Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (50)
- Part of a Book (43)
- Review (8)
- Conference Proceeding (7)
- Book (5)
- Preprint (4)
- Doctoral Thesis (2)
- Working Paper (1)
Language
- English (120) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (120)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (120) (remove)
Keywords
- Englisch (120) (remove)
Institute
We propose a compositional analysis for sentences of the kind "You only have to go to the North End to get good cheese", referred to as the Sufficiency Modal Construction in the recent literature. We argue that the SMC is ambiguous depending on the kind of ordering induced by only. So is the exceptive construction – its cross-linguistic counterpart. Only is treated as inducing either a 'comparative possibility' scale or an 'implication-based' partial order on propositions. The properties of the 'comparative possibility' scale explain the absence of the prejacent presupposition that is usually associated with only. By integrating the scalarity into the semantics of the SMC, we explain the polarity facts observed in both variants of the construction. The sufficiency meaning component is argued to be due to a pragmatic inference.
Why variables?
(1999)
This paper addresses the question of how sentence-internal semantic dependencies are computed? The kind of semantic dependency I am looking at is that between a so called "bound (variable) pronoun" and its binder illustrated in (1), where the dependency is indicated by a connecting line. With all the literature on the topic (see for example Partee 1973, Percus 1998), I assume that this case is the prototype of all semantic dependencies, and therefore any result for this case generalizes to all types of sentence-internal semantic dependencies.
While both Japanese and English have a grammatic al form denoting the progressive, the two forms (te-iru & be+ing) interact differently with the inherent semantics of the verb to which they attach (Kindaichi, 1950; McClure, 1995; Shirai, 2000). Japanese change of state verbs are incompatible with a progressive interpretation, allowing only a resultative interpretation of V+ te-iru, while a progressive interpretation is preferred for activity predicates. English be+ing denotes a progressive interpretation regardless of the lexical semantics of the verb. The question that arises is how we can account for the fact that change of state verbs like dying can denote a progressive interpretation in English, but not in Japanese. While researchers such as Kageyama (1996) and Ogihara (1998, 1999) propose that the difference lies in the lexical semantics of the verbs themselves, others such as McClure (1995) have argued that the difference lies in the semantics of the grammatical forms, be+ing and te-iru. We present results from an experimental study of Japanese learners’ interpretation of the English progressive which provide support for McClure’s proposal. Results indicate that independent of verb type, learners had significantly more difficulty with the past progressive. We argue that knowledge of L2 semantics-syntax correspondences proceeds not on the basis of L1 lexical semantic knowledge, but on the basis of grammatical forms.
The expressions few and a few are typically considered to be separate quantifiers. I challenge this assumption, showing that with the appropriate definition of few, a few can be derived compositionally as a + few. The core of the analysis is a proposal that few has a denotation as a one-place predicate which incorporates a negation operator. From this, argument interpretations can be derived for expressions such as few students and a few students, differing only in the scope of negation. I show that this approach adequately captures the interpretive differences between few and a few. I further show that other such pairs are blocked by a constraint against the vacuous application of a.
This paper revisits the question of whether propositions in situation semantics must be persistent (Kratzer (1989)). It shows that ignoring persistence causes empirical problems to theories which use quantification over minimal situations as a solution for donkey anaphora (Elbourne (2005)), while at the same time modifying these theories to incorporate persistence makes them incompatible with the use of situations for contextual restriction (Kratzer (2004)).
The current study investigates the relation between aspect and particle verbs in the acquisition of English. Its purpose is to determine whether children associate telicity, as argued in previous studies, or rather perfectivity, which entails completion of a telic situation, with their early particle verb use. The study analyzes naturalistic data of four monolingual children between 1;6 and 3;8 from CHILDES acquiring English as their first language. On the one hand, it finds that children use both –ed and irregular perfective morphology with simplex verbs before particle verbs. They further use imperfective before perfective morphology with particle verbs. These findings suggest that there is no correlation between telic particle verbs and perfective morphology, as would have been predicted on an account which claims that lexical aspect of predicates guides the acquisition of grammatical aspect (Olsen & Weinberg 1999). On the other hand, the study finds that the children’s particle verbs denote telic situations from early on, but not half of them were used to refer to situations that are also completed. This finding questions analyses which claim that, at an initial stage, children will only interpret predicates as telic if they refer to situations that are at the same time completed. Completion information is not necessary for children in order to use particle verbs correctly for telic situations, as would have been predicted on an extended account along the lines of Wagner (2001). As a conclusion, it is suggested that the divergent findings result from a difference in methodology. While restrictions of perfective and imperfective morphology to particular classes of lexical aspect pertain to the production of grammatical aspect morphology, perfective and imperfective viewpoints on situations pertain to the level of interpretation of telic and atelic situations.
