Why-questions and focus in Italian

In this study we argue that the appropriateness of an answer to a why-question, potentially bearing on multiple contrast classes, is mainly influenced by the focalized argument, which identifies the relevant reference set. The focalization structure, however, interacts in a non-trivial way with the thematic structure and its accessibility, suggesting a general (independent) prominence of the direct object (DO) over the indirect one (IO). In correlation to that, we also observed that DO appears more resistant to extraction compared to IO, while it seems felicitous in a post-IO focalized low position (light NP-shifting). These contrasts are obtained by running five distinct experiments in Italian targeting various dislocation configurations: Four forced choice tasks manipulating leftward dislocation (i) clefting versus (ii) fronting versus (iii) clitic left dislocation and (iv) postverbal reordering (canonical DO IO order vs. IO DO) in ditransitive predicates. Then (v) an acceptability judgment study was administered to assess the difficulty in figuring out a licensing context coherent with the argument ordering, provided in the why-question. To minimize the interacting factors, all sentences included null subjects and a context was provided for each experimental item in the forced choice tasks, introducing the relevant contrast classes.

Experimental Evidence on Island Effects in Spanish Relative Clauses

Research on islands has been central to linguistic theory for more than 50 years. Its importance relies on the theoretical consequences islands posit for movement and long distance dependencies. In this paper we aim to explore the contrast between a variety of islands in Spanish relative clauses to reveal whether there is any gradience in the strength of the island effects. In order to tease apart fine-grained contrasts we run an acceptability judgment study based on the factorial definition of island, an experimental paradigm that aims to isolate the various factors that can affect the acceptability of a sentence involving island violations. Overall, we found that the five constructions tested (embedded wh-questions, whether-clauses, adjuncts, complex NPs and relative clauses) show island effects in Spanish and that there are limited differences in the size of these effects, which points to a more categorical view of islands.

Cabaran Penguatkuasaan Penghakiman Mahkamah Syariah: Kajian Peranan Bahagian Sokongan Keluarga Terhadap Hak Wanita dan Kanak-Kanak di Sarawak

Cabaran Penguatkuasaan Penghakiman Mahkamah Syariah: Kajian Peranan Bahagian Sokongan Keluarga Terhadap Hak Wanita dan Kanak-Kanak di Sarawak Abstrak Penghakiman yang diputuskan oleh Hakim Syarie di Mahkamah Syariah hendaklah dipatuhi oleh pihak-pihak. Ketidakpatuhan penghakiman Mahkamah Syariah akan memberikan kesan terhadap wanita dan kanak-kanak dari aspek kewangan. Penguatkuasaan dan pelaksanaan penghakiman boleh diambil tindakan di Mahkamah Syariah. Kertas penyelidikan ini bertujuan melihat cabaran penguatkuasaan penghakiman yang memfokuskan kepada fungsi dan peranan Bahagian Sokongan Keluarga Jabatan Kehakiman Syariah Malaysia di Sarawak. Pendekatan metodologi yang digunapakai bagi kertas kerja ini ialah pendekatan kualitatif. Penyelidikan mendapati bahawa BSK JKSM yang ditempatkan di Sarawak merupakan satu langkah yang proaktif diambil oleh JKSM untuk memastikan penghakiman Mahkamah Syariah dipatuhi oleh pihak Penghutang Penghakiman. Penguatkuasaan penghakiman yang dilaksanakan adalah penghakiman nafkah anak, nafkah isteri, nafkah eddah dan mutaah dikuatkuasakan melalui mekanisme perundangan yang berkuatkuasa di Sarawak. Terdapat beberapa cabaran dalam pelaksanaan penguatkuasaan penghakiman di Sarawak yang telah diambil tindakan dan langkah pemerkasaan oleh pihak JKSM dan Jabatan Kehakiman Syariah Sarawak. Pemerkasaan bahagian ini dilakukan secara holistik dan optimum dari segi kekangan kakitangan, fasiliti dan kompetensi pegawai. Kata Kunci: Bahagian Sokongan Keluarga, Penguatkuasaan Perintah, Sarawak, Hak Wanita, Hak Kanak-kanak Challenges in Enforcement of Syariah Court Judgment: Study of The Role of The Family Support Division on The Rights of Women and Children in Sarawak Abstract The judgment decided by the Syariah Judge in the Syariah Court shall be complied with by the parties. Non-compliance with Syariah court judgments will have a financial impact on women and children. Enforcement and execution of judgments can be taken action in Syariah Courts. This research paper is aimed to view the challenges of judgment enforcement focusing on the functions and roles of the Family Support Division of the Department of Syariah Judiciary Malaysia in Sarawak. The methodological approach of the study which this paper is based is a qualitative approach. The study has revealed that BSK JKSM located in Sarawak is a proactive step taken by JKSM JKSM to ensure that the judgment of the Syariah Court is complied with by the Judgment Debtor. The enforcement of the judgment is that the judgment of child maintenance, wife's maintenance, eddah maintenance and mutaah is enforced through the legal mechanism in force in Sarawak. There are several challenges in the implementation of judgment enforcement in Sarawak that have been taken action and empowerment measures by the JKSM and Department of Syariah Judiciary Sarawak. The empowerment of this division is done holistically and optimally in terms of staff constraints, facilities and officer competencies. Keywords: Family Support Division, Enforcement of judgment, Sarawak, Women's Rights, Children's Rights

