(In)vulnerable inflected infinitives as complements to modals

The paper presents data from Galician and Romeyka which show that inflected infinitives do appear as non-attitude complements contra most existing accounts, more specifically as complements to modal and (some) volitional predicates that induce obligatory semantic control. Based on Landau’s (2015) argument that [+Agr] is irrelevant for non-attitude complements, it is argued that the phi-features on the inflected infinitives in non-attitude complements are redundant; in more technical terms, affixes expressing these features are dissociated morphemes, which are not interpreted at LF but are inserted at PF instead. For this reason, they crucially appear in monoclausal contexts, i.e., in complements to modals: in this context, in which the complement has no external argument (via lexical restructuring), these morphemes express a copy of a relevant subject Agr on the modal that is valued in syntax. From this also follows why they are vulnerable to change, essentially, because they contribute nothing.

Pseudo-grammaticalization: The anatomy of "come" in Modern Hebrew pseudo-coordination constructions

The paper examines the pseudo-coordination construction featuring the verb come preceding a lexical verb in Modern Hebrew, and shows that this is a mono-clausal mono-eventive construction, which did not emerge via a process of grammaticalization. That is, there is no tightening of internal dependencies between parts of the construction (Haspelmath 2004), nor evidence of a lexical unit starting to assume grammatical functions (Heine, Claudi & Hünnemeyer 1991). I go on to argue that, in this particular construction, the verb come is a “lexical restructuring verb” (Wurmbrand 2004, 2014), whose lexical properties do not differ from those of ‘simple’ change-of-location uses of come in that both feature a deictic meaning component. Particular attention will be paid to what looks like the absence of a motion component, suggesting that even if simple come selects for a prepositional complement, it does not necessarily encode a motion component, and therefore the absence of the PP, in a complex verb construction is not tied to loss of motion, but merely to a change in the type of complement. The current account provides substance to claims stressing a metaphorical relation between the two occurrences of come, since it points to the close similarities in the lexical-pragmatic properties of this lexeme in its two environments of use, and locates the difference between them in the choice of complement that produces the effect of transfer from the location realm to a more abstract one characteristic of metaphoric meanings.

Lexical restructuring in preliterate children: Evidence from novel measures of phonological representation

ABSTRACTThere is substantial debate in the literature surrounding the development of children's phonological representations (PRs). Although infant studies have shown children's representations to contain fine phonetic detail, a consensus is yet to be reached about how and when phonemic categories emerge. This study used novel implicit PR measures with preschool children (n= 38, aged 3 years, 6 months to 4 years, 6 months) to test predictions made by these competing accounts of PR development. The measures were designed to probe PR segmentation at the phoneme (rather than the phone) level without requiring an explicit awareness of phonemes. The results provide evidence in support of vocabulary driven restructuring, with PR segmentation found to be related to vocabulary when controlling for age.

Lexical characteristics of words and phonological awareness skills of preschool children

ABSTRACTThe lexical restructuring model (LRM; Metsala & Walley, 1998) can be used to explain the development of phonological awareness (PA). According to LRM, as children's vocabularies increase, children develop a more refined lexical representation of the sounds comprising those words, and in turn children become more sensitive to the detection of specific phonemes. LRM identifies several lexical characteristics of words that influence lexical restructuring: age of acquisition (AoA), word frequency, neighborhood density, and phonotactic probability. In this study, the effects of these lexical characteristics on children's performance on PA tasks were evaluated, as well as moderation of these effects by children's oral language skills and ages, in two independent samples of preschool children who completed measures of PA and oral language. For both samples, AoA and word frequency were negatively related to PA skills, and phonotactic probability was positively related to PA skills. Children's ages and oral language skills were positive predictors of PA skills, and children's ages moderated the relations between AoA and PA skills for children in Sample 2. Children's oral language skills moderated the relations between AoA and PA skills for children in Sample 1. Implications are discussed.