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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 paper investigates the interaction of focus and adverbial quantification in Hausa, a Chadic tone language spoken in West Africa. The discussion focuses on similarities and differences between intonation and tone languages concerning the way in which adverbial quantifiers (AQs) and focus particles (FPs) associate with focus constituents. It is shown that the association of AQs with focused elements does not differ fundamentally in intonation and tone languages such as Hausa, despite the fact that focus marking in Hausa works quite differently. This may hint at the existence of a universal mechanism behind the interpretation of adverbial quantifiers across languages. From a theoretical perspective, the Hausa data can be taken as evidence in favour of pragmatic approaches to the focus-sensitivity of AQs, such as e.g. Beaver & Clark (2003).
Questions in Northern Sotho
(2006)
This article gives an overview of the marking of polar and constituent questions in Northern Sotho, a Bantu language of South Africa. It thereby provides a contribution to the typological investigation of sentence types in the world’s languages. As will be shown, Northern Sotho follows cross-linguistic tendencies in marking interrogative sentences: It uses intonation as main indicator in polar questions and question words as main indicator in constituent questions. Nevertheless, it also shows interesting language-specific variation, e.g. with respect to the location of raised intonation in polar questions, the presence of two pragmatically distinct question particles in polar questions, or a split in the formation of constituent questions based on the grammatical function of the questioned constituent.
In this paper I argue that the set of formal features that can head a functional projection is not given by UG but derived through L1 acquisition. I formulate a hypothesis that says that initially every functional category F is realised as a semantic feature [F]; whenever there is an overt doubling effect in the L1 input with respect to F, this semantic feature [F] is reanalysed as a formal feature [i/uF]. In the first part of the paper I provide a theoretical motivation for this hypothesis, in the second part I test this proposal for a case-study, namely the cross-linguistic distribution of Negative Concord (NC). I demonstrate that in NC languages negation has been reanalysed as a formal feature [i/uNEG], whereas in Double Negation languages this feature remains a semantic feature [NEG] (always interpreted as a negative operator), thus paving the way for an explanation of NC in terms of syntactic agreement. In the third part I discuss that the application of the hypothesis to the phenomenon of negation yields two predictions that can be tested empirically. First I demonstrate that negative markers X° can be available only in NC languages; second, independent change of the syntactic status of negative markers, can invoke a change with respect to the exhibition of NC in a particular language. Both predictions are proven to be correct. I finally argue what the consequences of the proposal presented in this paper are for both the syntactic structure of the clause and second for the way parameters are associated to lexical items.
Languages cross-linguistically differ with respect to whether they accept or ban True Negative Imperatives (TNIs). In this paper I show that this ban follows from three generally accepted assumptions: (i) the fact that the operator that encodes the illocutionary force of an imperative universally takes scope from C°; (ii) the fact that this operator may not be operated on by a negative operator and (iii) the Head Movement Constraint (an instance of Relativized Minimality). In my paper I argue that languages differ too with respect to both the syntactic status (head/phrasal) and the semantic value (negative/non-negative) of their negative markers. Given these difference across languages and the analysis of TNIs based on the three above mentioned assumptions, two typological generalisations can be predicted: (i) every language with an overt negative marker X° that is semantically negative bans TNIs; and (ii) every language that bans TNIs exhibits an overt negative marker X°. I demonstrate in my paper that both typological predictions are born out.
As editor of the next iteration of the Köchel Catalogue, I have to deal with the current (sixth) edition’s Appendix C, devoted to "Doubtful and Misattributed Works." My goal is to reduce the potentially vast dimensions of that appendix to only those works for which some connection to Mozart cannot be ruled out. In the decades since 1964, when the current edition of Köchel was published, many of the works listed in Appendix C have been convincingly attributed to other composers. Other works therein can confidently be dismissed as never having had any meaningful connection to Mozart. Yet even after removing the reattributed and trivially misattributed works from the appendix, we are left with a handful of works that may possibly have had something to do with Mozart, even if clear evidence one way or the other remains elusive. One must, of course, be cautious in removing questionable and doubtful works from the catalogue, as the present case-study will illustrate. The work under consideration, catalogued as K6 Anh. C 9.07, is an unaccompanied piece for three or four voices with the text "Venerabilis barba capucinorum." ...
