High-Order Areas and Auditory Cortex Both Represent the High-Level Event Structure of Music

Recent fMRI studies of event segmentation have found that default mode regions represent high-level event structure during movie watching. In these regions, neural patterns are relatively stable during events and shift at event boundaries. Music, like narratives, contains hierarchical event structure (e.g., sections are composed of phrases). Here, we tested the hypothesis that brain activity patterns in default mode regions reflect the high-level event structure of music. We used fMRI to record brain activity from 25 participants (male and female) as they listened to a continuous playlist of 16 musical excerpts and additionally collected annotations for these excerpts by asking a separate group of participants to mark when meaningful changes occurred in each one. We then identified temporal boundaries between stable patterns of brain activity using a hidden Markov model and compared the location of the model boundaries to the location of the human annotations. We identified multiple brain regions with significant matches to the observer-identified boundaries, including auditory cortex, medial pFC, parietal cortex, and angular gyrus. From these results, we conclude that both higher-order and sensory areas contain information relating to the high-level event structure of music. Moreover, the higher-order areas in this study overlap with areas found in previous studies of event perception in movies and audio narratives, including regions in the default mode network.

Polysemy and Apparent Polyfunctionality of the Sakhalin Ainu Prefixes e- and ko-

The present study focuses on the polysemous verbal prefixes e- and ko- of Sakhalin Ainu and proposes their analysis as markers of high transitivity. The author takes a compositional approach to argument structure and event structure in order to account for the main use of e- and ko- as applicative markers as well as for their less common use as markers of resultative-completive and intensive aspect. Ultimately, the analysis shows that the apparent polyfunctionality of e- and ko- arises from two separate applications at the syntax-semantics level of one same underlying function of the prefixes. The author also comments on how the Sakhalin Ainu case fits in with other cases of valence-aspect conceptual overlapping cross-linguistically and on the implications of his findings for Ainu studies specifically.

ASPECT AND AKTIONSART OF SECONDARY ASPECTUAL VERBS IN SERBIAN

The aim of the paper is to investigate aspectual value of secondary aspectual verb phrase in Serbian in terms of both grammatical and lexical aspect (Aktionsart). The present analysis focuses on two secondary aspectualizers krenuti and stati, which when used as lexical verbs have the opposite meanings related to motion in space, but when they appear as phase construction heads both verbs modify the opening segment of the aspectual event. The central idea of the proposal is that event types in general largely depend on temporal structures which need to be contextualized before they are formally identifiable. In other words, contrary to traditional approaches which define lexical aspect as inherent to verb meaning, we claim that each verb form (or any lexical and/or grammatical form for that matter) has an underlying meaning through which it entertains systematic relations with other forms in a language (Hirtle 1982:40). We start form aspectual and Aktionsart features of krenuti and stati as verb lexemes, then move onto the level of syntax to identify the co-compositional aspect of the overall phase construction via event structure and event segmentation mechanisms. Finally, the present paper aims to examine different uses of the two secondary aspectual verbs, along with the different types of events they can denote in order to bring to light the potential meanings which give rise to the various contextual senses of the aspectual construction. The reported results of the analysis were checked on the Corpus of Contemporary Serbian Language (SrpKor 2013). Key words: aspectual constructions, Aktionsart, aspectual event, temporal structure, secondary aspectualizer, event segmentation, event co-composition

A new operational representation of dependencies in Event Structures

The execution of an event in a complex and distributed system where the dependencies vary during the evolution of the system can be represented in many ways, and one of them is to use Context-Dependent Event structures. Event structures are related to Petri nets. The aim of this paper is to propose what can be the appropriate kind of Petri net corresponding to Context-Dependent Event structures, giving an operational flavour to the dependencies represented in a Context/Dependent Event structure. Dependencies are often operationally represented, in Petri nets, by tokens produced by activities and consumed by others. Here we shift the perspective using contextual arcs to characterize what has happened so far and in this way to describe the dependencies among the various activities.

