Copy raising as a lexical rule

The paper argues that there is compelling evidence for analyzing copy raising in English as a lexical rule that converts a subtype of perception verb with a stimulus subject (so-called “flip-perception” verbs) into a semantically bleached verb of mild evidentiary force, roughly equivalent to seem in some uses, which identifies the index of its external argument with the index of the pronominally expressed external argument of its complement.

Perception verbs, copy raising, and evidentiality in Swedish and English

The Germanic languages have a number of different verbs of perception such as ‘see’, ‘hear’, and ‘look like’, and these verbs can appear in different syntactic frames. The literature on these verbs point to many similarities and also interesting and subtle differences between verbs and constructions. This chapter specifically focuses on English ‘look like’ and its Swedish counterpart ‘se ut som’. Specifically, copy-raising examples like ‘Mia looked like she was sleeping’ are compared to expletive examples such as ‘It looked like Mia was sleeping’. A comparison between new psycholinguistic study of Swedish and similar recent studies on Swedish and English lends support to the hypothesis that copy-raising and expletive examples are more similar to each other in English than they are in Swedish: in Swedish the embedded pronoun is less likely to be interpreted as co-referential with the matrix subject.

Seeing vs. Seeing That: Children's Understanding of Direct Perception and Inference Reports

Young children can reason about direct and indirect visual information, but fully mapping this understanding to linguistic forms encoding the two knowledge sources appears to come later in development. In English, perception verbs with small clause complements ('I saw something happen') report direct perception of an event, while perception verbs with sentential complements ('I saw that something happened') can report inferences about an event. In two experiments, we ask when 4-9-year-old English-speaking children have linked the conceptual distinction between direct perception and inference to different complements expressing this distinction. We find that, unlike older children or adults, 4-6-year-olds do not recognize that see with a sentential complement can report visually-based inference, even when syntactic and contextual cues make inference interpretations highly salient. These results suggest a prolonged developmental trajectory for learning how the syntax of perception verbs like see maps to their semantics.

Expressing perception in parallel ways

This chapter compares Pseudo-relatives (‘PRs’), a construction found in most Romance languages, with ‘Subject-wieclauses’ (‘SWs’), a German construction in which the subject of an embedded wie-clause precedes the complementizer wie (‘how’; e.g. Ich sah Maria, wie sie sang, lit. “I saw Mary, how she sung”, i.e. ‘I saw Mary singing’). We show that both constructions mainly occur with perception verbs, and that they have a very similar syntactic behaviour; e.g., they can be coordinated with adjectival or prepositional small clauses and have anaphoric tense. Furthermore, they both have a clausal nature but can modify a DP. We thus propose to extend Casalicchio’s (2016) analysis of PRs to SWs: they are Small Clauses (i.e., they have a typical subject-predicate configuration but no temporal independence) and they project a ForceP that hosts both the subject of the SW and the complementizer wie.

SEMANTICS OF VISUAL PERCEPTION VERBS IN THE ERZYA-MORDVIN AND FINNISH LANGUAGES

The subject of this paper is visual perception verbs in the Erzya-Mordvin and Finnish languages from the point of view of their semantic characteristics in comparison. Depending on the leading role of the sensory system, which, along with the visual system, plays a major role in perception, one distinguishes between auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory perception. This verbal group has a sensuous level of interrelations. Being verbs of perception, they are aimed at objects that have physical characteristics, whereas many of them are focused on the perception of concepts. In this regard, the verbs of perception develop a polysemy that goes in different directions. The novelty of the research lies in the comparative study of the lexical level of the Erzya-Mordvin and Finnish languages, which will allow us to tackle some theoretic aspects of Finno-Ugric linguistics in the future. The problem associated with the study of the semantics of perception verbs, or perceptual activity, is of relevance. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to describe the structure of the semantic field of verbs of one aspect of perception, namely the visual one: to determine the nuclear and peripheral verbal units using the material of the languages under study; to describe the system of meanings of verbal lexemes in the Erzya and Finnish languages, to analyze the polysemy of the studied verbal group in each of the above languages; to reveal additional semantic connotations in verbal lexemes; of particular interest is also the comparative study of the specifics of expression of the same semantic meaning in the context of far-related languages, in this case, Erzya and Finnish.

Semantic features of the sensory-evidential “auditive” grammeme in the Nenets shamanistic songs

The specific semantic features and the functions of sensory evidential verbal “auditive” forms are identified and specified in Nenets shamanistic ritual songs documented by Toivo Lehtisalo at the beginning of the 20th century. The significant typological specificity of Samoyedic evidential systems is the availability of verbal forms marked by special morphological formants expressing sensory evidential meanings. The verbal forms in question, indicating an auditory, acoustic source of receiving the information being communicated, are traditionally termed as “auditive” in Samoyedic linguistics. The cognitive problem is that the particular grammatical meaning of the auditive that is basic in the diachronic levels documented, in fact, coincides with the lexical meaning of the Samoyedic verbs of auditory perception. When used in evidential utterances, they indicate an auditory source of information communicated in the same way as the auditive grammemes in their basic meaning. That is why, at the later stages documented, the Samoyedic “auditive” is assumed to be redundant archaism that is not based on any actual communicative demand but only depends on folklore tradition. Nenets shamanistic ritual song texts informatively documented by Toivo Lehtisalo offer linguistically fact-based, historical, and ethnological facts. These facts make it possible to assume that the Samoyedic “auditive” primarily was grammaticalized in the sacral sphere, and its diachronically earlier semantics reflected the specificity of sacral shamanistic performance ritual communication with invisible ghost helpers. Therefore, the diachronically earlier auditive semantics was specific and different from the lexical semantics of auditive perception verbs.