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- Keyword
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- Semantics (6)
- Pronouns (3)
- Syntax (3)
- Attitudes (2)
- Degree semantics (2)
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- Ellipsis (2)
- Plurals (2)
- Presupposition (2)
- Tense (2)
- Typology (2)
- Accommodation (1)
- Adjectives (1)
- Adverb (1)
- Again (1)
- Ambiguity avoidance (1)
- Amounts (1)
- Argument structure (1)
- Assertions (1)
- Associative plurals (1)
- Athabaskan (1)
- Attitude reports (1)
- Back (1)
- Bayesian pragmatics (1)
- Binding Theory (1)
- Causativization (1)
- Clausal exceptives (1)
- Clause embedding (1)
- Conditionals (1)
- Count; mass; quantification; numerals; measuring; Tupi (1)
- Counterfactual (1)
Articles 1 - 24 of 24
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Counterdirectionality In The Grammar: Reversals And Restitutions, Jyoti Iyer
Counterdirectionality In The Grammar: Reversals And Restitutions, Jyoti Iyer
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation is an exploration of counterdirectionality, a semantic notion encompassing various sorts of reversals, involving either movement along a path, or---more abstractly---the restoring of an object or a state of affairs to a prior condition. Counterdirectionality is a relationship between an asserted event and a presupposed event in a strict temporal ordering. Across languages, it is frequently expressed by presuppositional adverbs that mean BACK (as in English Ali flew back from New York, Bina hugged Ali back, The door swung back open). The distribution of BACK-adverbs tends to overlap in a systematic way with that of …
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 …
'You' Will Always Have 'Me': A Compositional Theory Of Person, Kaden T. Holladay
'You' Will Always Have 'Me': A Compositional Theory Of Person, Kaden T. Holladay
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation investigates the morpho-syntactic makeup of personful expressions
in natural language; special focus is given to referential uses of personal pronouns. The central thesis guiding the inquiry is that utterance contexts, which serve to fix the semantic values of person indexicals, are specifically a kind of centered situation. This treatment of contexts puts restrictions on what kinds of person features are definable, and the resulting inventory of such features (in conjunction with independently-motivated pragmatic constraints on the use of referential expressions) provides a novel explanation for the typology of person systems.
Tense In Conditionals: Ins And Outs, Zahra Mirrazi
Tense In Conditionals: Ins And Outs, Zahra Mirrazi
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation is concerned with the role of tense in bringing about the semantic and pragmatic differences in conditionals. Investigating the contribution
of tense and aspect in Farsi conditionals, this dissertation expands the typology of
temporal morphology in antecedents of conditionals.
First, I make a novel observation that Farsi morphologically distinguishes between hypothetical and factual conditionals. Conditionals with zero tense in their
antecedent require the truth of their antecedent to be unsettled in the context, and
they yield hypothetical interpretation. Conditionals with present tense in their
antecedent require the truth of their antecedent to be settled in the projected context …
The Syntactic And Semantic Atoms Of The Spray/Load Alternation, Michael A. Wilson
The Syntactic And Semantic Atoms Of The Spray/Load Alternation, Michael A. Wilson
Doctoral Dissertations
What is the relationship between the word spray in the sentence John sprayed the paint onto the wall and its identically pronounced counterpart in John sprayed the wall with the paint? At some level, we recognize these two uses of spray as the same word. But the fact that they combine with their arguments in different ways means they cannot be identical. The relationship between these two uses of spray—called the spray/load alternation—is productive in a way that a descriptively adequate grammar of English should capture. Other verbs show the same pattern, adults and children extend …
The Event Structure Of Attitudes, Deniz Özyıldız
The Event Structure Of Attitudes, Deniz Özyıldız
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation focuses on what it means to think that or to think whether something is the case. First, I show that the type of clause that think combines with makes a difference in the kind of attitude a thought report ascribes, and in the kind of eventuality that it describes. With a declarative complement, think entails belief and introduces an eventuality description that may (but need not be) stative. With a question complement, think introduces an eventuality description that is necessarily dynamic, and often deliberative. In this case, there is no entailment of belief, but one of agnosticism and …
Shifting The Perspectival Landscape: Methods For Encoding, Identifying, And Selecting Perspectives, Carolyn Jane Anderson
Shifting The Perspectival Landscape: Methods For Encoding, Identifying, And Selecting Perspectives, Carolyn Jane Anderson
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation explores the semantics and pragmatics of perspectival expressions. Perspective, or point-of-view, encompasses an individual’s thoughts, perceptions, and location. Many expressions in natural language have components of their meanings that shift depending on whose perspective they are evaluated against. In this dissertation, I explore two sets of questions relating to perspective sensitivity. The first set of questions relate to how perspective is encoded in the semantics of perspectival expressions. The second set of questions relate to how conversation participants treat perspectival expressions: the speaker’s selection of a perspective and the listener’s identification of the speaker’s perspective. In Part I, …