Derivational Syntax: a Minimalist Approach to Affixation in Bahasa Indonesia Predicates

<p>This thesis focuses on verbal phrase aspect (vP-aspect) in Bahasa Indonesia (BI). In BI, vP-aspect is morphologically marked on the predicate. I claim that the sufiix -kan marks an aspect, which I refer to as kan-aspect, indicating that the object undergoes change. This is in a stark contrast with i-aspect, where the object is stationary and unchanged. The analysis is based on the notion that the semantics and syntax of a predicate should be analysed within the vP (for instance, Tenny 1987, 1994, Chomsky 1995, Arad 1998, Croft 1998, among others), with the core argument determining the aspectual property of an event structure (Tenny 1987, Arad 1998, Ritter and Rosen 1998). Since this thesis proposes to take into account the -kan and -i distinction as an important aspect in the analysis, the structural location of the two suffixes will take centre stage. This has not been done in the literature on BI that looks at these derivational suffixes. This thesis further develops the analysis beyond verb phrases: it takes into account the syntax of Voice Phrase of sentence structures that include (temporal) Aspect Phrase, Wh-extractions, and Relative Clauses.</p>

Derivational Syntax: a Minimalist Approach to Affixation in Bahasa Indonesia Predicates

<p>This thesis focuses on verbal phrase aspect (vP-aspect) in Bahasa Indonesia (BI). In BI, vP-aspect is morphologically marked on the predicate. I claim that the sufiix -kan marks an aspect, which I refer to as kan-aspect, indicating that the object undergoes change. This is in a stark contrast with i-aspect, where the object is stationary and unchanged. The analysis is based on the notion that the semantics and syntax of a predicate should be analysed within the vP (for instance, Tenny 1987, 1994, Chomsky 1995, Arad 1998, Croft 1998, among others), with the core argument determining the aspectual property of an event structure (Tenny 1987, Arad 1998, Ritter and Rosen 1998). Since this thesis proposes to take into account the -kan and -i distinction as an important aspect in the analysis, the structural location of the two suffixes will take centre stage. This has not been done in the literature on BI that looks at these derivational suffixes. This thesis further develops the analysis beyond verb phrases: it takes into account the syntax of Voice Phrase of sentence structures that include (temporal) Aspect Phrase, Wh-extractions, and Relative Clauses.</p>

What can cognitive linguistics tell us about language-image relations? A multidimensional approach to intersemiotic convergence in multimodal texts

In contrast to symbol-manipulation approaches, Cognitive Linguistics offers a modal rather than an amodal account of meaning in language. From this perspective, the meanings attached to linguistic expressions, in the form of conceptualisations, have various properties in common with visual forms of representation. This makes Cognitive Linguistics a potentially useful framework for identifying and analysing language-image relations in multimodal texts. In this paper, we investigate language-image relations with a specific focus on intersemiotic convergence. Analogous with research on gesture, we extend the notion of co-text images and argue that images and language usages which are proximal to one another in a multimodal text can be expected to exhibit the same or consistent construals of the target scene. We outline some of the dimensions of conceptualisation along which intersemiotic convergence may be enacted in texts, including event-structure, viewpoint, distribution of attention and metaphor. We take as illustrative data photographs and their captions in online news texts covering a range of topics including immigration, political protests, and inter-state conflict. Our analysis suggests the utility of Cognitive Linguistics in allowing new potential sites of intersemiotic convergence to be identified and in proffering an account of language-image relations that is based in language cognition.

Causative morphology as Voice-driven allomorphy

Recent syntactic approaches to event structure differ in whether causative semantics are introduced by a designated syntactic head (e.g. v caus; Pylkkänen 2008; Harley 2017) or is interpreted configurationally (Ramchand 2008; Alexiadou et al. 2015; Wood & Marantz 2017). The examination of the morphosyntactic properties of Samoan faʻa-causatives reveals a ‘bundling paradox’ in that faʻa- appears to introduce an agent role while co-occuring with Voice morphology—a pattern which is not predicted by Caus0-approaches (Harley 2017). Instead, this chapter develops an account that analyzes causative morphology like faʻa- as the bi-directionally spell-out of the verbalizer v which is sensitive to the presence of Voice in bi-eventive configurations (cf. Embick 2010). Therefore, this chapter not only provides a first syntactic investigation of faʻa-causatives in Samoan, but also adds a new cross-linguistic perspective to the ongoing discussion of causatives at the syntax-semantics interface.

On the Integration of Dative Adjuncts into Event Structures in Yapa Languages

Warlpiri and Warlmanpa (Ngumpin-Yapa languages of Australia) exhibit a complex predicate construction in which a class of preverbs introduces a single argument that is not shared by the argument structure of the inflecting verb, nor is there necessarily any shared event structure. This is problematic for many theories of linking structures of complex predicates, since no arguments or events are shared between the predicative elements of the complex predicate. The same grammatical relation is instantiated by a beneficiary adjunct. In light of new research in event and argument structure, I propose a lexical rule which introduces an applicative argument to account for the beneficiary construction; and that the preverbs take another predicate as one of their arguments to account for the complex predicates. The applicative rule and the preverbs both introduce an argument of the same grammatical relation, leading to interesting interactions, given that two grammatical relations of the same type are not expected to co-occur within a single clause.