Focus on verbal operators such as aspect or tense ("predication focus", lucidly described by Hyman & Watters (1984) under the label "auxiliary focus") has been noticed to exist in African languages of Afroasiatic and Niger-Congo affiliation, but not so far in Saharan. The Saharan language Kanuri is assumed to have substantially reorganized its TAM system, particularly in the perfective aspect domain (Cyffer [2006] dates major changes between the years 1820 and 1900). The paper discusses, for the first time in Kanuri scholarship, the existence of a neat subsystem of predication focus marking by suffix in the perfective aspect which is made up of a total of six conjugational paradigms that uniformly encode predication focus by suffix {-ò}. Kanuri dialects differ in strategies and scope of focus marking encoded in verb morphology. In the light of data from the Yerwa (Nigeria) and Manga (Niger) dialects the paper discusses some "anomalies" with regard to general focus theory which we account for by describing the "Kanuri Focus Shift" as a diachronic process which is responsible for leftward displacement of scope of focus.
In this paper we will develop a formal conceptual model of how the path in a motion situation interacts with the semantic analysis of so called 'motion shape verbs' like 'wackeln' ('wobble'), a subclass of the so called 'manner of motion verbs'. Central to this model will be the distinction between two concepts of motion: translational motion and nontranslational motion, which has no inherent translational component but puts emphasis on describing specific Motion Shape Patterns. We will define and algorithmically describe a theory of Path Shape Decomposition that aims at algorithmically deriving the translational vs. nontranslational distinction from the shape of the path. To account for object internal motion, we additionally introduce Bounding Box encapsulation, which yields a topological division of inner and outer movement. Finally we demonstrate how the outcome of such a technical decomposition can be used in modelling a Path Superimposition scenario like 'Peter wackelt über die Straße'.
The Bantu language Makhuwa makes a distinction between cojoint and disjoint verb forms. Two hypotheses are made from generalisations on the distribution of the conjoint and disjoint verb forms in Makhuwa. 1) The verb appears in its conjoint form when a focal element occupies the Immediate After Verb (IAV) position; 2) the verb appears in its disjoint form when the IAV position is empty. A syntactic analysis is provided that accounts for these hypotheses if the IAV position is defined in terms of structural rather than linear adjacency between two heads in a direct c-command relation.
In the syntactic analysis two focus projections are proposed: one under TP (Ndayiragije 1999) hosting the disjoint morpheme and one under vP, to whose specifier focal elements move. Non-focal elements remain in-situ. This analysis accounts both for the strong adjacency requirement of a cojoint verb form and its focal object and for the empty IAV position that requires a verb to appear in its disjoint form.
The material reported on in this paper is part of a set of experiments in which the role of Information Structure on L2 processing of words is tested. Pitch and duration of 4 sets of experimental material in German and English are measured and analyzed in this paper. The well-known finding that accent boosts duration and pitch is confirmed. Syntactic and lexical means of marking focus, however, do not give the duration and the pitch of a word an extra boost.
Russian predicate cleft constructions have the surprising property of being associated with adversative clauses of the opposite polarity. I argue that clefts are associated with adversative clauses because they have the semantics of S-Topics in Büring's (1997, 2000) sense of the term. It is shown that the polarity of the adversative clause is obligatorily opposed to that of the cleft because the use of a cleft gives rise to a relevance-based pragmatic scale. The ordering principle according to which these scale
Dealing with alternatives
(2006)
Traditionally, pure additive particles and scalar additive particles are both characterized by an existential presupposition. They differ insofar as the set of alternatives that is built is unordered for the former, and ordered for the latter, which carry the so-called scalar presupposition. As a result, the two characterisations cannot be cumulated, an impossibility that is at odds with the fact that several languages exhibit this combination of readings for a single item. The discussion of Italian neanche '(n)either/(not) even', an item that can both be additive and scalar, allows us to expose the connection between the oppositions non-ordered vs ordered set of alternatives and verified vs accommodated existential presupposition by adding content to the traditional view that the set of alternatives is made up of 'relevant' items in the context. The question of how to characterise this item is set against the backdrop of a more general discussion of the network of additive particles found in Italian.
