The effect of filler complexity and context on the acceptability of wh-island violations in Dutch

Acceptability judgements of syntactic island violations are often claimed to improve by either increasing the complexity of the wh-filler phrase or integrating the violating sentence into a discourse. In two acceptability judgement tasks, we looked at wh-island violations in Dutch by varying the complexity of the filler phrase and by presenting the sentences either in isolation or with a preceding discourse. We found that neither variable had a significant effect in isolation, but that only in their combination a significant effect was observed. The same effect showed up in non-island conditions, however. This is in contrast to findings in the literature on English and French and suggests that the complexity effect in Dutch is not syntactic. We therefore conclude that wh-islands are strong islands in Dutch (Broekhuis & Corver 2015) and show that the contrast with English and French can be made to follow from featural Relativized Minimality (Rizzi 2017), taking into account the verb second property of Dutch.

Tense and aspect in Xhosa

This dissertation investigates the semantics of each tense and aspect in Xhosa. Since tense and aspect perform important pragmatic functions, the analysis takes into account the correlation between the verb and the wider discourse in which it is embedded. Tense reflects the temporal relation between the time of the utterance (speech time) and an interval the speaker makes the assertion about (reference time). The Remote Past and the Remote Future tenses differ from their Recent/Immediate counterparts in that they denote events which occurred in a significantly different situation than the speech time and/or events in the surrounding discourse. Aspect does not only indicate the relation between the time occupied by the real world event and the reference time chosen by the speaker. The Perfective aspect represents an event as a unique change-of-state that pertains to a single point on the timeline which at the same time functions as the reference time. By contrast, for the Imperfective aspect temporally links the event to a contextually provided reference time, e.g. the utterance time, a time adverbial, a period of time previously introduced in the preceding discourse, or the interlocutors’ shared experience. At the pragmatic level, the Perfective aspect tends to introduce an event’s resulting state into the discourse, whereas the Imperfective aspect tends to rule it out. Like the Imperfective aspect, the Anterior and the Prospective aspects assert an event’s occurrence from a contextually defined reference time. They refer to the consequent and the preparatory states of an event, respectively. On the pragmatic level, the Anterior aspect may also indicate that the truth-conditionality of the event’s resulting state is contradicted in the immediate discourse. This study shows that tense and aspect temporally represent different means of temporally assigning an event to a particular portion of the timeline. I further argue that aspect indicates whether the reference time is provided in the context (Imperfective, Anterior, Prospective) or whether it is introduced by the verb itself (Perfective). Furthermore, this study shows that aspect exhibits a pragmatic function by laying focus on different parts of the event that are relevant in the upcoming discourse.

Animacy, Anaphora and Language Change in Swedish

This paper considers the role of animacy in the overt marking of indirect anaphors, i.e., noun phrases (NP), which introduce new discourse referents, that are grounded in the preceding discourse by means of a grounding element, an anchor. The indirect anaphors are considered in a diachronic perspective with reference to the emergent definite article and the variation between the article and other marking elements, in particular possessive pronouns. The study is based on an annotated corpus of Swedish prosaic texts from 1200–1550, which is a period of time when the definite article undergoes the process of grammaticalization in this language. The material was sorted according to the different combinations of the animacy of the anchor and the anaphor.The indirect anaphors which are anchored by means of expressions referring to animate entities show more variation of expression than those expressions referring to inanimate entities at the onset of definite article grammaticalization, but as the grammaticalization progresses, all indirect anaphors are by default expressed by the definite article. This is connected with the ongoing grammaticalization of the definite article and its extended use in new contexts. Keywords animacy; indirect anaphora; language change; definite article; Swedish

An Alleged Ambiguity and the Dynamics of Context-Change

The observation that demonstrative expressions allow for both bound and referential readings, and can be bound across sentence boundaries, provides independent motivation for a shifty account of context. Dynamic semantics offers an elegant model of shiftiness, in treating the context as a running record of potential interpretive dependencies, and utterances as instructions to update and possibly change extant dependencies. Such an account advances over the static Kaplanean model insofar as it allows for the interpretation to be dynamically affected by the linguistic elements in the preceding discourse. However, due to the way it represents linguistic dependencies, and due to its reliance on both linguistic and non-linguistic effects of context to determine interpretation, the account still makes demonstrative pronouns indefinitely ambiguous at the level of logical form, thus inheriting some of the theoretical problems of the static account.

