On the grammaticality of morphosyntactically reduced remnants in Polish sluicing

This paper explores the grammaticality status of reduced sluicing remnants (i.e., remnants realized as NPs due to preposition drop) in Polish. We provide experimental evidence that reduced remnants are variously acceptable in a specific environment (where there is a prior explicit correspondent in the antecedent clause) and are as unacceptable as ungrammatical structures elsewhere. We interpret this pattern as reflecting elaboration effects (i.e., effects that the degree of elaboration of explicit correspondents has on the acceptability of reduced remnants) that follow from the cue-based retrieval theory of sentence processing. Our data support the option of treating reduced remnants as ungrammatical but sometimes acceptable and the option of treating them as grammatical but sometimes degraded, and we discuss how they fit into the current theories of clausal ellipsis.

Image inspired Chinese couplet generation

Chinese couplets, as one of the traditional Chinese culture, is the treasure of Chinese civilization and the inheritance of Chinese history. Given a sentence (namely an antecedent clause), people reply with another sentence (namely a subsequent clause) equal in length. Because of the complexity of the semantic and grammatical rules of couplet, it is not easy to create a suitable couplet that meets the requirements of sentence pattern, context, and flatness. With the development of neural models and natural language processing, automatic generation of Chinese couplets has drawn significant attention due to its artistic and cultural value, most of these works mainly focus on generating couplet by given text information, while visual inspirations for couplet generation have been rarely explored. In this paper, we design a Chinese couplet generation model based on NIC (Neural Image Caption), which can compose a piece of couplet suitable to the artistic conception in an image. At first, we use the improved VGG16 model to predict the input image. The content of the image can be automatically recognized and the corresponding description are generated and translated into Chinese keywords. Then, the encoder-decoder framework is used repeatedly to process these keywords, and finally the couplet can be generated. Moreover, to satisfy special characteristics of couplets, we incorporate the attention mechanism into the encoding-decoding process, which greatly improves the accuracy of couplets generated automatically.

Structure and inference in Japanese right dislocation

This paper explores the syntactic nature of Japanese Right Dislocation Constructions (RDCs) by illuminating the ellipsis sites in the postverbal domains of the constructions via pragmatic inference. Although the most prevailing bi-clausal analysis of RDCs adopts the perspective that the repetition of the antecedent clause occurs in collocation, this paper shows that the same surface strings are potentially ambiguous since right dislocation is a heterogeneous phenomenon. It proposes additional types of a bi-clausal structure and discusses evidence that suggests that even when the surface strings are the same the recovery of the ellipsis site is possibly derived in multiple ways through the use of distinct linguistic strategies.

Counteridenticals and dream reports

Counteridenticals are counterfactual conditional sentences whose antecedent clausescontain an identity statement, e.g. If I were you, I’d buy the blue dress. Here, we argue thatcounteridenticals are best analyzed along the lines of dream reports. After showing that counteridenticalsand dream reports exhibit striking grammatical and perceptual parallels, we suggestan analysis of counteridenticals with Percus and Sauerland’s (2003) analysis of dreamreports. Following their proposal, we propose to make use of concept generators, realized ascentered worlds. To this end, we argue that the presence of if licenses the presence of an imagine-operator, which constitutes the attitude the antecedent clause ‘x be-PAST y’ is taken under;The speaker predicates, in the imagine mode, the consequent property to his/her imagined self.To capture the different degrees of identification between the subject and the predicate of theidentity statement of counteridenticals’ antecedents observed in the literature, we incorporatePercus and Sharvit’s (2014) notion of asymmetric be into the analysis. This proposal has severaladvantages over existing analyses (Lakoff, 1996; Kocurek, 2016) of counteridentical meaning,as it both explains the different degrees of identification observed for counteridenticals andcorrectly predicts the parallels between counteridenticals and dream reports.Keywords: Counteridenticals, counterfactuals, dream reports, pronoun movement