War and death in business : some remarks on the nature of conceptualisation in the field economy
(2005)
Vestiges
(2013)
The poems in this collection are adequate, with great lines. The rhythm is stimulating to all the five senses thanks to the use of multiple images. A lot of imagery in Vestiges gives a picture of a war front after a ferocious battle. The objects, animals, and images in the poems disorient and lead the reader to focusing on putting flesh to the bones than just getting the juice of the poems... The rhythm more than anything else carries the reader through this chaotic tableau painted in Vestiges. In a way, this comes across as a substantiation of the poet's vision of our world and an explanation as to why he considers this collection as a skeleton; and precisely skeletons left by the ravages of war. Is the poet's world and ours a field of ruins and topsy-turvydom to which we are all blind? The answer is yours.
This article outlines a production-oriented imagology and equips the imagological toolkit with concepts and terminology from cultural memory studies, reception aesthetics, narratology, rhetoric, and text linguistics. It thereby presents the theoretical framework which makes it possible to analyse generic elements without a national connotation with regard to their function in generating a national image. Using as examples genres from English Romanticism and how they evoke Englishness, the article highlights the aesthetic complexity of national images and their range of variation. Simultaneously it paves the way for a more nuanced deconstruction of these images.
Starting from a consideration of the internal make-up of adverbial clauses this paper shows that the widespread assumption that fronted arguments in English and CLLD constituents in Romance occupy the same position leads to a number of problems. I will conclude that the position occupied by English topicalized arguments differs from that of the CLLD topics in Romance. In particular, English topics occupy a higher position in the left periphery. The final part of the paper compares three proposals for the lower topic position in Romance.
This thesis examines the spread and promotion of English on a global level, from a historical perspective in particular ‘Third World’ contexts. The globalization of English as an exclusive language of power is considered to be a trap, when accompanied by an ideology aiming to universalize monolingual and monocultural norms and standards. World-wide English diffusion is related - not to any mystical effects of some psycho-social mechanisms or transmuting alchemy - but to a global rise of military, political, economic, communicational and cultural Euro-American hegemony. The fact that the English language has become perhaps the primary medium of social control and power has not been given a prominent place in the analyses of established social scientists or political planners. On the contrary, the positively idealized dominance of English as a universal medium has become part of a collection of myths seeking to deny the global reality of multilingualism. Not allowing for the existence of any power besides itself, the perpetuation of this hegemony of English within a multilingual scenario has become a contradiction in terms. Centuries of colonialism, followed by neo-colonialism, are seen to have resulted in a world-wide consensus favouring centralization and homogenization of state and world economies, administrations, language, education and mass media systems, as prerequisites to local and global unity. The particular case of India as encountered by a colonizing Britain is used to illustrate the historical clash between differing language and educational traditions and cultures. It was on the strength of their own predominantly positive attitudes towards diversity - encoded in their promotion of complex social and religious philosophies, as well as varied economic and educational practices of pluralism and hierarchy-without-imposition, unity in diversity, etc. - that the people and their leaders finally achieved Indian independence from British colonialism. Contemporary Indian society, however, is still grappling with the legacy of a Eurocentric civilizational model - encoded in the neo-colonial system of English education - and in conflict with its own positively idealized and actively promoted traditions of pluralism. On national and international levels, the destabilization and destruction of diversity continues to threaten more than the linguistic and cultural uniqueness of numerous communities and individuals. For those majorities and minorities who refuse to give up their ‘differences’, political, economic and physical survival is at stake. A paradoxical reality, seldom acknowledged, is that while for the politically and economically already powerful language groups, the enormous resources spent on formal (language) education have become a means to maintain their material and political capital, whereas for the majority of modern societies' marginalized members, powerful linguistic barriers to full economic or political participation remain firmly in place. The justifications for perpetuating exclusionary policies and sustaining structural inequality have come from monocultural ideological assumptions in education and language policies as one of the key mechanisms for state control of labour. This thesis concludes that the trap of an ideologically exclusive status for English can be avoided by theoretically positivizing and institutionally promoting existing multilingual and multicultural peoples’ realities as an integral part of their human rights, in order to resist global Englishization.
