fragen gesucht. Das Ergebnis ist eine virtuelle Ausstellung mit 20 Porträts (Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main, 2017). Diese Ausstellung war jedoch nur ein Teil einer Reihe von Veranstaltungen, die sich im Jubiläumsjahr der Frankfurter Universität mit den Literaturwissenschaften in Frankfurt befassten.