In this paper I argue that the syntax of Eastern Bantu does not make reference to the notion 'syntactic object'. That is, there is no linguistic category of objects that is the target of syntactic rules in Eastern Bantu languages. Instead I propose that syntactic rules broadly distinguish complements and adjuncts as well as category type of complement or adjunct. I argue that Bantu languages are typologically special in that (a) the verb complement structure can be expanded by the valency increasing applicative suffix; and (b) that the class of adjuncts can be expanded through verb concord licensing. Because of these properties, Bantu languages have a much-expanded notion of 'complement' and 'adjunct'. Namely, complements consist of (a) inherent complements (subcategorised by the lexical verb), and (b) derived complements (licensed by the applicative suffix). Adjuncts consist of (a) non-subcategorised modifying constituents in the usual sense and (b) phrases that are licensed by verb concord (i.e. Topics in Bresnan and Mchombo (1987)). I propose that most the differences in the licensing of objects in Bantu are due to two causes: (a) the unusual split in the composition of complements and adjuncts and (b) a set of typological parameter settings.
Many analyses of existential sentences have focused attention on determining which of its elements constitutes the logical subject and predicate, and this has proven to be a not uncontroversial topic of research. Some, from both syntactic and semantic points of view, have argued that there is a subject (cf. Williams 1994) others that it is a predicate (cf. Moro 1997). Similarly, some have argued that the associate NP is a logical subject, others that it is apredicate (Higginbotham 1987).
One logical possibility that has not (to my knowledge) been pursued in the linguistics literature is that these statements are not of the form subject-predicate, a possibility that has been taken up in the philosophical literature by P.F. Strawson (1959). He claims that there are such statements and that their form is simpler than that of subject-predicate statements because it does not, and cannot, involve an expression that makes reference to an individual. Not involving reference to an individual, these sentences are therefore are made true by different means than a subject-predicate statement whose truth, in the simplest cases, depends on the denotation of the subject being a member of the denotation of the predicate. Of interest from the point of view of the present discussion is his claim that existential statements are examples of this kind of statement, which he calls a feature-placing statement. The truth of a statement of the form feature-placer requires that something with the set of features denoted by the associate NP exist at the location or coordinates expressed by the placer. In an existential sentence we can take the associate NP as the feature-denoting expression and the coda-XP as the placer.
This paper looks at sentences with "quantificational indefinites," discussed by Diesing (1992) and others. I propose that these sentences generate sets of alternatives of the form {p, not p and it's possible that p}, which restrict the quantification by an extension of familiar focus principles. For example, in the sentence "I usually read a book about slugs" (on the relevant reading), "usually" quantifies over pairs <x,t> such that x is a book about slugs, t is a time interval, and one alternative is true from the set {I read x at t, I can but do not read x at t}. In addition to accounting for a well-known contrast between creation and non-creation verbs, this also explains a second contrast that Diesing’s analysis cannot account for.
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.
The German causal preposition durch ('by', 'through') poses a challenge to formal-semantic analyses applying strict compositionality. To deal with this challenge, a formalism which builds on recent important developments in Discourse Representation Theory is developed, including a more elaborate analysis of presuppositional phenomena as well as the integration into the theory of unification as a mode of composition. It is argued that that the observed unificational phenomena belong in the realm of pragmatics, providing an argument for presuppositional phenomena at a sentence- and word-internal level.
This paper presents two experimental studies investigating the processing of presupposed content. Both studies employ the German additive particle auch (too). In the first study, participants were given a questionnaire containing bi-clausal, ambiguous sentences with 'auch' in the second clause. The presupposition introduced by auch was only satisfied on one of the two readings of the sentence, and this reading corresponded to a syntactically dispreferred parse of the sentence. The prospect of having the auch-presupposition satisfied made participants choose this syntactically dispreferred reading more frequently than in a control condition. The second study used the self-paced-reading paradigm and compared the reading times on clauses containing auch, which differed in whether the presupposition of auch was satisfied or not. Participants read the clause more slowly when the presupposition was not satisfied. It is argued that the two studies show that presuppositions play an important role in online sentence comprehension and affect the choice of syntactic analysis. Some theoretical implications of these findings for semantic theory and dynamic accounts of presuppositions as well as for theories of semantic processing are discussed.
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.
The paper presents a novel approach to explaining word order variation in the early Germanic languages. Initial observations about verb placement as a device marking types of rhetorical relations made on data from Old High German (cf. Hinterhölzl & Petrova 2005) are now reconsidered on a larger scale and compared with evidence from other early Germanic languages. The paper claims that the identification of information-structural domains in a sentence is best achieved by taking into account the interaction between the pragmatic features of discourse referents and properties of discourse organization.