The syntactic structure of predicatives : clues from the omission of the copula in child english
(2001)
This paper explores the syntax of main clause predicatives from the perspective of trying to account for an asymmetry in copular constructions in certain languages. One of the languages in which we find such an asymmetry is child English (around age 2). Specifically, new results show that children acquiring English tend to use an overt (and inflected) copula in individual-level predicatives, but they tend to omit the copula in stage-level predicatives. The analysis adopted to account for this pattern draws on evidence from adult English, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese that stage-level predicates are Aspectual (they contain AspP) while individual-level predicates are not (they involve only a lexical Small Clause predicate). Children's omission of the copula in structures with AspP is linked to the fact that at this stage of development, children fail to require finiteness in main clauses. In particular, Asp0 is temporally anchored in child English, thereby obviating the need for a finite (temporally anchored) Infl, i.e. an inflected copula.
The reason is not small
(2010)
"Don’t forget the sugar!" my husband called after our son who was already running down the road, hopping across puddles and skirting garbage mounds. He leaned back in his chair and sighed. The plastic covered wires were stretching to the point that they would break soon. We would get it restrung again. (...)
The causative/anticausative alternation has been the topic of much typological and theoretical discussion in the linguistic literature. This alternation is characterized by verbs with transitive and intransitive uses, such that the transitive use of a verb V means roughly "cause to Vintransitive" (see Levin 1993). The discussion revolves around two issues: the first one concerns the similarities and differences between the anticausative and the passive, and the second one concerns the derivational relationship, if any, between the transitive and intransitive variant. With respect to the second issue, a number of approaches have been developed. Judging the approach conceptually unsatisfactory, according to which each variant is assigned an independent lexical entry, it was concluded that the two variants have to be derivationally related. The question then is which one of the two is basic and where this derivation takes place in the grammar. Our contribution to this discussion is to argue against derivational approaches to the causative / anticausative alternation. We focus on the distribution of PPs related to external arguments (agent, causer, instrument, causing event) in passives and anticausatives of English, German and Greek and the set of verbs undergoing the causative/anticausative alternation in these languages. We argue that the crosslinguistic differences in these two domains provide evidence against both causativization and detransitivization analyses of the causative / anticausative alternation. We offer an approach to this alternation which builds on a syntactic decomposition of change of state verbs into a Voice and a CAUS component. Crosslinguistic variation in passives and anticausatives depends on properties of Voice and its combinations with CAUS and various types of roots.
Kripke's "modal argument" uses consideration about scope within modal contexts to show that proper names and definite descriptions must be of two different semantic types. I reexamine the data that is used to motivate Kripke's argument, and suggest that it, in fact, indicates that proper names behave exactly like a certain type of definite description, which I call "particularized" descriptions.
This article presents new experimental data on the phonetics of syllabic /l/ and syllabic /n/ in Southern British English and then proposes a new phonological account of their behaviour. Previous analyses (Chomsky and Halle 1968:354, Gimson 1989, Gussmann 1991 and Wells 1995) have proposed that syllabic /l/ and syllabic /n/ should be analysed in a uniform manner. Data presented here, however, shows that syllabic /l/ and syllabic /n/ behave in very different ways, and in light of this, a unitary analysis is not justified. Instead, a proposal is made that syllabic /l/ and syllabic /n/ have different phonological structures, and that these different phonological structures explain their different phonetic behaviours.
