The Processing of Negation and Polarity: An Overview

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and negation-related phenomena in psycholinguistics. In generative theoretical linguistics, negation and polarity sensitivity have been extensively studied, as the related phenomena are situated at the interfaces of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and are thus extremely revealing about the architecture of grammar. With the now long tradition of research on negation and polarity in psychology and psycholinguistics, and the emerging field of experimental semantics and pragmatics, a multitude of interests and experimental paradigms have emerged which call for re-evaluations and further development and integration. This special issue contains a collection of 16 research articles on the processing of negation and negation-related phenomena including polarity items, questions, conditionals, and irony, using a combination of behavioral (e.g., rating, reading, eye-tracking and sentence completion) and neuroimaging techniques (e.g., EEG). They showcase the processing of negation and polarity with or without context, in various languages and across different populations (adults, typically developing and ADHD children). The integration of multiple theoretical and empirical perspectives in this collection provides new insights, methodological advances and directions for future research.

Polysemy and grammaticalization of verbs of throwing: evidence from Hill Mari

The paper deals with verbs of throwing in Hill Mari (Finno-Ugric). The data were collected in fieldwork mainly by elicitation, as well as by analyzing the corpus of transcribed oral narratives. First of all, two dominant lexemes of this semantic field are taken into account. These lexemes display clear differences in their Aktionsart properties. The differences between the lexemes with regard to a number of parameters previously proposed in typology are investigated, their relevance is evaluated. New parameters for their opposition are put forward. In addition, the article discusses the peripheral verbs of adjacent semantic fields (destruction and distribution in space). The correlations between more general distributive semantics of the peripheral lexemes and their semantic content in the contexts of throwing are considered. Special attention is paid to the grammaticalization of dominant verbs of throwing in complex verb constructions and to the analysis of their distributional constraints. Both the similarities between the constructions (participant with a semantic role of Patient, semantics of destruction) and the diff erences between them (constraints on plurality) are studied. Data on complex verb constructions are also discussed in the light of the cross-linguistic variation in the semantic shifts typical of the domain under consideration

Matching with Constraints

In recent years, a number of new challenges have been observed in the application of matching theory. One of the most pressing problems concerns how to allocate refugees to hosts safely and in a timely manner. Currently, this placement is implemented on an ad hoc basis where the preferences of both refugees and hosts are not taken into account. Another important realization is that real-life matching markets are often subject to various distributional constraints. For example, there has been increased attention to school choice models that take account of affirmative action and diversity concerns. The objective of this research is to design efficient algorithms while satisfying desirable properties for these new emerging problems.

The grammar of indefinites

This chapter discusses the two indefinites that have been treated as specific indefinites in scholarship on Classical Latin: quidam ‘a certain’ and aliquis ‘some (or other)’. While with quidam the referent is introduced as known to the speaker, aliquis expresses ignorance on the part of the speaker with respect to the exact identity of the discourse referent. As concerns quidam, the pragmatic conditions it obeys in Classical and Late Latin are examined, and possible causes for the fact that it is not continued in Romance are discussed. In the case of aliquis, it is argued that a better description of its semantic properties can be reached by treating it as an epistemic indefinite. In Late Latin some of the distributional constraints to which it was subject in the Classical language disappear: aliquis extends into polarity contexts, preluding the behavior of its Romance continuations.

Strategyproof and Fair Matching Mechanism for Union of Symmetric M-convex Constraints

In this paper, we identify a new class of distributional constraints defined as a union of symmetric M-convex sets, which can represent a variety of real-life constraints in two-sided matching settings. Since M-convexity is not closed under union, a union of symmetric M-convex sets does not belong to this well-behaved class of constraints in general. Thus, developing a fair and strategyproof mechanism that can handle this class is challenging. We present a novel mechanism called Quota Reduction Deferred Acceptance (QRDA), which repeatedly applies the standard DA mechanism by sequentially reducing artificially introduced maximum quotas. We show that QRDA is fair and strategyproof when handling a union of symmetric M-convex sets. Furthermore, in comparison to a baseline mechanism called Artificial Cap Deferred Acceptance (ACDA), QRDA always obtains a weakly better matching for students and, experimentally, performs better in terms of nonwastefulness.