Modifiability by almost has been used as a test for the quantificational force of a DP without stating the meaning of almost explicitly. The aim of this paper is to give a semantics for almost applying across categories and to evaluate the validity of the almost test as a diagnosis for universal quantifiers. It is argued that almost is similar to other cross-categorial modifiers such as at least or exactly in referring to alternatives ordered on a scale. I propose that almost evaluates alternatives in which the modified expression is replaced by a value close by on the corresponding Horn scale. It is shown that a semantics for almost that refers to scalar alternatives derives the correct truth conditions for almost and explains selectional restrictions. At the same time, taking the semantics of almost seriously invalidates the almost test as a simple diagnosis for the nature of quantifiers.
There is an elegant account, proposed by Beaver and Condoravdi (2003), that assumes that the temporal connectives before and after are converses (i.e., they are analyzed by means of a unified lexical schema), and that explains away their different logical and veridical behavior appealing to other factors. There is an elegant explanation that connects the licensing of Polarity Items to informational strengthening requirements: Polarity Items are viewed as existentials that lead to a widening of the domain of quantification, and they are predicted to be legitimate only when this widening leads to a stronger statement (roughly, in downward monotone contexts). My plan is to connect these two approaches – by proposing an amendment in the definition Beaver and Condoravdi presented for before and after that is meant to account also for their Polarity Items licensing behavior.
Although verb forms encoding focus were recorded in various Bantu languages during the twentieth century it was not until the late 1970's that they became the centre of serious attention, starting with the work of Hyman and Watters. In the last decade this attention has grown. While focus can be expressed variously, this paper concentrates largely on its morphological, partly on its tonal expression. On the basis of morphological and tonal behaviour, it identifies four blocks of languages, representing less than a third of all Bantu languages: those with metatony, those with a binary constituent contrast between verb ("disjunctive") and post-verbal ("conjunctive") focus, those with a three-way contrast, and those with verb initial /ni-/. Following Güldemann's lead, it is shown there is a fairly widespread grammaticalisation path whereby focus markers may come to encode progressive aspect, then present tense. Many Bantu languages today have a pre-stem morpheme /a/ 'non-past' and it is hypothesized that many of these /a/, which are otherwise hard to explain historically, may derive from an older focus marker.
A number of historically French-speaking countries have adopted English as second or one of the official languages. This does not only pose a problem of multilingualism at State level as well as at social level, but it also questions the actual status of English as a language at both levels. In fact, English does not only have to compete with French, but also with native African languages. This article gives an insight into the status of English in Gabon – a French-speaking country in western central Africa. Gabon has not (yet) adopted English as one of the official languages, but the status of the language needs to be investigated from a sociolinguistic perspective. The paper retraced the story of English in Gabon by outlining three periods of contact between the English language and the populations of Gabon. The presence of English throughout the three periods is then linguistically attested through an empirical study of English loanwords in the general vocabulary of Gabonese native languages. The second topic that the article covers is the contemporary situation of the language in the country whose policy refers to it as foreign language. Meanwhile, the influence of the American lifestyle and music, the education system and the elites that were educated in English-speaking countries produce a different social view on the language. This growing social status may signal prominent new developments in the future. This leads the author to set perspectives of the language as it is spoken in Gabon.
Multiple modals construction
(2006)
Modal items of different semantic types can only be combined in a specific order. Epistemic items, for instance, cannot be embedded under deontic ones. I'll argue that this fact cannot be explained by the current semantic theories of modality. A solution to this problem will be developed in an update semantics framework. On the semantic side, a distinction will be drawn between circumstantial information about the world and information about duties, whereas I'll use Nuyts' notion of m-performativity to account for certain use of the modal items.
This paper focuses on different subtypes of constructions involving temporally bounded quantification, e.g. sequences like David visited Rome three times followed by temporal phrases as different as (i) last year, which defines a time interval; (ii) in less that two months, which defines an amount of time; and (iii) per month, which refers to a time unit. As for the first two types of temporal phrases, data will be presented which shows that they have specific linguistic properties in these quantifying contexts, and do not behave exactly as the locating or duration adverbials they are superficially identical with. The third type of phrases will receive special attention. Structures with frequency adverbials like n times per month will be analysed compositionally, separating the quantified component n times from the temporally binding phrase per month (whose role is comparable to that of adverbials (i) and (ii) in the relevant constructions). The data presented is mainly from Portuguese, although the issues at stake – the linguistic properties of temporally bounded quantification – are obviously relevant to parallel constructions in other languages.