Experimental Evidence on Island Effects in Spanish Relative Clauses

Research on islands has been central to linguistic theory for more than 50 years. Its importance relies on the theoretical consequences islands posit for movement and long distance dependencies. In this paper we aim to explore the contrast between a variety of islands in Spanish relative clauses to reveal whether there is any gradience in the strength of the island effects. In order to tease apart fine-grained contrasts we run an acceptability judgment study based on the factorial definition of island, an experimental paradigm that aims to isolate the various factors that can affect the acceptability of a sentence involving island violations. Overall, we found that the five constructions tested (embedded wh-questions, whether-clauses, adjuncts, complex NPs and relative clauses) show island effects in Spanish and that there are limited differences in the size of these effects, which points to a more categorical view of islands.

What Do We Hear in the Voice? An Open-Ended Judgment Study of Emotional Speech Prosody

The current study investigated what can be understood from another person’s tone of voice. Participants from five English-speaking nations (Australia, India, Kenya, Singapore, and the United States) listened to vocal expressions of nine positive and nine negative affective states recorded by actors from their own nation. In response, they wrote open-ended judgments of what they believed the actor was trying to express. Responses cut across the chronological emotion process and included descriptions of situations, cognitive appraisals, feeling states, physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, emotion regulation, and attempts at social influence. Accuracy in terms of emotion categories was overall modest, whereas accuracy in terms of valence and arousal was more substantial. Coding participants’ 57,380 responses yielded a taxonomy of 56 categories, which included affective states as well as person descriptors, communication behaviors, and abnormal states. Open-ended responses thus reveal a wide range of ways in which people spontaneously perceive the intent behind emotional speech prosody.

Balancing information-structure and semantic constraints on construction choice: building a computational model of passive and passive-like constructions in Mandarin Chinese