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. …
Talking About Her(Self): Ambiguity Avoidance And Principle B. A Theoretical And Psycholinguistic Investigation Of Romanian Pronouns, Rudmila-Rodica Ivan
Talking About Her(Self): Ambiguity Avoidance And Principle B. A Theoretical And Psycholinguistic Investigation Of Romanian Pronouns, Rudmila-Rodica Ivan
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation answers a deceivingly simple question: why can her in Hermione talked about her refer to the sentence subject in Romanian, but not in English? The Romanian facts, which are surprising for both classic and competition-based accounts of the Binding Theory over the last 40 odd years, bring us to the following overarching question: what are the constraints on pronominal reference? To address these main questions, I carry out a psycholinguistic investigation of Romanian pronouns and argue that the distribution and interpretation of pronominal forms is jointly determined by pragmatic and morphosyntactic constraints. I discuss evidence from four experiments, …
Representing Context: Presupposition Triggers And Focus-Sensitivity, Alexander Goebel
Representing Context: Presupposition Triggers And Focus-Sensitivity, Alexander Goebel
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation investigates the role of Focus-sensitivity for a typology of presupposition triggers. The central hypothesis is that Focus-sensitive triggers require a linguistic antecedent in the discourse model, whereas presuppositions of triggers lacking Focus-sensitivity are satisfied as entailments of the Common Ground. This hypothesis is supported by experimental evidence from two borne out predictions. First, Focus-sensitive triggers are sensitive to the salience of the antecedent satisfying their presupposition, as operationalized via the Question Under Discussion, and lead to interference-type effects, while triggers lacking Focus-sensitivity are indifferent to the QUD-structure. Second, Focus-sensitive triggers are harder to globally accommodate than triggers lacking …
The Production And Perception Of Subject Focus Prosody In L2 Spanish, Covadonga Sanchez
The Production And Perception Of Subject Focus Prosody In L2 Spanish, Covadonga Sanchez
Doctoral Dissertations
New information can be introduced in discourse through different strategies, including syntactic and prosodic ones. This project provides an account of the syntactic and intonational strategies used for focus-marking in Peninsular Spanish, Mainstream American English and L2 Spanish using parallel experimental designs and a unitary method of analysis within the Autosegmental-Metrical framework for the study of intonation. It provides a comprehensive description of specific phonological categories and their phonetic implementation not only in monolingual speech, but also as they develop in the L2 grammar of Spanish learners with different experiences with the target language, following the premises of the L2 …
Phrasal And Clausal Exceptive-Additive Constructions Crosslinguistically, Ekaterina Vostrikova
Phrasal And Clausal Exceptive-Additive Constructions Crosslinguistically, Ekaterina Vostrikova
Doctoral Dissertations
This work focuses on the syntax and semantics of exceptive and exceptive-additive constructions across different languages. Exceptive-additive constructions are constructions that can be interpreted as ‘except for’ and ‘in addition to’ depending on the context they are used in. The meaning an exceptive-additive construction gets depends on the other functional elements in a sentence. Those constructions get the exceptive meaning when they are put together with universal quantifiers and they get the additive meaning with existentials, wh-words and focus associates. In each context only one of the meanings is available. This work is the first systematic study of the …
Binding And Coreference In Vietnamese, Thuy Bui
Binding And Coreference In Vietnamese, Thuy Bui
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation investigates the real-time comprehension and final interpretation of object pronouns in Vietnamese, a language in which reflexive and non-reflexive pronominal forms have overlapping meanings. It addresses the questions of whether and how Principle B is applied as a structural constraint to determine the appropriate antecedent for pronouns in the language. The central argument is that Vietnamese speakers rely on two distinct mechanisms to resolve anaphoric relations: Within a pronoun's local domain, even though coreference is highly permissive, binding is strictly prohibited. Results from three two-alternative forced choice and three self-paced reading experiments show consistent profiles for both the …
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. …
Responding To Questions And Assertions: Embedded Polar Response Particles, Ellipsis, And Contrast, Jeremy Pasquereau
Responding To Questions And Assertions: Embedded Polar Response Particles, Ellipsis, And Contrast, Jeremy Pasquereau
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation studies the distribution of Polar Response Particles (i.e. yes/no particles) in embedded contexts with a focus on European French.