This article is organised as follows: First a general background is given to the phenomenon of syllabic consonants both cross linguistically and specifically in Southern British English. In §3 a set of experiments designed to elicit syllabic consonants are described and in §4 the results of these experiments are presented. §5 contains a discussion on data published by earlier authors concerning syllabic consonants in English. In §6 a theoretical phonological framework is set out, and in §7 the results of the experiments are analysed in the light of this framework. In the concluding section, some outstanding issues are addressed and several areas for further research are suggested.
The interpretation of traces
(2004)
This paper argues that parts of the lexical content of an A-bar moved phrase must be interpreted in the base position of movement. The argument is based on a study of deletion of a phrase that contains the base position of movement. I show that deletion licensing is sensitive to the content of the moved phrase. In this way, I corroborate and extend conclusions based on Condition C reconstruction by N. Chomsky and D. Fox. My result provides semantic evidence for the existence of traces and gives semantic content to the A/A-bar distinction.
Previous work examining the role of antecedent accessibility in pronominal coreference has often linked coreference to prominent structural positions that in turn are linked to information structure statuses such as topic. Three experiments examine the influence of topichood independently of structural prominence by exploring the influence of the pragmatic notion of aboutness on the written production of pronominal coreferring expressions. The results show that being mentioned in an about-phrase increases the likelihood that a referent will be selected as the future topic of a following sentence as well as increasing the proportion of responses with early, pronominal coreference to that referent, at the expense of coreference with the subject. These results suggest that coreference is sensitive to the status of other, structurally non-prominent referents in discourse, and that the pragmatic notion of aboutness influences pronominal coreference.
The aim of this article is to follow the changes that took place in the history of easy-to-please constructions. To fully apprehend that, we will begin by looking at Middle English infinitives and the change which affected them. Our attempt here is to prove that Early Middle English to was at its intermediate stage of development, i.e. it was neither a preposition nor inflection. In Late Middle English, to reached its final stage of a gradual evolution heading TR On account of the analysis of to and infinitives in Middle English, new constructions in which easv-to-please appear will be explained.
The distribution of trimoraic syllables in German and English as evidence for the phonological word
(2000)
In the present article I discuss the distribution of trimoraic syllables in German and English. The reason I have chosen to analyze these two languages together is that the data in both languages are strikingly similar. However, although the basic generalization in (1) holds for both German and English, we will see below that trimoraic syllabIes do not have an identical distribution in both languages.
In the present study I make the following theoretical claims. First, I argue that the three environments in (1) have a property in common: they all describe the right edge of a phonological word (or prosodic word; henceforth pword). From a formal point of view, I argue that a constraint I dub the THIRD MORA RESTRICTION (henceforth TMR), which ensures that trimoraic syllables surface at the end of a pword, is active in German and English. According to my proposal trimoraic syllables cannot occur morpheme-internally because monomorphemic grammatical words like garden are parsed as single pwords. Second, I argue that the TMR refers crucially to moraic structure. In particular, underlined strings like the ones in (1) will be shown to be trimoraic; neither skeletal positions nor the subsyllabic constituent rhyme are necessary. Third, the TMR will be shown to be violated in certain (predictable) pword-internal cases, as in Monde and chamber; I account for such facts in an OptimalityTheoretic analysis (henceforth OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993) by ranking various markedness constraints among themselves or by ranking them ahead of the TMR. Fourth, I hold that the TMR describes a concrete level of grammar, which I refer to below as the 'surface' representation. In this respect, my treatment differs significantly from the one proposed for English by Borowsky (1986, 1989), in which the English facts are captured in a Lexical Phonology model by ordering the relevant constraint at level 1 in the lexicon.
This paper reviews research on English past-tense acquisition to test the validity of the single mechanism model and the dual mechanism model, focusing on regular-irregular dissociation and semantic bias. Based on the review, it is suggested that in L1 acquisition, both regular and irregular verbs are governed by semantics; that is, early use of past tense forms are restricted to achievement verbs—regular or irregular. In contrast, some L2 acquisition studies show stronger semantic bias for regular past tense forms (e.g., Housen, 2002, Rohde, 1996). It is argued that L1 acquisition of the past-tense morphology can be accounted for more adequately by the single-mechanism model.
