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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Parsing And Interpretation Of Comparatives: More Than Meets The Eye, Margaret Ann Grant
The Parsing And Interpretation Of Comparatives: More Than Meets The Eye, Margaret Ann Grant
Open Access Dissertations
This dissertation examines comparative constructions, both in terms of their representation in syntax and semantics and in terms of the way these representations are built and interpreted incrementally during sentence processing. While there has been extensive investigation of comparatives in the syntax and semantics literature (see Bresnan, 1973; von Stechow, 1984; Heim, 1985; Kennedy, 1999, among others), there has been little work on how comparatives are processed (although see Fults and Phillips, 2004; Wellwood et al., 2009 for work on so-called comparative illusions). In the first half of the dissertation, I address issues that are primarily syntactic in nature; in …
Quantification, Misc., Jan Anderssen
Quantification, Misc., Jan Anderssen
Open Access Dissertations
This dissertation investigates various topics concerning the interpretation of determiner phrases and their connection to individual entities. The first chapter looks at a phenomenon called telescoping, in which a quantificational expression appears to bind a pronominal form across sentence boundaries, at odds with commonly assumed and well motivated constraints on binding. I investigate the limited circumstances under which telescoping is available and argue that the mechanism that makes it available should respect said locality constraints. In particular, I argue that the impression of co-variation arises not because of binding by the initial quantificational expression, but because an of independent, albeit …
Constraining Interpretation: Sentence Final Particles In Japanese, Christopher M. Davis
Constraining Interpretation: Sentence Final Particles In Japanese, Christopher M. Davis
Open Access Dissertations
This dissertation is concerned with how pragmatic particles interact with sentential force and with general pragmatic constraints to derive optimal dynamic interpretations. The primary empirical focus of the dissertation is the Japanese sentence final particle yo and its intonational associates. These right-peripheral elements are argued to interact semantically with sentential force in specifying the set of contextual transitions compatible with an utterance. In this way, they semantically constrain the pragmatic interpretation of the utterances in which they occur. These conventional constraints on interpretation are wedded with general pragmatic constraints which provide a further filter on the road to optimal interpretation.
Natural Selection And The Syntax Of Clausal Complementation, Keir Moulton
Natural Selection And The Syntax Of Clausal Complementation, Keir Moulton
Open Access Dissertations
This dissertation examines the syntax and semantics of clausal complements. It identifies semantic underpinnings for some syntactic properties of the arguments of propositional attitude verbs. The way clausal arguments compose with their embedding predicates is not uniform and semantic differences emerge from the syntactic context clausal arguments appear in. Three case studies are taken up: clausal arguments of nouns, dislocated clausal arguments (sentential subjects and topics), and infinitival complements with overt subjects (AcI constructions). Chapter Two assembles evidence to support Stowell’s (1981) claim that the clausal complements of nouns are modifiers. It is shown that the clausal complements of nouns …
Two Types Of Definites In Natural Language, Florian Schwarz
Two Types Of Definites In Natural Language, Florian Schwarz
Open Access Dissertations
This thesis is concerned with the description and analysis of two semantically different types of definite articles in German. While the existence of distinct article paradigms in various Germanic dialects and other languages has been acknowledged in the descriptive literature for quite some time, the theoretical implications of their existence have not been explored extensively. I argue that each of the articles corresponds to one of the two predominant theoretical approaches to analyzing definite descriptions: the `weak' article encodes uniqueness. The `strong' article is anaphoric in nature. In the course of spelling out detailed analyses for the two articles, various …