Attitudes De Se And Logophoricity, Yangsook Park
Attitudes De Se And Logophoricity, Yangsook Park
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation investigates two related notions that represent attitudes and perspectives, de se attitudes and the notion of logophoricity, based on the case study of the long-distance reflexive caki in Korean, which specifically encodes attitudes towards oneself in attitude reports or co-refers with individuals whose point of view or perspective is represented in a sentence. The main claim of this thesis is that there are distinct semantic/syntactic mechanisms for the obligatory de se interpretation of the long-distance reflexive caki on the one hand, and the long-distance binding of caki on the other. Specifically, for the semantics of the de se …
Meaning And Modality, Jesse Fitts
Meaning And Modality, Jesse Fitts
Doctoral Dissertations
I intended to write four papers whose topics faintly concerned separate issues in meaning and modality. As it turned out, chapters 1-3 all roughly concern the same topic: propositions. While I argue for two different theses in chapters 1 and 2, I try to understand the changing propositions literature in both. In addition to arguing for the respective theses in chapters 1 and 2, accounting for this change is a parallel goal for the chapters taken together. Chapter 3 examines particular propositional roles---the objects of the attitudes and the objects of credence. Finally, chapter 4 changes the subject to the …
Amount Relatives Redux, Jon Ander Mendia
Amount Relatives Redux, Jon Ander Mendia
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation provides a novel analysis of Amount Relatives (Carlson 1977, Heim 1987, Grosu & Landman 1998, Herdan 2008, Meier 2015, a.o). Amount Relatives are a form of non-intersective relative clause that is usually associated with amount interpretations . For example, the sentence it will take us the rest of our lives to drink the champagne they spilled that evening is most naturally interpreted as referring to an amount of champagne, and not any particular champagne. Previous accounts of Amount Relatives have converged in appealing to degree semantics in order to extract an amount from the relative clause, suggesting that …
Verbal -S Productions In The Structured Writing Samples Of Variable Aae-Speaking Fourth-Grade Students With And Without Language Impairment, Jacklyn High Felton
Verbal -S Productions In The Structured Writing Samples Of Variable Aae-Speaking Fourth-Grade Students With And Without Language Impairment, Jacklyn High Felton
Doctoral Dissertations
Researchers in speech-language pathology and ethnolinguistics have worked to gain knowledge about typical and atypical language patterns of African American children who are identified as African American English (AAE) dialect speakers. Much progress had been made, but limitations in this field of knowledge have persisted, especially for AA children who demonstrate variable use of AAE, presumably through the process of assimilation in the school setting. Therefore, more information is needed to provide diagnostic markers for deviations in typical language development for variable AAE-MAE speakers. Prior empirical research has found that third- and fourth-grade AAE-speaking children with typical language development overtly …
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 …
Experiencing In Japanese: The Experiencer Restriction Across Clausal Types, Masashi Hashimoto
Experiencing In Japanese: The Experiencer Restriction Across Clausal Types, Masashi Hashimoto
Doctoral Dissertations
Adjectives of sensation and emotion (Experiencer adjectives) in Japanese can take only the speaker as their experiencer subject in declarative root sentences and the addressee in interrogative root sentences in conversation. This constraint, which I call the Experiencer restriction, is lifted in other various clauses, however. This dissertation examines the Experiencer restriction across clausal types under scrutiny, and presents two analyses of the phenomenon, following the claim by Krifka (2001, 2004), Speas and Tenny (2003) and others that speech acts are syntactically realized. First, I introduce the phenomenon and give a brief review of its analyses which were made before …
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 …
The Grammar Of Individuation And Counting, Suzi Lima
The Grammar Of Individuation And Counting, Suzi Lima
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation investigates the linguistic expression of individuation, counting, quantifying and measuring in Yudja (Juruna family), a Tupi language spoken in Brazil. Based on elicitation data and experimental studies with children and adults, three main topics are explored: (i) the semantic properties of numeral constructions and their compatibility with notional count and notional mass nouns; (ii) the semantics of container phrases and their interaction with numerals, and finally (iii) the semantics of nominal quantifiers. Relying on the principles of mereotopology (Casati and Varzi 1999, Varzi 2007), the main claim of this dissertation is that in Yudja all nouns can be …