The ultimate goal of the study is to examine the acquisition of intensifiers in English and German. In this paper an overview of the first results regarding four L1 English-speaking children will be given. Contrary to previous claims in the literature (e.g. Thomas 1990), it will be argued that intensifiers are used by children in early phases of language acquisition. Intensifiers play an important role in early phases of language acquisition since they can be used to express the wish either to be included or excluded in a certain action and thus contribute to structuring a central aspect of the child's discourse.
The flâneur has been depicted in several different ways in 19th as well as 20th and 21st century literature and criticism. The focus of this brief paper will be on the roles given him in English writings from or around the time of the 1848 revolutions in France and Germany, in which the flâneur comes to represent not only a street idler, but also a critical traveller to, and observer of, the continental city and its revolutionary activities.
The paper proposes structural constraints for different adjunct classes in German and English. Approaches in which syntax has only the task to provide adjunct positions and in which principles of scope are supposed to explain the distribution of adjuncts are rejected as incomplete. The syntactic requirements are not as rigid as other approaches require, such that there is just one possible position for a given adjunct. Rather the syntactic constraints may be fulfilled in different positions.
Several phenomena associated with the differences in the performance of novice interpreters and semi-professionals have been discussed in the paper. Particular emphasis was placed on the occurrence of imported cognitive load which strongly influenced the performance of the subjects also in places where no intrinsic difficulty had been detected. Nevertheless, too little evidence was provided to establish a more detailed pattern of imported cognitive load, which was due to the limited number of participants in the study. It would be possible to obtain more detailed data and comments from the participants by means of interviews conducted individually with the participants. It would allow asking detailed questions to the participants, which might be a more reliable method than the immediate retrospective accounts. Moreover, in the present study such variables as gender differences, age differences and the possible influence of other foreign languages were not taken into account. Perhaps these variables might shed some light on the issue of the management of cognitive resources. Also, the corpus gathered for the present study may be used for the investigation of other aspects of the SI performance.
Rezension zu Rainer Maria Rilke's The Book of Hours. A New Translation with Commentary. Translated by Susan Ranson. Edited with and Introduction and Notes by Ben Hutchinson. Camden House. Rochester New York. 2009. XLIV + 240 S.
Rethinking the adjunct
(2000)
The purpose of the present paper is twofold: first, to show that, when defining the adjunct, it is necessary to distinguish in a strict modular way between the syntactic level and the lexico-semantic level. Thus, the adjunct is a syntactic category on a par with the specifier and the complement, whereas the argument belongs to the same set as does (among others) the modifier. The consequence of this distinction is that there is no direct one-to-one opposition between adjuncts and arguments. Nor is there any direct one-to one relation between adjuncts and modifiers.
The second and main purpose of the paper is to account for the well-known difference between the position of a specific set of modifiers (cause, time, place etc.) in, on the one hand, English and Swedish, on the other, German. In English and Swedish the default position of these modifiers is postverbal, whereas in German it is preverbal. Further, in English and Swedish, these modifiers occur in a mirror order compared with their German counterparts, an order which, from a semantic point of view, is not the expected one. I shall demonstrate that this difference is due to the different settings of the verbal head parameter, the former languages being VO-languages and the latter being OV -languages. I shall further argue that in English and Swedish these modifiers are base generated as adjuncts to an empty VP, which is a complement of the main verb of what I shall call the minimal VP (MVP), whereas in German they are adjuncts on top of the MVP. Finally, I shall argue that the postverbal modifiers move at the latest at LF to the top of the MVP, in order to take scope over it, the restriction being 'Shortest move'. The movement results in the correct scope order of the postverbal modifiers.
The proposed structure also accounts for the binding data, in particular for the binding of a specific Swedish possessive anaphor 'sin'. This pronoun, which may occur within the MVP, must not occur within the postverbal modifiers in the empty VP. This supports the assumption that there is a strict borderline between the MVP and the assumed empty VP. The account is also in accordance with the focus data, the specific set of modifiers being potential focus exponents in a wide focus reading in English and Swedish, but not in German.
