Zero, Null Individuals, and Nominal Semantics in Cantonese

It has been convincingly argued that English zero provides evidence for introducing null individuals into the ontology of natural language (Bylinina & Nouwen 2018). We examine ‘zero’ in Cantonese, where it provides evidence that such null individuals are a matter of crosslinguistic variation. Cantonese zero has a more restricted distribution. It occurs widely in a number of contexts, but it is systematically ruled out with ordinary classifiers. These facts, coupled with assumptions about the nature of measurement and nominal semantics, demonstrate despite its extensive use in the language, zero is impossible in precisely the uses that require null individuals. Cantonese seems to be telling us that such null individuals are simply absent from its ontology, implying an interesting difference in natural language metaphysics between the languages—and perhaps a different perspective on what theoretical shape crosslinguistic variation can take.

A multilingual corpus study of the competition between past and perfect in narrative discourse

The western European present perfect is subject to substantial crosslinguistic variation. The literature, however, focuses on individual languages or on comparisons of a restricted number of languages. We piece together the puzzle and do so in a data-driven way by comparing the use of the present perfect through a parallel corpus based on the French novel L’Étranger and its translations in Italian, German, Dutch, European Spanish, British English, and Modern Greek. We introduce and showcase Translation Mining, a software suite combining a parallel corpus database with annotation and analysis tools. Translation Mining allows us to generate descriptive statistics of tense use across languages but also to visualize variation through its multidimensional scaling component and to link the variation we find to the underlying data through its integrated setup. We confirm that the present perfect competes with the past and we reveal the fine-grained scalar nature of the variation. To complete the puzzle, we ascertain the dimensions of variation, ranging from lexical and compositional semantics to dynamic semantics and pragmatics.1

A Novel Approach to the Syntax of Chinese Adjectival Predicates: Differences between Standard Mandarin and Sichuanese Mandarin

In Mandarin Chinese, bare adjectives can only function as predicates when they co-occur with some other elements in certain contexts, most typically the degree adverb hen ‘very’. This phenomenon cannot be found in other languages like English. To explain this crosslinguistic variation, researchers have developed different theories, among them the most developed theory regards hen ‘very’ as an overt positive morpheme. Previous studies have all focused on just one Mandarin variety, namely Standard Mandarin (STM). However, the present theory cannot apply to other Mandarin varieties like Sichuanese Mandarin which, as this paper demonstrates, does not have an overt positive morpheme. This paper provides new data from Sichuanese Mandarin and proposes that register grammar should be taken into consideration. A novel, hybrid approach to explain this crossdialectal variation is given in this paper.

The locus of parametric variation in Bantu gender and nominal derivation

In this paper, we capture the crosslinguistic variation in Bantu nominal structure in a unified analysis of gender on n (Kramer 2014, 2015). We demonstrate that this analysis accounts for the morphosyntactic properties of basic nouns as well as locative and diminutive derivations. Moreover, it allows us to capture intra- and inter-language morphosyntactic variation by reference to just three parameters – one strictly morphological and two structural. The presence of one or two n heads, and the size of the complement distinguish between different types of locatives (structural variation); the presence or absence of a spell-out rule of adjacent n heads differentiates “stacking” versus “non-stacking” prefixes in diminutive and augmentative derivations (morphological variation only).

Edge Features and Multiple Wh-Questions

Building on Chomsky’s (2000) proposal that A’-movement is triggered by an EPP-type of feature added to phase heads and Bošković’s (2007) proposal that the relevant feature is to be found on the moving element itself, Nunes (2020) has argued that these two apparently conflicting views ultimately instantiate different grammatical options available at UG. He shows that much of the crosslinguistic variation regarding single wh-questions hinges on whether edge features (features that trigger successive cyclic A’-movement) are lexically associated with wh-elements or phase heads and whether the edge features are intrinsically valued or unvalued. In this paper, I extend this approach to multiple wh-questions, showing that these factors also derive the basic typology of multiple wh-questions found in natural languages.

Numeral Any: the view from Farsi

This paper documents a dimension of crosslinguistic variation among Universal Free Choice Items. In English, the distribution and interpretation of any DPs containing a numeral ("numeral any") differs from that of any DPs with no numeral (Dayal 2005, 2013; Chierchia 2013). In contrast, the Farsi counterparts of any and numeral any mirror each other. Two competing analyses of the contrast between any and numeral any are assessed against the Farsi data – the Wide Scope Constraint Analysis (Chierchia 2013) and the Viability Constraint Analysis (Dayal 2013). The paper shows that, with minimal extensions, either analysis can capture the behavior of the Farsi counterpart of numeral any with distributive predicates. The situation changes, however, when the minimally modified analyses are assessed with respect to sentences with collective predicates: the extended Wide Scope Constraint Analysis captures the attested interpretation of those sentences, but the extended Viability Constraint Analysis rules them out, undergenerating.

Formal Basis of a Language Universal

Steedman (2020) proposes as a formal universal of natural language grammar that grammatical permutations of the kind that have given rise to transformational rules are limited to a class known to mathematicians and computer scientists as the “separable” permutations. This class of permutations is exactly the class that can be expressed in combinatory categorial grammars (CCGs). The excluded non-separable permutations do in fact seem to be absent in a number of studies of crosslinguistic variation in word order in nominal and verbal constructions. The number of permutations that are separable grows in the number n of lexical elements in the construction as the Large Schröder Number Sn−1. Because that number grows much more slowly than the n! number of all permutations, this generalization is also of considerable practical interest for computational applications such as parsing and machine translation. The present article examines the mathematical and computational origins of this restriction, and the reason it is exactly captured in CCG without the imposition of any further constraints.

Psych predicates in European languages

Previous work on psych predicates has so far mostly focused on verbs and their non-canonical argument structures within and across languages. In this study, we propose a usage-based account using parallel subtitles in seven European languages in order to examine the intralinguistic and crosslinguistic variation of psychological expressions. We start out from 12 semantically defined psychological concepts rather than concrete constructions; this allows us to include verbal and non-verbal expressions and thus to assess the variation and distribution of construction types of psychological expressions found in language use. We show that while there is a high degree of variation in terms of constructions used within languages, psychological expressions are relatively stable across languages. On the other hand, we find systematic, crosslinguistic concept-specific preferences for psychological expressions.

Crosslinguistic similarity and variation in the simultaneous morphology of sign languages

Two differences between signed and spoken languages that have been widely discussed in the literature are: the degree to which morphology is expressed simultaneously (rather than sequentially), and the degree to which iconicity is used, particularly in predicates of motion and location, often referred to as classifier predicates. In this paper we analyze a set of properties marking agency and number in four sign languages for their crosslinguistic similarities and differences regarding simultaneity and iconicity. Data from American Sign Language (ASL), Italian Sign Language (LIS), British Sign Language (BSL), and Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) are analyzed. We find that iconic, cognitive, phonological, and morphological factors contribute to the distribution of these properties. We conduct two analyses—one of verbs and one of verb phrases. The analysis of classifier verbs shows that, as expected, all four languages exhibit many common formal and iconic properties in the expression of agency and number. The analysis of classifier verb phrases (VPs)—particularly, multiple-verb predicates—reveals (a) that it is grammatical in all four languages to express agency and number within a single verb, but also (b) that there is crosslinguistic variation in expressing agency and number across the four languages. We argue that this variation is motivated by how each language prioritizes, or ranks, several constraints. The rankings can be captured in Optimality Theory. Some constraints in this account, such as a constraint to be redundant, are found in all information systems and might be considered non-linguistic; however, the variation in constraint ranking in verb phrases reveals the grammatical and arbitrary nature of linguistic systems.