Agreement is traditionally viewed as a cross-referencing device for core arguments such as subjects and (primary) objects.1 In this paper, I discuss data from Bantu languages that lead to a radical departure from this generally accepted position: agreement in a subset of Bantu languages cross-references a (sentential) topic rather than the subject. The crucial evidence for topic agreement comes from a construction known as subject-object (S-O) reversal, where the fronted patient agrees with what has uniformly been taken to be a `subject marker'. The correct analysis of S-O reversal as a topic construction with `topic agreement' explains a range of known facts in the languages in question. Furthermore, synchronic variation across Bantu in the presence/absence of S-O reversal and in the properties of the (topic/subject) agreement marker suggests a diachronic path from topic to subject marking. The systematic variation and covariation in the syntax of Bantu languages and the historical picture that it offers would be missed altogether if we continue to reject the idea that the notion of topic can be deeply grammaticized in the form of agreement.
Modern theorists rarely agree on how to represent the categories of tense and aspect, making a consistent analysis for phenomena, such as the present perfect, more difficult to attain. It has been argued in previous analyses that the variable behavior of the present perfect between languages licenses independently motivated treatments, particularly of a morphosyntactic or semanticsyntactic nature (Giorgi & Pianesi 1997; Schmitt 2001; Ilari 2001). More specifically, the wellknown readings of the American English (AE) present perfect (resultative, experiential, persistent situation, recent past (Comrie 1976)), are at odds with the readings of the corresponding structure in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), the 'pretérito perfeito composto' (default iterativity and occasional duration (Ilari 1999)). Despite these variations, the present work, assuming a tense-aspect framework at the semantic-pragmatic interface, will provide a unified analysis for the present perfect in AE and BP, which have traditionally been treated as semantically divergent. The present perfect meaning, in conjunction with the aspectual class of the predicate, can account for the major differences between languages, particularly regarding iterativity and the "present perfect puzzle", regarding adverb compatibility.
This report explores the question of compatibility between annotation projects including translating annotation formalisms to each other or to common forms. Compatibility issues are crucial for systems that use the results of multiple annotation projects. We hope that this report will begin a concerted effort in the field to track the compatibility of annotation schemes for part of speech tagging, time annotation, treebanking, role labeling and other phenomena.
This paper focuses on restrictions on the ordering of internal constituents of noun phrases in Chichewa, especially when those constituents are discontinuous. The motivation for discontinuity of the NP constituents will be given, together with discussion of constructions that can be subsumed under this rubric but that do not really involve discontinuity in the canonical sense. These are constructions where a topic NP in a left periphery position is either linked anaphorically with a modifier "remnant" or semantically with its hyponym in post-verbal position. According to Guthrie's classification of Bantu languages, Chichewa is placed in zone N unit N31. It is regarded as a dialect of Nyanja, classified as belonging to unit N30 (Guthrie 1967-71).
The retreat of BE as perfect auxiliary in the history of English is examined. Corpus data are presented showing that the initial advance of HAVE was most closely connected to a restriction against BE in past counterfactuals. Other factors which have been reported to favor the spread of HAVE are either dependent on the counterfactual effect, or significantly weaker in comparison. It is argued that the effect can be traced to the semantics of the BE perfect, which denoted resultativity rather than anteriority proper. Related data from other older Germanic and Romance languages are presented, and finally implications for existing theories of auxiliary selection stemming from the findings presented are discussed.
Functions of English "man"
(2006)
This paper discusses the semantics of the English particle man. It is shown that this particle does different things when used sentence-initially and sentence-finally. The sentenceinitial use is further shown to separate into two distinct intonational types with different semantic content. A formal semantics is proposed for these types.
Setswana distinguishes between conjunctive and disjunctive verb forms in the present positive tense. Creissels (1996) shows that this is also true of a number of other tenses (present negative, future positive and perfect positive). This work is used as a starting point to investigate the conjunctive/disjunctive distinction in my own Setswana data. Further to those presented in Creissels, there is data on the past and past progressive tenses, and environments such as relatives and subordinates. Creissels' analysis is supported by different examples, including those that do not utilise a frame intended to limit boundary effects. There are also examples not within this frame that raise questions about how flexible the conjunctive/disjunctive system can be. This paper is a work in progress.