In the Case of Theme: Topic Identifiers in English and Norwegian Academic Texts

This paper investigates the use of clause-initial constituents prefaced by topic-identifying expressions such as in terms of, in the case of and their Norwegian counterparts. The focus is on the nature, frequency and discourse functions of these in a corpus of published academic writing in English and Norwegian and across three disciplines. Such expressions are rather infrequent overall, but medicine uses them the least and linguistics the most in both languages. The functions of the construction can be compared either to those of left dislocation or to other types of clause-initial adverbials depending on the degree of coreference between the theme and some element in the rheme. The pattern with coreference is more common in Norwegian than in English. Generally, topic identifiers are used for announcing explicitly a theme that represents a topic shift or a contrast with the preceding discourse. The study contributes to contrastive pragmatics through its focus on the discourse-pragmatic functions of the expressions under study and the cross-linguistic comparison of this type of information structuring device across different disciplines of academic writing.

Predictability, plausibility and possibility

Late positive event-related potential (ERP) components occurring after the N400,traditionally linked to reanalysis due to syntactic incongruence, are increasinglyconsidered to also reflect reanalysis and repair due to semantic difficulty.Semantic problems can have different origins, such as a mismatch of specificpredictions based on the context, low plausibility, or even semantic impossibilityof a word in the given context. DeLong, Quante & Kutas (2014) provided the firstdirect evidence for topographically different late positivities for prediction mismatch(left frontal late positivity for plausible but unexpected words) and plausibilityviolation (posterior-parietal late positivity for implausible, incongruent words).The aim of the current study is twofold: (1) to replicate this dissociation of ERPeffects for plausibility violations and prediction mismatch in a different language, and(2) to test an additional contrast within implausible words, comparing impossibleand possible sentence continuations. Our results replicate DeLong, Quante & Kutas(2014) with different materials in a different language, showing graded effects forpredictability and plausibility at the level of the N400, a dissociation of plausible andimplausible, anomalous continuations in posterior late positivities and an effect ofprediction mismatch on late positivities at left-frontal sites. In addition, we foundsome evidence for a dissociation, at these left-frontal sites, between implausiblewords that were fully incompatible with the preceding discourse and those for whichan interpretation is possible.

On Left-Peripheral Expletives in Central Colombian Spanish

This chapter analyzes a construction involving an expletive-like demonstrative, eso, which appears in the left periphery of the clause in dialects of Spanish spoken in Central Colombia and Venezuela, two closely related null-subject varieties. This expletive is optional, it can only appear preverbally, and is mostly restricted to declarative matrix clauses. When it appears in questions, they can only be interpreted as echo (noninformational) questions. It is incompatible with a wide focus interpretation; rather it introduces a contrast with some discoursive item or some salient element in the context. The essay builds on previous proposals for related optional expletives in Romance, which propose that optional expletives are subjects of predicational cleft-like structures such as it is true that where some parts have been deleted. The current proposal suggests that eso is the subject of a predication whose predicate is the full clause. The expletive, in turn, links to the preceding discourse.

Peaches and eggplants or. . . something else? The role of context in emoji interpretations

This paper presents the results of an experiment designed to measure interpretations of two emojis oft-discussed in popular culture, the eggplant and the peach. The experiment asked people to judge how sexual an emoji-containing text message was. The context surrounding these messages was manipulated across experimental conditions, altering both the preceding discourse and the presence of a sentence-final wink emoji. Unsurprisingly, the baseline interpretation of both the eggplant and peach emoji is euphemism. When one of these emojis is used in a context that strongly biases towards the non-euphemistic interpretation, ratings for sexualness decrease and variability increases. This suggests that participants are still able to access non-euphemistic interpretations of these emojis, but it must be under specific circumstances and will nonetheless come with a high degree of variability. Wink emojis added to messages containing non-euphemistic food emojis were also rated as more highly sexual (albeit still low on the rating scale), indicating an affective role for this emoji.

Dissociating predictability, plausibility and possibility of sentence continuations in reading: evidence from late-positivity ERPs

Late positive event-related potential (ERP) components occurring after the N400, traditionally linked to reanalysis due to syntactic incongruence, are increasingly considered to also reflect reanalysis and repair due to semantic difficulty. Semantic problems can have different origins, such as a mismatch of specific predictions based on the context, low plausibility, or even semantic impossibility of a word in the given context. DeLong, Quante & Kutas (2014) provided the first direct evidence for topographically different late positivities for prediction mismatch (left frontal late positivity for plausible but unexpected words) and plausibility violation (posterior-parietal late positivity for implausible, incongruent words). The aim of the current study is twofold: (1) to replicate this dissociation of ERP effects for plausibility violations and prediction mismatch in a different language, and (2) to test an additional contrast within implausible words, comparing impossible and possible sentence continuations. Our results replicate DeLong, Quante & Kutas (2014) with different materials in a different language, showing graded effects for predictability and plausibility at the level of the N400, a dissociation of plausible and implausible, anomalous continuations in posterior late positivities and an effect of prediction mismatch on late positivities at left-frontal sites. In addition, we found some evidence for a dissociation, at these left-frontal sites, between implausible words that were fully incompatible with the preceding discourse and those for which an interpretation is possible.