The Syntax of Dagbani personal pronouns: an analysis

Cross-linguistically, personal pronouns are noted as being deficient in relation to some morphosyntactic and phonological properties. Some striking asymmetries have been identified between strong and weak personal pronouns in relation to modification, coordination/conjunction, whether they have a semantic referent, and can encode focus. This study explores the personal pronominal system of Dagbani along Cardinaletti and Starke’s (1994) typology and observed asymmetries. Using insights from published literature on Dagbani pronouns as well as my understanding as a native speaker, I argue that, unlike personal pronouns in Romance/Germanic languages, Dagbani personal pronouns can be modified by quantifiers, can be coordinated, and can occur in conjunction constructions, as well as encode topic and focus as salient semantic discourse properties. Furthermore, the pre/post verbal distinctions among nonemphatic pronominal forms in Dagbani still hold, even as these occur in coordinated and modified constructions, due to structural constraints imposed on them by coordinating conjuctions and quantifiers.

Investigating Fast Mapping task components: no evidence for the role of semantic referent nor semantic inference in healthy adults

Fast Mapping (FM) is an incidental learning process that is hypothesised to allow rapid, cortical-based memory formation, independent of the normal, hippocampally-dependent episodic memory system. It is believed to underlie the rapid vocabulary learning in infants that occurs separately from intentional memorisation strategies. Interest in adult FM learningwas stimulated by a report in which adults with amnesia following hippocampal damage showed a normal ability to learn new object-name associations after an incidental FM task,despite their impaired memory under a conventional intentional memorisation task. This remarkable finding has important implications for memory rehabilitation, and has led to a number of neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies in other patients and controls. Given this growing interest in adult FM, we conducted four behavioural experiments with healthy adults (N=24 young or older adults in Experiment 1-3 using within-participantdesigns; N=195 young adults in Experiment 4 using a between-participant design) that attempted to dissect which component(s) of the FM task are important for memory. Two key components of the FM task have been claimed to support FM learning: i) provision of a known semantic referent and ii) requirement that the new association be inferred. Experiment 1 provided no evidence that removing the semantic referent impaired memory performance, while Experiment 2 provided no evidence that removing the semantic inference impaired performance. Experiment 3 was a replication of Experiment 2 with older participants, basedon the hypothesis (from studies of amnesic individuals) that FM would be more effective following the hippocampal atrophy typical of increasing age, but again found no evidence that semantic inference is beneficial. Given potential concerns about contamination between tasks when each participant performed multiple variants of the FM task, we ran a final between-participant design in which each participant only ever did one condition. Despite 80% power and despite being able to detect better memory following intentional memorisation in the explicit encoding (EE) control condition than in each of the FMconditions, we again found no evidence of differences between any FM conditions. We conclude that there is no evidence that the components hypothesized to be critical for FM are relevant to healthy adults.

Why Bare Demonstratives Need Not Semantically Refer

I-theories of bare demonstratives take the semantic referent of a demonstrative to be determined by an inner state of the utterer. These states are typically taken to be states that constitute having certain referential intentions. E-theories take the referent to be determined by factors external to the utterer. These are typically taken to be criteria like salience, conversational relevance and the like. The issue has recently flared up again in an exchange between Gauker (2008), who defends an E-theory, and Åkerman (2009; 2010), who defends an I-theory.