In the present monograph, we will deal with questions of lexical typology in the nominal domain. By the term "lexical typology in the nominal domain", we refer to crosslinguistic regularities in the interaction between (a) those areas of the lexicon whose elements are capable of being used in the construction of "referring phrases" or "terms" and (b) the grammatical patterns in which these elements are involved. In the traditional analyses of a language such as English, such phrases are called "nominal phrases". In the study of the lexical aspects of the relevant domain, however, we will not confine ourselves to the investigation of "nouns" and "pronouns" but intend to take into consideration all those parts of speech which systematically alternate with nouns, either as heads or as modifiers of nominal phrases. In particular, this holds true for adjectives both in English and in other Standard European Languages. It is well known that adjectives are often difficult to distinguish from nouns, or that elements with an overt adjectival marker are used interchangeably with nouns, especially in particular semantic fields such as those denoting MATERIALS or NATlONALlTIES. That is, throughout this work the expression "lexical typology in the nominal domain" should not be interpreted as "a typology of nouns", but, rather, as the cross-linguistic investigation of lexical areas constitutive for "referring phrases" irrespective of how the parts-of-speech system in a specific language is defined.
The current study focuses on the prosodic realization of negators in Saisiyat, an endangered aboriginal language of Taiwan, and compares its prosodic realization of negation with that of English. The results of this study indicate that sentential subjects are the most acoustically prominent items in the Saisiyat negative sentences measured. This contrasts sharply with the English experimental sentences, in which the negator itself was the most acoustically prominent item. These findings suggest that Saisiyat is a pitch-accent language; thus, the presence of negators does not significantly change the prosodic parameters of surrounding words. English, in contrast, is an intonation language, so the presence of negation results in substantial prosodic modification. This suggests that the phenomenon of negation is universally prominent; however, languages with different prosodic systems will adopt different strategies for realizing prominence.
This paper addresses the syntax and semantics plurals, and then applies it to reciprocal expressions. In the course of this investigation, I address two problems for the conventional view that a reciprocal makes essentially the same semantic contribution to the sentence as other noun phrases, but has an interesting internal structure. I will show that both problems are properties of plurality in general, and can be successfully explained along these lines. As a result, the paper is more about plurality in general than reciprocals though the goal of the paper is to account for the two problems relating to reciprocals.
The Deep Linguistic Processing with HPSG Initiative (DELH-IN) provides the infrastructure needed to produce open-source semantic transfer-based machine translation systems. We have made available a prototype Japanese-English machine translation system built from existing resources include parsers, generators, bidirectional grammars and a transfer engine.
In what follows, I first briefly review Perlmutter (1968, 1970), in which it is argued that aspectual verbs are ambiguous between control and raising. I suggest that while the argument for the raising analysis is solid, the arguments supporting the control analysis of aspectual verbs are less so. As an alternative hypothesis to consider, I introduce the structural ambiguity hypothesis. In Section 3, I review three recent analyses of control and raising. Although there are important differences among them, they all share the basic assumption that the control/raising distinction is due to differences in selectional restrictions that the lexical items impose. Under such an assumption, the lexical ambiguity hypothesis is the only available option. In Section 4, I present evidence for the structural ambiguity hypothesis from studies concerning aspectual verbs in languages from four distinct families, German (Wurmbrand 2001), Japanese (Fukuda 2006), Romance languages (Cinque 2003), and Basque (Arregi Molina-Azaola 2004). These data strongly suggest that across languages aspectual verbs can appear in two different syntactic positions, either below or above vP, or the projection with which an external argument is introduced (Kratzer 1994, 1996, Chomsky 1995). Given these findings, I argue that it is the aspectual verbs' position with respect to vP which creates the control/raising ambiguity. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is lower than vP, an external argument takes scope over the aspectual verb. Thus, it is interpreted as control. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is higher than vP, on the other hand, it is the aspectual verb that takes scope over an entire vP, including the external argument. Thus, it is interpreted as raising. In section 5, I extend the scope of this study to include a discussion of want-type verbs in Indonesian, as analyzed in Polinsky & Potsdam (2006). Polinsky & Potsdam argue that the Indonesian want-type verbs must be raising in at least certain cases where they allow a rather peculiar interpretation. Although they assume that there are also control counterparts of the want-type verbs, I argue that applying the proposed analysis to the want-type verbs does away with the need for stipulating two distinct lexical entries for these verbs. Section 6 concludes the paper.