Linear Lengthening in Iwaidja: An Event-Quantifying Intonation at the Phonology to Semantics/Pragmatics Interface

This paper investigates the meaning of a specific intonation contour found in the Northern Australian language Iwaidja called Linear Lengthening Intonation (LLI). Using an experimental field work approach, we analysed approximately 4,000 utterances. We demonstrate that the semantics of LLI is broadly event-quantificational as well as temporally scalar. LLI imposes aspectual selectional restrictions on the verbs it combines with (they must be durative, i.e. cannot describe ‘punctual’, atomic events), and requires the event description effected by said verbs to exceed a contextually-determined relative scalar meaning (e.g., a ‘typical duration’ à la (Tatevosov 2008)). Iwaidja differs from other Northern Australian languages with similar intonation patterns (see e.g. (Bishop 2002: 2002; Simard 2013)), in that it does not seem to have any argument NP-related incremental or event scalar meaning. This suggests that LLI is a decidedly grammatical, language-specific device; not a purely iconic kind of expression (even though it also possibly has an iconic dimension).

Application of Morphosyntactic Cues in Detection of GOAL Semantic Role

This paper analyzes the semantics of verbs with the prefix “do-” and explains the adlativity feature based on the morpho-syntactically annotated corpus hrWaC and handcrafted verb valency frames. The work aims to automatically add all types of adlativity to Croatian verb valency lexicon. As a result, it was revealed that if a language resource encodes “do-” as the adlative prefix in Croatian as a source language, then the adlative meaning in the target language can be assumed as well. Using the valency frame transition rules for language pairs, it is possible to design matching verb valency frames in other languages and consequently describe each verb and its translation by semantic roles (agent, patient, direction-to, and goal) and by selectional restrictions.

A Rose by Any Other Verb: The Effect of Expectations and Word Category on Processing Effort in Situated Sentence Comprehension

Recent work has shown that linguistic and visual contexts jointly modulate linguistic expectancy and, thus, the processing effort for a (more or less) expected critical word. According to these findings, uncertainty about the upcoming referent in a visually-situated sentence can be reduced by exploiting the selectional restrictions of a preceding word (e.g., a verb or an adjective), which then reduces processing effort on the critical word (e.g., a referential noun). Interestingly, however, no such modulation was observed in these studies on the expectation-generating word itself. The goal of the current study is to investigate whether the reduction of uncertainty (i.e., the generation of expectations) simply does not modulate processing effort-or whether the particular subject-verb-object (SVO) sentence structure used in these studies (which emphasizes the referential nature of the noun as direct pointer to visually co-present objects) accounts for the observed pattern. To test these questions, the current design reverses the functional roles of nouns and verbs by using sentence constructions in which the noun reduces uncertainty about upcoming verbs, and the verb provides the disambiguating and reference-resolving piece of information. Experiment 1 (a Visual World Paradigm study) and Experiment 2 (a Grammaticality Maze study) both replicate the effect found in previous work (i.e., the effect of visually-situated context on the word which uniquely identifies the referent), albeit on the verb in the current study. Results on the noun, where uncertainty is reduced and expectations are generated in the current design, were mixed and were most likely influenced by design decisions specific to each experiment. These results show that processing of the reference-resolving word—whether it be a noun or a verb—reliably benefits from the prior linguistic and visual information that lead to the generation of concrete expectations.

The Argument and Semantic Structures of Japanese Verb Give

This study examines four Japanese synonymous verbs that have the same equivalent in English, namely GIVE. These four Japanese synonymous verbs are ageru, kureru, kizou suru, and kifu suru. This study used a qualitative descriptive method. Example sentences for the data were taken from Balance Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese corpus data. The theories applied in this study are argument structure theory and Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory. Based on the analysis, there were selectional restrictions found in the argument structure of these synonymous verbs that can be used to distinguish one verb from another. In addition, these synonymous verbs, although there are some overlapping meaning components, have distinctive meaning components belonging to each verb. Therefore, it can be said that these synonymous verbs cannot fully replace each other in all contexts.

Af hverju góðlátlegur en ekki *góðleglátur?: Um leyfilegar og óleyfilegar viðskeytaraðir í íslensku

Í greininni er sagt frá rannsókn á viðskeytaröðum í íslensku með nafnorðs- og lýsingarorðsviðskeytum í fyrsta sæti, hversu algengar þessar raðir eru og hvaða valhömlur (e. selectional restrictions) eru ráðandi í viðskeytingunni. Þessar raðir voru fengnar þannig að 26 viðskeyti sem mynda nafnorð voru pöruð við 22 viðskeyti sem tengjast nafnorðum og sömuleiðis voru 9 viðskeyti sem mynda lýsingarorð pöruð saman við 12 viðskeyti sem tengjast lýsingarorðum. Eftir stóð 661 möguleg röð þegar vinsaðar höfðu verið út raðir með samskonar viðskeytum (sbr. t.d. -legleg). Leitað var að staðfestum röðum meðal þessara mögulegu raða í Íslenskum orðasjóði og Beygingarlýsingu íslensks nútímamáls og fundust 36 slíkar, 19 raðir með nafnorðsviðskeyti í fyrsta sæti og 17 raðir með lýsingarorðsviðskeyti í fyrsta sæti. Mögulegar ástæður fyrir hlutfallslega fáum staðfestum röðum eru ræddar. Valhömlur spila stórt hlutverk til þess að skýra þetta. Sum viðskeyti geta t.d. ekki tengst grunnorðum sem sjálf eru viðskeytt þó þau geti hæglega tengst tvíkvæðum grunnorðum (sbr. t.d. -lát). Að auki virðist nær ómögulegt að breyta röð viðskeyta innan orðs og sum viðskeyti geta ekki bætt við sig viðskeytum og geta því ekki myndað viðskeytaraðir. Í greininni er einnig fjallað um ‚klofna viðskeytingu‘ þar sem eignarfallsendingar koma á milli tveggja viðskeyta en endingin gerir það að verkum að viðskeytingin getur haldið áfram, sbr. dæmi eins og leikaraskapur. Öll þessi atriði eiga sinn þátt í því að staðfestar viðskeytaraðir eru hlutfallslega fáar í íslensku.

