Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 10 of 10
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Associative Plurals, Sherry Hucklebridge
Associative Plurals, Sherry Hucklebridge
Doctoral Dissertations
The goal of this dissertation is to present an analysis of associative plurals in Japanese, Turkish, and Armenian that captures their associative interpretation along with a series of cross-linguistically consistent behaviours that do not seem to stem directly from these special meanings. For associative plurals, group affiliation is established through spatio-temporal or conceptual contiguity rather than a shared description (Moravcsik 2003). Approaches to English-like additive plurality are unable to capture associative plurals because they predict a plurality based on similarity, where every element of a plural noun is either an element of the corresponding singular or a concatenation of those …
The Online Processing Of Even's Likelihood Presupposition, Erika Mayer
The Online Processing Of Even's Likelihood Presupposition, Erika Mayer
Doctoral Dissertations
Even is a focus-sensitive semantic operator that introduces a presupposition about likelihood. Under many semantic accounts, even’s likelihood presupposition requires the sentence with even to be less likely than a set of contextually-relevant alternatives. On one hand, even’s presupposition is complex, and this complexity may cause delays in processing. On the other hand, despite—and indeed because—of this complexity, even has the potential to be highly informative to readers. In this dissertation, I investigate whether and how even interacts with lexical predictability in online processing. If comprehenders are able to rapidly process even, they may be able to …
The Emptiness Of The Present: Fronting Constructions As A Window To The Semantics Of Tense, Petr Kusliy
The Emptiness Of The Present: Fronting Constructions As A Window To The Semantics Of Tense, Petr Kusliy
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation is devoted to the temporal interpretation of fronting constructions in English and the phenomenon of the Sequence of Tense. It provides and analyzes previously unobserved data from verb phrase fronting constructions in which the simultaneous interpretation of a present tense embedded under a matrix past tense is available. These data are theoretically unexpected and challenging because most theories of English tense disallow this interpretation for Present-under-Past configurations. An account that captures the new data is proposed. It establishes a connection between the simultaneous interpretation of Present-under-Past and the mode of semantic composition between a verb and its complement. …
The Head-Quarters Of Mandarin Arguments, Hsin-Lun Huang
The Head-Quarters Of Mandarin Arguments, Hsin-Lun Huang
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation looks at the syntactic distributions of various Mandarin arguments and develops an argument structure that takes into account the arguments’ semantic types. Theories of argument realization mostly build on a one-to-one correspondence between the syntactic positions of arguments and the thematic relations they bear to the verb in the underlying structure. And this correspondence is rooted in the assumption that the argument positions in the verb’s projection must be saturated before other semantic compositions can take place. This dissertation argues that the saturation requirement can be alleviated, depending on whether languages make a morphological distinction in their syntax. …
Movement And The Semantic Type Of Traces, Ethan Poole
Movement And The Semantic Type Of Traces, Ethan Poole
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation argues that there are only two possible semantic representations of movement: (i) a bound variable, i.e. trace, ranging over an individual semantic type, such as entities and degrees, or (ii) reconstruction back into the launching site of movement. Even though natural language has expressions over higher types, these expressions cannot be represented as traces, which only range over individual types. I call this constraint the Trace Interpretation Constraint. The novel empirical motivation for this constraint comes from a detailed investigation of movement targeting DPs that denote properties, a kind of higher-type expression. I observe that such movement obligatorily …
The Form And Acquisition Of Free Relatives, Michael Clauss
The Form And Acquisition Of Free Relatives, Michael Clauss
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation examines the syntax of Free Relatives (FRs) in English at different stages of first language acquisition. The goal is to provide a theory of Free Relatives that explains phenomena in adult and child FRs, is feasibly learnable by a child, and reflects principles expressed in theories of Universal Grammar based on the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1993, 1995, 2005). The central empirical concern is the difference between the distribution of Wh expressions in FRs vs. Wh questions in English, the difference in grammaticality between Charles wondered dish what Sebastian made and *Charles ate what dish Sebastian made (*Wh-NP). To …
Building Meaning In Navajo, Elizabeth A. Bogal-Allbritten
Building Meaning In Navajo, Elizabeth A. Bogal-Allbritten
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation contributes to the growing tradition of work in which detailed exploration of understudied languages informs formal semantic and syntactic theory and probes the tension between crosslinguistic grammatical variation and crosslinguistic commonality in communicative goals. The dissertation focuses on two topics in Navajo (Diné Bizaad): (i) attitudes of 'thinking' and 'desiring' and (ii) the expression of adjectival meaning and degree constructions. The first part of the dissertation presents the methodological and linguistic background for the rest of the dissertation. Chapter 1 discusses the project of crosslinguistic semantic research and fieldwork methodology. Chapter 2 gives a broad introduction to the …
Fragments And Clausal Ellipsis, Andrew Weir
Fragments And Clausal Ellipsis, Andrew Weir
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of fragments -- utterances which consist of a constituent smaller than a clause. Examples include short answers, such as What did he eat? --- Chips, as well as cases which do not respond to any overt question; for example, saying The train station, please on entering a taxi. I defend Merchant 2004's proposal that, underlyingly, fragments contain clausal structure: the fragment answer chips is elliptical for he ate chips, with he ate being present in the syntax but unspoken. I argue that challenges to ellipsis-based accounts of fragments can be …
Comprehending Each Other: Weak Reciprocity And Processing, Helen Majewski
Comprehending Each Other: Weak Reciprocity And Processing, Helen Majewski
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation looks at the question of how comprehenders get from an underspecified semantic representation to a particular construal. Its focus is on reciprocal sentences. Reciprocal sentences, like other plural sentences, are open to a range of interpretations. Work on the semantics of plural predication commonly assumes that this range of interpretations is due to cumulativity (Krifka 1992): if predicates are inherently cumulative (Kratzer 2001), the logical representations of plural sentences underspecify the interpretation (rather than being ambiguous between various interpretations). The dissertation argues that the processor makes use of a number of general preferences and principles in getting from …
Contrastive Topic: Meanings And Realizations, Noah Constant
Contrastive Topic: Meanings And Realizations, Noah Constant
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation develops a theory of contrastive topics (CTs)—what they mean, and how they are realized. I give a compositional semantics for CT constructions, built on the idea that CT marks anaphora to a complex question in the discourse. The account allows us to maintain an inclusive view of what counts as a contrastive topic, making reasonable predictions about sentences with CT phrases of difference types, in various combinations, and across various speech acts. Empirically, the dissertation focuses on contrastive topic marking in English and Mandarin Chinese. In English, CT phrases are typically realized with a “rising” prosody. I offer …