When a Hybrid Account of Disorder is not Enough

In this paper I discuss Wakefield’s account of mental disorder as applied to the case of gender dysphoria (GD). I argue that despite being a hybrid account which brings together a naturalistic and normative element in order to avoid pathologising normal or expectable states, the theory alone is still not extensive enough to answer the question of whether GD should be classed as a disorder. I suggest that the hybrid account falls short in adequately investigating how the harm and dysfunction in cases of GD relate to each other, and secondly that the question of why some dysfunction is disvalued and experienced as harmful requires further consideration. This masks further analysis of patients’ distress and results in an unhelpful overlap of two types of clinical patients within a diagnosis of GD; those with gender-role dysphoria and those with sex dysphoria. These two conditions can be associated with different harms and dysfunctions but Wakefield’s hybrid account does not have the tools to recognise this. This misunderstanding of the sources of dysfunction and harm in those diagnosed with GD risks ineffective treatment for patients and reinforcing the very same prejudiced norms which were conducive to the state being experienced as harmful in the first place. The theory needs to engage, to a surprising and so far unacknowledged extent, with sociological concepts such as the categorisation and stratification of groups in society and the mechanism of systemic oppression, in order to answer the question of whether GD should be classed as a mental disorder. Only then can it successfully avoid pathologising normal or expectable states, as has been seen in past ‘illnesses’ such as homosexuality and ‘drapetomania’.

Jeremy is a... Expressive-relativism and expressives in predicative positions

Expressives are words that convey speakers’ attitudes towards a particular object or situation. Consider two examples: Attributive: That f**khead Jeremy forgot the turkey. Predicative: Jeremy is a f**khead. In both examples the word f**khead communicates some expressive content - the negative attitude of the speaker. However, only in Predicative does it appear to contribute to the truth-conditional content. The task is to explain the semantics of the word f**khead when it seemingly behaves wildly differently in different syntactic positions. In this paper I consider several good candidates for dealing with f**khead occurring in Predicative position: Expressivist and Descriptive approaches that treat f**khead in Predicative as purely descriptive; and Expressive-Contextualism that treats Predicative as communicating to both expressive and descriptive dimensions. I show that none of the options fully capture the meaning of f**khead. Treating Predicative as purely descriptive leaves out the highly important expressive element, whilst Contextualist semantics does not seem as a suitable descriptive theory for expressives. I finally present a novel hybrid account that combines Expressivist semantics with Relativism. I call this view Expressive-Relativism. I show that by adopting Expressive-Relativism we can not only explain the relationship of f**khead in Attributive and Predicative, but also give a suitable descriptive theory that captures the truth-conditions of Predicative.

Is structural priming between different languages a learning effect? Modelling priming as error-driven implicit learning

To test whether error-driven implicit learning can explain cross-language structural priming, we implemented three different models of bilingual sentence production: Spanish-English, verb-final Dutch-English, and verb-medial Dutch-English. With these models, we conducted simulation experiments that all revealed clear and strong cross-language priming effects.One of these experiments included structures with different word order between the two languages. This enabled us to distinguish between the error-driven learning account of structural priming and an alternative hybrid account which predicts that identical word order is required for cross-language priming. Cross-language priming did occur in our model between structures with different word order. This is in line with results from behavioural experiments.The results of the three experiments reveal varying degrees of evidence for stronger within-language priming than cross-language priming. This is consistent with results from behavioural studies.Overall, our findings support the viability of error-driven implicit learning as an account of cross-language structural priming.