Japanese embedded questions are nominal: Evidence from quantificational variability effect

The exhaustivity of an embedded interrogative sentence can be altered by the presence of an adverb in the matrix clause. This phenomenon, known as Quantificational Variability Effect (QVE), manifests itself in a peculiar way in Japanese. A QVE-inducing adverb can take the form of a numeral classifier that agrees with the embedded Wh-phrase. While a QVE-inducing numeral classifier appears to be associated with an embedded wh-phrase, it is not clear how such an association can be established. I argue that Japanese embedded questions are implicitly nominalized in the fashion similar to the internally-headed relative clause construction, and that the nominalized embedded questions are treated as concealed questions. The proposed analysis gives a very simple account for the puzzling QVE construction, as the floated quantifier structure with a concealed-question-denoting NP is commonplace. The paper examines a variety of phenomena, such as doubly headed relative clause structure and selectional restrictions on QVE, which support the nominal structure of Japanese embedded questions.

Light verb variations and varieties of Mandarin Chinese: Comparable corpus driven approaches to grammatical variations

This article presents a classification and clustering based study to account for the differences among five Chinese light verbs (congshi, gao, jiayi, jinxing, and zuo) as well as their variations in Mainland China Mandarin (ML) and Taiwan Mandarin (TW). Based on 13 linguistic features, both competition and co-development of these light verbs are studied in terms of their distinct and shared collocates. The proposed method discovers significant new grammatical differences in addition to confirming previously reported ones. Most significant discoveries include selectional restrictions differentiating deverbal nominals and event nouns, and degrees of transitivity of VO compounds. We also find that most variations between Mainland China Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin are in fact differences in tendencies or preferences in contexts of usage of shared grammatical rules.

Category Mismatches in Coordination Revisited

We reexamine cases of coordinated elements that do not match in syntactic category. We show that these fall into two types. The first type includes predicates, modifiers in the clausal domain, and such modifiers apparently coordinated with arguments. We argue that these do not actually involve coordination of unlike categories. The second type involves coordinated arguments of different categories. With this type, unlike the first, noninitial conjuncts may violate selectional restrictions. To account for these violations, researchers have typically posited a special status for the first conjunct in a coordinate structure, such that it alone can determine the category of the coordinate phrase. We show that such accounts are untenable. First, the final conjunct can be what matters for selection, if it is closest to the selecting or selected element. Second, category mismatches are not free, but are extremely limited and exactly match those observed in ellipsis and displacement. This calls for a uniform account of these mismatches, not one specific to coordination. We spell out such an analysis, in which displacement, ellipsis, and coordination permit certain categories to behave as certain other categories through their effects on null syntactic heads.

Causation and dispositions: Towards a semantic characterization of the French causative verb laisser

The French causative verb laisser can enter two different constructions: a monoclausal one resembling the faire-infinitive construction (Kayne 1975, Alsina 1992, Guasti 1996, Folli & Harley 2007) and a biclausal one. While differences in interpretation between these two constructions have been pointed out (Kayne 1975, Enghels & Roegiest 2012), the link between structure and conceptual representation has not been clearly defined yet. In this paper, we tackle the syntax and semantics of causative laisser adopting as a background Talmy’s (1988) force dynamics model of causation. We further show that the link to the selectional restrictions of the causative verb can be made by considering forces as dispositional causal properties (Fara 2001), that is, properties that become relevant with respect to the role of an entity in a causal chain.

How Animacy and Verbal Information Influence V2 Sentence Processing: Evidence from Eye Movements

There exists a clear association between animacy and the grammatical function of transitive subject. The grammar of some languages require the transitive subject to be high in animacy, or at least higher than the object. A similar animacy preference has been observed in processing studies in languages without such a categorical animacy effect. This animacy preference has been mainly established in structures in which either one or both arguments are provided before the verb. Our goal was to establish (i) whether this preference can already be observed before any argument is provided, and (ii) whether this preference is mediated by verbal information. To this end we exploited the V2 property of Dutch which allows the verb to precede its arguments. Using a visual-world eye-tracking paradigm we presented participants with V2 structures with either an auxiliary (e.g. Gisteren heeft X … ‘Yesterday, X has …’) or a lexical main verb (e.g. Gisteren motiveerde X … ‘Yesterday, X motivated …’) and we measured looks to the animate referent. The results indicate that the animacy preference can already be observed before arguments are presented and that the selectional restrictions of the verb mediate this bias, but do not override it completely.