A central tenet of cognitive linguistics is that adults’ knowledge of language consists of a structured inventory of constructions, including various two-argument constructions such as the active (e.g., Lizzy rescued John), the passive (e.g., John was rescued by Lizzy) and “fronting” constructions (e.g., John was the one Lizzy rescued). But how do speakers choose which construction to use for a particular utterance, given constraints such as discourse/information structure and the semantic fit between verb and construction? The goal of the present study was to build a computational model of this phenomenon for two-argument constructions in Mandarin. First, we conducted a grammaticality judgment study with 60 native speakers which demonstrated that, across 57 verbs, semantic affectedness – as determined by further 16 native speakers – predicted each verb’s relative acceptability in the bei-passive and ba-active constructions, but not the Notional Passive and SVO Active constructions. Second, in order to simulate acquisition of these competing constraints, we built a computational model that learns to map from corpus-derived input (information structure + verb semantics + lexical verb identity) to an output representation corresponding to these four constructions (+“other”). The model was able to predict judgments of the relative acceptability of the test verbs in the ba-active and bei-passive constructions obtained in Study 1, with model-human correlations in the region of r = 0.5 and r = 0.3, respectively. Surprisingly, these correlations increased (to r = 0.75 and r = 0.5 respectively) when lexical verb identity was removed; perhaps because this information leads to over-fitting of the training set. These findings suggest the intriguing possibility that acquiring constructions involves forgetting as a mechanism for abstracting across certain fine-grained lexical details and idiosyncrasies.

Situated Embodiment: When Physical Weight Does and Does Not Inform Judgments of Importance

Bodily sensations impact metaphorically related judgments. Are such effects obligatory or do they follow the logic of knowledge accessibility? If the latter, the impact of sensory information should be moderated by the accessibility of the related metaphor at the time of sensory experience. We manipulated whether “importance” was on participants’ minds when they held a physically heavy versus light book. Participants held the book while making an importance judgment versus returned it before making the judgment (Study 1) or learned prior to holding the book that the study was about “importance evaluations” versus “graphics evaluations” (Study 2). In both studies, the same book was judged more important when its heft was increased but only when importance was on participants’ minds at the time of sensory experience. We conclude that sensory experiences only impact metaphorically related judgments when the applicable metaphor is highly accessible at the time of experience.

Situated embodiment: When physical weight does and does not inform judgments of importance

Bodily sensations impact metaphorically related judgments. Are such effects obligatory or do they follow the logic of knowledge accessibility? If the latter, the impact of sensory information should be moderated by the accessibility of the related metaphor at the time of sensory experience. We manipulated whether “importance” was on participants’ minds when they held a physically heavy vs. light book. Participants held the book while making an importance judgment vs. returned it before making the judgment (Study 1) or learned prior to holding the book that the study was about “importance evaluations” vs. “graphics evaluations” (Study 2). In both studies, the same book was judged more important when its heft was increased, but only when importance was on participants’ minds at the time of sensory experience. We conclude that sensory experiences only impact metaphorically-related judgments when the applicable metaphor is highly accessible at the time of experience.

Sheikh Nuruddin Al-Raniri Description Of Heaven In Bad 'Al-Khalq Al-Samawat Wa Al-Ard [MSS 1517(A)]

Sheikh Nuruddin al-Raniri (d. 1658) is a renowned scholar in the Malay archipelago during the rule of Sultan Iskandar Thani (1636-1641 AD) in Acheh. He had authored 35 works on various disciplines of Islam and Bad 'al-Khalq al-Samawat wa al-Ard describes the concept of heaven genesis in Jawi manuscript MSS1517 (A). This article is a preliminary analysis of the manuscript focusing on excerpts of al-Raniri's exposition on the meaning of heaven and its categories. That heaven has respective names and inhabitants in the Day of Judgment. Study on the biography of al-Raniri and the written scripture was conducted by analyzing al-Raniri's thinking pattern, which was extracted from the book. Moreover, the concept of the natural phenomenon was explained and discussed intensively following Islamic thinking. Then each phrase and al-Raniri’s ideology was clearly defined base on the interpretation of Qur’an and hadiths. Result of this study shows that the writing method done by al-Raniri was mostly focusing on imagining the condition of a specific place in heaven. Keywords: al-Raniri; Bad 'al-Khalq al-Samawat wa al-Ard; heaven; earth eISSN: 2398-4287 © 2020. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BYNC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia.DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/ebpj.v5iSI1.2300