This paper discusses locative inversion constructions in Otjiherero against the background of previous work by Bresnan and Kanerva (1989) on the construction in Chichewa, and Demuth and Mmusi (1997) on Setswana and related languages. Locative inversion in Otjiherero is structurally similar to locative inversion in Chichewa and Setswana, but differs from these languages in that there are fewer thematic restrictions on predicates undergoing locative inversion. As Otjiherero has a three-way morphological distinction of locative subject markers, this shows that there is no relation between agreement morphology and thematic restrictions in locative inversion, confirming the result of Demuth and Mmusi. The availability of transitive predicates to participate in locative inversion in Otjiherero furthermore raises questions about the relation between locative inversion, valency, and applicative marking, and these are addressed in the paper, although further research is needed for a full analysis. In terms of function of the locative subject markers, Otjiherero presents, like Chishona, a split system where all markers support locative readings, but where one of them is also used in expletive contexts. In contrast to Chishona, though, this is the class 16, rather than the class 17 marker.
Based on a Relevance Theory-informed view of language development, this paper argues that grammatical relations are construction-specific conventionalizations (grammaticalizations) of implicatures which arise out of repeated patterns of reference to particular types of referents. Once conventionalized, these structures function to constrain the hearer's identification of referents in discourse. As they are construction-specific, and hence language-specific, there is no category "subject" across languages; different languages will either show this type of grammaticalization or not, and if they do, may show it or not in different constructions. Any cross-linguistic use of terms such as "subject" (and "S", as in "SOV") should then be avoided.
Sino-Tibetan languages
(2006)
The Sino-Tibetan (ST) language family includes the Sinitic languages (what for political reasons are known as Chinese ‘dialects’) and the 200 to 300 Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages. Geographically it stretches from Northeast India, Burma, Bangladesh, and northern Thailand in the southeast, throughout the Tibetan plateau to the north, across most of China and up to the Korean border in the northeast, and down to Taiwan and Hainan Island in the southeast. The family has come to be the way it is because of multiple migrations, often into areas where other languages were spoken (LaPolla, 2001).
Li Fang-Kuei (1902-1987)
(2006)
Fang-Kuei Li was one of the foremost scholars of Thai and Sino-Tibetan studies and a major contributor to Amerind studies. Born in China, he was one of the early scholars sent to the United States to study. He had developed an interest in language while learning English, Latin, and German as part of his studies in China, and so he decided to study linguistics in the United States. In 1924, he went to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, receiving his B.A. 2 years later, then moved to the University of Chicago, where he received his M.A. and Ph.D., studying with Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, and Carl Darling Buck.
Wang Li (1900-1986)
(2006)
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.
This paper discusses a semantic analysis of three syntactic types of English each, namely, floated each, binominal each, and prenominal each. It is argued that floated each consists of two parts, a quantifier and an inaudible element which functions as its restrictor, which together form a tripartite quantificational structure when they compose with the predicate. Binominal each and an associated NP such as two topics (which is generally called the 'distributive share') are syntactically analyzed as forming a subject-predicate relation within a DP in which the NP undergoes so-called 'predicate inversion'. Semantically, binominal each is analyzed as having the same semantic value as floated each, while prenominal each is shown to have a different logical type from floated and binominal each. As can be seen from analogous constructions in some Romance languages, it does not lexically contain its restrictor.
This paper concerns the distribution of wh-words in Asante Twi, which has both a focus fronting strategy and an in-situ strategy. We show that the focusing and the in-situ constructions are not simply equally available options. On the contrary, there are several cases where the focusing strategy must be used and the in-situ strategy is ungrammatical. We show that the cases in Asante Twi are "intervention effects", which are attested in other languages, like German, Korean, and French. We identify a core set of intervening elements that all of these languages have and discuss their properties.
The impact of the morphological alternation of subject markers on tense/aspect: the case of Swahili
(2006)
Subject markers for the first, second and third person singular in Southern Swahili dialects display morphological variation in that specific forms are chosen with different tense-aspect markers. This paper documents this variation in the different dialects and presents a distributional chart which reveals the symmetric patterns between these subject markers and their corresponding tense-aspect formatives. The study corroborates earlier work in the manifestation of variant morphological tense-aspect formatives of the regional dialects of Swahili by Mazrui (1983).
