The syntax of inner aspect in Hungarian

This paper is concerned with the syntactic representation of inner aspect in Hungarian. We contribute to the extant research on inner aspectual markers by providing an analysis of entailed versus implied telicity as well as the (non)maximality effects with which telic predicates are associated. Although we focus on the grammar of Hungarian, we also draw parallels between typologically different languages like Finno-Ugric (e.g. Hungarian and Finnish) and Germanic (e.g. English) regarding their inner aspectual marking strategies, and the interaction of inner aspect and case assignment.

Semantic and Pragmatic Structures in Chomsky’s Binding Theory

The central question that this paper attempts is to describe the conditions under which the anaphor can be determined grammatically or contextually. The issue at hand is whether anaphoric forms can be distinguished from indexical ones within Binding theory. The syntactic representation of bindees are characterized by the use of indices. But what role does the context play in assigning co-referential or non-coreferential properties to anaphors? Furthermore, ellipses are also context-bound. An elliptical structure is indexical, rather than anaphoric. The study analyzes the syntactic structures of Chomsky’s Binding theory within Bolinger’s (1979) semantic model Meaning and Form. It seeks the support of other semanticists in order to fill possible semantic gaps in Binding theory. Keywords: binding theory, elliptical structures, meaning and form model

An explicit, generative, and automatic syntactic representation of multi-digit numbers

Representing the base-10 structure of numbers is a challenging cognitively ability, unique to humans, but it is yet unknown how precisely this is done. Here, we examined whether and how literate adults represent a number’s full syntactic structure. In 5 experiments, the participants repeated sequences of 6-7 number words, and we systematically varied the order of words within the sequence. Repetition was more accurate when the sequence was grammatical (e.g., ninety-seven) than when it was not (seven-ninety). The performance monotonously improved for sequences with increasingly longer grammatical segments, up to a limit of ~4 words per segment, irrespectively of the number of digits, and worsened thereafter. We conclude that at least for numbers up to 6 digits long, participants represented the number’s full syntactic structure and used it to merge number words into chunks in short-term memory. Short chunks improved memorization, but oversized chunks disrupted memorization. The existence of a chunk size limit suggests that the chunks are not memorized templates, whose size limit is not expected to be so low. Rather, they are created ad-hoc by a generative process, such as the hierarchical syntactic representation hypothesized in Michael McCloskey’s number-processing model. Chunking occurred even when it disrupted performance, and even when external cues for chunking were controlled for or were removed; we conclude that the above generative process operates automatically rather than voluntarily.

Writing Units or Decades First in Two Digit Numbers Dictation Tasks: The Case of Arabic—An Inverted Language

This study investigated the effect of educational level and of the syntactic representation of numbers in Arabic on the task of transcoding two-digit numbers from dictation. The participants were primary, junior-high, and high school pupils and higher education students. All spoke Arabic as a mother tongue. They performed a transcoding task, namely writing two-digit numbers from dictation. Units first\decades first writing patterns were collected depending on the differential syntactic structures of the two-digit number dictated (decades first: whole tens; units first: teen numbers; identical units and decades, remaining two-digit numbers). The findings reveal that in general, Arabic speakers adopt a decades-first writing pattern for two-digit numbers, especially when it is consistent with the syntactic structure of two-digit numbers, as in whole-tens numbers. This decade-first writing pattern is more evident and consistent in junior-high school, high school, and higher education than in primary school due to the improvement in mathematical skills and second and third languages. However, this pattern is modulated by the syntactic complexity of the unit–decade structure. This complexity is more pronounced in two-digit numbers whose processing is more dependent on numerical syntax. Thus, whole-tens numbers, teen numbers, and identical-decade–unit numbers are less complex than the remaining two-digit numbers.

The linguistic impairment of the perfect aspect in Alzheimer’s disease and logopenic primary progressive aphasia

Taking into account that neuropsychological studies with subjects with language pathologies can contribute to the investigation of the organization of syntactic knowledge, the objective of this work is to investigate the syntactic representation of the perfect aspect based on data from subjects with pathologies that affect their language. More specifically, we aimed to investigate the possible phrases associated with the types of the perfect aspect and the hierarchy among them. This work aims to investigate the syntactic representation of the perfect aspect. Therefore, we sought to verify a possible linguistic impairment of this aspect in individuals diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and Primary Progressive Logopenic Aphasia (LPPA). A double case study was carried out with one patient with AD and another with LPPA. The methodology consisted of applying functionality tests, neuropsychological tests, and linguistic tests. The results indicated that both the AD patient and the LPPA patient present functional decline and cognitive impairment, with the degree of impairment of the first patient being more extensive than that of the second one in both cases. Regarding language, the patient with AD showed impairment with all four types of perfect, present tense, and imperfective aspect, whereas the LPPA patient has shown impairment only in perfect of recent past and present tense. Based on the results we propose the existence of a phrase to perfect of recent past and the dominance of the temporal phrase over the perfect phrases in the syntactic hierarchy.

EXPRESS: When the independence of syntactic representation meets the sentence processing of Mandarin: Evidence from syntactic priming

There is no consensus on whether syntactic representation is independent of semantic representation in Mandarin. In four experiments, we adopted the syntactic priming paradigm to investigate the independence of syntactic representation in Mandarin. Experiments 1 and 2 investigated the priming effects of double object construction (DO) and prepositional object construction (PO) with the ditransitive verb being repeated across the prime and target. Experiment 1 showed two-way priming effects of DO and PO. Experiment 2 showed that the syntactic priming effects persisted regardless of whether the semantic features (animacy of the Theme) matched across the prime and target or not. Furthermore, such effects persisted in Experiments 3 and 4 where the ditransitive verb across the prime and target was not repeated. Taken together, these findings provide evidence that syntactic/semantic independence is universal and favored over the traditional Chinese grammar account, which claims that the syntactic representation of Mandarin is not independent of the semantic representation.

Consistent disjunctive sequent calculi and Scott domains

Based on the framework of disjunctive propositional logic, we first provide a syntactic representation for Scott domains. Precisely, we establish a category of consistent disjunctive sequent calculi with consequence relations, and show it is equivalent to that of Scott domains with Scott-continuous functions. Furthermore, we illustrate the approach to solving recursive domain equations by introducing some standard domain constructions, such as lifting and sums. The subsystems relation on consistent finitary disjunctive sequent calculi makes these domain constructions continuous. Solutions to recursive domain equations are given by constructing the least fixed point of a continuous function.

Recursion and the Definition of Universal Prosodic Categories

It is widely agreed that prosodic constituents should mirror syntactic constituents (unless high-ranking prosodic constraints interfere). Because recursion is a feature of syntactic representations, one expects recursion in prosodic representations as well. However, it is of current controversy what kinds of syntactic representation motivate prosodic recursion. In this paper, the use of Phonological Phrase recursion is reviewed in several case studies, chosen because prosodic recursion mostly does not reflect syntactic recursion as defined in current syntactic theory. We provide reanalyses that do not appeal to prosodic recursion (unless syntactically motivated), showing that Phonological Phrase recursion is not necessary to capture the relevant generalizations. The more restrictive use of prosodic recursion we argue for has the following conceptual advantages. It allows for more consistent cross-linguistic generalizations about the syntax–prosody mapping so that prosodic representations more closely reflect syntactic ones. It allows the fundamental syntactic distinctions between clause (and other phases) and phrase to be reflected in the prosodic representation, and it allows cross-linguistic generalizations to be made about the prosodic domain of intonational processes, such as downstep and continuation rise.