The Bound Variable Hierarchy and Donkey Anaphora in Mandarin Chinese

Cheng and Huang (1996) argue that both unselective binding and E-type pronoun strategies are necessary for the interpretation of natural language sentences and claim that there exists a correspondence between two sentence types in Chinese and the two strategies, namely that the interpretation of the “wh … wh” construction (which they call “bare conditional”) employs the unselective binding strategy, while the ruguo ‘if’ and dou ‘all’ conditionals use the E-type pronoun strategy. They also suggest that there is a complementary distribution between bare conditionals and ruguo/dou conditionals in the sense that the latter allows all the NP forms, e.g. (empty) pronouns and definite NPs, except for wh-phrases in their consequent clauses, and can even have a consequent clause with no anaphoric NP in it, while the former permits only the same wh-phrase appearing in both the antecedent clause and the consequent clause. Although we agree with Cheng and Huang on the necessity of the two strategies in natural language interpretation, we see apparent exceptions to the correspondence between sentence types and interpretation strategies and the complementary distribution between wh-phrases and other NPs in bare conditionals and ruguo/dou conditionals. We think that the claimed correspondence and complementary distribution are the default or preferred patterns, or a special case of a more general picture, namely that (i) bare conditionals prefer the unselective binding strategy and the ruguo ‘if’ and dou ‘all’ conditionals, the E-type pronoun strategy; and (ii) wh-phrases are more suitable for being a bound variable, and pronouns are more suitable for being the E-type pronoun. This paper proposes a Bound Variable Hierarchy to help account for the distribution of wh-phrases and pronouns in Chinese conditionals and claims that any deviation from the preferred patterns will require additional contexts or accommodation.

Tense, Indexicality, and Consequence

This chapter outlines the problem of framing a theory of the temporal indicators of natural language in all their complexity and, in particular, of understanding the interaction of linguistic and contextual elements. It describes how the phenomenon of sequence of tense shows that tense logic is too limited, since it excludes the cross-reference typical of bound variables; it suggests instead that the tenses express temporal relations between events conceived as in Davidson. The particular discussion leads to the general question of the form of truth conditions for sentences in an indexical language. The discussion advocates conditional truth conditions, in which an antecedent clause spells out the import of the indexical elements. It goes on to describe two notions of a model for a language with such truth conditions, the notions varying as to whether the satisfaction of such antecedents is incorporated, and thus diverging in their conceptions of logical consequence.

Successive-Cyclic Movement and Island Repair: The Difference between Sluicing and VP-Ellipsis

It is well known that in sluicing constructions wh-dependencies can cross certain projections that are otherwise barriers to movement (Ross 1969, Chomsky 1972). This fact would follow under the assumption that the relevant barriers are somehow deactivated when phonologically deleted (“island repair”). The problem, however, is that another form of phonological deletion (VP-ellipsis; VPE) seems to be impossible in certain contexts where sluicing allows for island repair (Chung, Ladusaw, and McCloskey 1995, Merchant 2001). Nevertheless, we argue against the conclusion that island repair is a special property of sluicing. The argument is based on two observations. First, the difference between sluicing and VPE seems too broad to warrant the conclusion that island repair is the distinguishing factor (Lasnik 2001). Second, the conclusion is directly refuted by other VPE environments where island repair is possible (Kennedy and Merchant 2000; Fox, in preparation). The argument leaves us with a puzzle that we attempt to resolve while still maintaining the null hypothesis that VPE and sluicing involve the same operation of deletion, differing only in the size of the deleted constituent. Our proposed resolution capitalizes on a special property of the relevant sluicing contexts—namely, the presence of an indefinite NP in the antecedent clause in a position parallel to that of a trace in the elided clause. We argue that given the parallelism conditions on ellipsis, this fact prevents the wh-phrase in the elided clause from undergoing successive-cyclic movement. The remaining option (one-fell-swoop movement) requires the deletion of all barriers, including those that would otherwise be circumvented via an intermediate landing site. Such deletion occurs in sluicing but not in VPE, which targets a smaller constituent.

Sluicing phenomena

The paper shows that in various sluicing types, the wh-phrase in the sluicing sentence as well as its relatum in the antecedent clause must be F-marked, and it explains this observation with Schwarzschild's (1999) and Merchant's (1999) focus theory. According to the semantics of the wh-phrase, it will argue that the relatum of the wh-phrase is an indefinite expression that must allow a specific interpretation. Following Heusinger (1997, 2000), specificity will be defined as an anchoring relation between the discourse referent introduced by the indefinite expression and a discourse given item. Because specific indefinite expressions are always novel, contexts like the scope of definite DPs, the scope of thematic matrix predicates, and the scope of downward-monotonic quantifiers which all exhibit non-novel indefinites do not allow sluicing.