This article presents an analysis of German nicht...sondern... (contrastive not...but...) which departs from the commonly held view that this construction should be explained by appeal to its alleged corrective function. It will be demonstrated that in nicht A sondern B (not A but B), A and B just behave like stand-alone unmarked answers to a common question Q, and that this property of sondern is presuppositional in character. It is shown that from this general observation many interesting properties of nicht...sondern... follow, among them distributional differences between German "sondern" and German "aber" (contrastive but, concessive but), intonational requirements and exhaustivity effect sondern presupposition is furthermore argued to be the result of the conventionalization of conversational implicatures.
Starting from the basic observation that, across languages, the anticausative variant of an alternating verb systematically involves morphological marking that is shared by passive verbs, the goal of this paper is to provide a uniform and formal account of these arguably two different construction types. The central claim that I put forward is that passives and anticausatives differ only with respect to the event-type features of the verb but both arise through the same operation, namely suppression by special morphology of a feature in v that encodes the ontological event type of the verb. Crucially, I argue for two syntactic primitives, namely act and cause, whereto I trace the passive/anticausative distinction. Passive constructions across languages are made compatible by relegating the differences to simple combinatorial properties of verb and prepositional types and their interactions with other event functors, which are in turn encoded differently morphologically across languages. New arguments are brought forward for a causative analysis of anticausatives. Agentive adverbials are examined, and doubt is cast on the usefulness of by-phrases as a diagnostic for argumenthood.
According to standard Binding Theory, pronouns and reflexives are in (nearly) complementary distribution. However, representational NPs (e.g. 'picture of her/herself') allow both. It has been suggested that in English, reflexives in representational NPs (RNPs) have a preference for 'sources of information' and that pronouns prefer 'perceivers of information.' We conducted two experiments investigating the effects of structural and non-structural (source/perceiver) factors on the interpretation of two kinds of RNP structures in a typologically different language, namely Finnish. Our results reveal source/perceiver effects for postnominal but not for prenominal RNPs in Finnish, with a difference in the degree of sensitivity that pronouns and reflexives exhibit to the source/perceiver manipulation, and our results also suggest that morphological differences in Finnish reflexives correspond to interpretation differences. As a whole, these results support a multiple-factor model of reference resolution, which assumes that multiple factors can play a role in reference resolution and that the relative contributions of these factors can be different for different anaphoric forms (Kaiser 2003b, Kaiser & Trueswell in press).
This paper investigates what factors make a particular referent a good antecedent for subsequent pronominal reference. In particular, it explores two seemingly conflicting claims in the literature regarding the effects of topicality and focusing on referent salience. In light of new experimental results combined with a review of existing work, I conclude that neither topicality nor focusing alone can explain referent salience as indicated by patterns of pronoun reference. Rather, the data provide support for a multiple-factor model of salience (e.g. Arnold 1999). More specifically, the results show that grammatical role has a striking effect: being a subject makes a referent more salient than either pronominalization/givenness or focusing alone. Furthermore, the results of the experiment suggest that the likelihood of subsequent pronominal reference is also influenced by structural focusing and pronominalization, but not as strongly as by subjecthood. I argue that these data are best captured by a multiple-factor model in which factors differ in how influential they are relative to one another, i.e. how heavily weighted they are. A single-factor system does not seem adequate for these data.
Semantic and pragmatic properties of the Yorùbá focus construction have not been fully examined. This paper investigates presupposition, exhaustivity effects, and felicity conditions in some of its attested forms. Yorùbá focus does not trigger existence presuppositions, it does not have any obligatory exhaustivity effects, and argument focus and predicate focus behave differently with respect to question-answer congruence. These properties are compatible Déchaine’s analysis (2002) of Yorùbá focus as inverse predication, essentially a type of cleft.
Beria, a member of the Saharan language family, is one of the rare languages in Africa exhibiting both an ergative and an active/agentive alignment system of grammatical relations.1 While the active/agentive pattern is shown by the participant reference markers, the ergative pattern is attested both in the constituent order and in the focus markers on the core constituents. In the pragmatically unmarked constituent order, the Agent constituent precedes the Patient constituent. An unmarked single constituent immediately preceding the verb may represent a Patient or a Subject argument. In this position, the Agent constituent requires the clitic GU. The focused Patient and Subject constituents are both either marked by the clitic DI or by a cleft construction.