Presupposed free choice and the theory of scalar implicatures

A disjunctive sentence like Olivia took Logic or Algebra conveys that Olivia didn’t take both classes (exclusivity) and that the speaker doesn’t know which of the two classes she took (ignorance). The corresponding sentence with a possibility modal, Olivia can take Logic or Algebra, conveys instead that she can take Logic and that she can take Algebra (free choice). These exclusivity, ignorance and free choice inferences are argued by many to be scalar implicatures. Recent work has looked at cases in which exclusivity and ignorance appear to be computed instead at the presupposition level, independently from the assertion. On the basis of those data, Spector and Sudo (Linguist Philos 40(5):473–517, 2017) have argued for a hybrid account relying on a pragmatic principle for deriving implicatures in the presupposition. In this paper, we observe that a sentence like Noah is unaware that Olivia can take Logic or Algebra has a reading on which free choice appears in the presupposition, but not in the assertion, and we show that deriving this reading is challenging on Spector and Sudo’s (2017) hybrid account. Following the dialectic in Fox (Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, Palgrave, London, pp 71–120, 2007), we argue against a pragmatic approach to presupposition-based implicatures on the ground that it is not able to account for presupposed free choice. In addition, we raise a novel challenge for Spector and Sudo’s (2017) account coming from the conflicting presupposed ignorance triggered by sentences like #Noah is unaware that I have a son or a daughter, which is infelicitous even if it’s not common knowledge whether the speaker has a son or a daughter. More generally, our data reveals a systematic parallelism between the assertion and presupposition levels in terms of exclusivity, ignorance, and free choice. We argue that such parallels call for a unified analysis and we sketch how a grammatical theory of implicatures where meaning strengthening operates in a similar way at both levels (Gajewski and Sharvit in Nat Lang Semant 20(1):31–57, 2012; Magri in A theory of individual-level predicates based on blind mandatory scalar implicatures, MIT dissertation, 2009; Marty in Implicatures in the DP domain, MIT dissertation, 2017) can account for such parallels.

Turkic default agreement

Baker & Vinokurova (2010) argue for a hybrid account of morphologically observable case, which involves both a configurational theory for accusative and dative, as in Marantz (1991), and case assignment by functional heads for nominative and genitive, as in Chomsky (2001). In the spirit of Levin & Preminger (2015), I argue that a configurational theory is enough to account for the assignment of genitive case. Based on the understudied phenomenon of default agreement with complex possessors in Turkic, I argue that a configurational theory is better equipped at handling the distribution of genitive case. I present a phase-based account of case blocking agreement in order to derive default agreement.

Compatibilism and Incompatibilism in Social Cogntiion

Compatibilism is the view that determinism is compatible with acting freely and being morally responsible. Incompatibilism is the opposite view. It is often claimed that compatibilism or incompatibilism is a natural part of ordinary social cognition. That is, it is often claimed that patterns in our everyday social judgments reveal an implicit commitment to either compatibilism or incompatibilism. This paper reports five experiments designed to identify such patterns. The results support a nuanced hybrid account: The central tendencies in ordinary social cognition are compatibilism about moral responsibility, compatibilism about positive moral accountability, neither compatibilism nor incompatibilism about negative moral accountability, compatibilism about choice for actions with positive outcomes, and incompatibilism about choice for actions with negative or neutral outcomes.

PP-Extraposition and the Order of Adverbials in English

In English, adverbials may intervene between the verb and a selected PP. We consider three analyses of this fact: the traditional account, that the PP shifts rightward across a right-adjoined adverbial ( Stowell 1981 ); an alternative account, that the verb moves leftward across a left-adjoined adverbial ( Pesetsky 1989 , Johnson 1991 ); and a hybrid account that assumes both extraposition and verb raising. We argue that the order of postverbal adverbials favors the extraposition analysis, provided this analysis is combined with the hypothesis that certain adverbials can directly modify other adverbials ( Rohrbacher 1994 , Williams 2014 ). We then compare two instantiations of the extraposition analysis: the traditional account and an antisymmetric account that emulates PP-extraposition through a combination of PP-intraposition and roll-up movement. While close to being notational variants, these accounts can be teased apart using the very strict locality requirement that holds of interaction with temporal only. The data then show that the symmetric account has the edge. Finally, we briefly discuss the implications of our findings for the analysis of the English VP, with a focus on the circumstances under which the verb moves.