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Full-Text Articles in Semantics and Pragmatics

Larson's Musical Forces In Schlenker's Music Semantics, Mick De Neeve Nov 2023

Larson's Musical Forces In Schlenker's Music Semantics, Mick De Neeve

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Larson’s musical forces of gravity, magnetism and inertia link music to metaphors of physical motion. Schlenker’s music semantics is based on similar physical world associations. Because Larson’s forces are about note movements towards harmonic stability, his framework implies note groupings at stable boundaries, given common cadential harmony. These groupings with forces assignments can then be viewed as musical events in Schlenker’s approach, and mapped to structure-preserving external (world) events as required for this author’s semantics. To this end, Schlenker’s truth definition, specifying when an event is ‘true of’ a musical expression, will be adapted. The synthesis amounts to what Schlenker …


Syntax And Semantics Of Music: Preface, Philippe Schlenker, Jurgis Skilters Aug 2023

Syntax And Semantics Of Music: Preface, Philippe Schlenker, Jurgis Skilters

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

N/A


Between Verb And Preposition: Diachronic Stages Of Coverbs In Mandarin Chinese, Glynis Jones Apr 2023

Between Verb And Preposition: Diachronic Stages Of Coverbs In Mandarin Chinese, Glynis Jones

Masters Theses

Mandarin Chinese has long been known to possess a category of words known as ‘coverbs’ in the literature, which sit in the gray area between verb and preposition. Li and Thompson (1974) describe the historical origins of Mandarin coverbs to be full transitive verbs, despite their modern state being decidedly less verbal. They also note that coverbs are a non-homogenous class. This thesis works to establish categories of coverbs in Mandarin Chinese and their distance from true verbhood in order to understand the diachronic shift that coverbs are currently undergoing before our very eyes. I will draw on the work …


The Head-Quarters Of Mandarin Arguments, Hsin-Lun Huang Oct 2018

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. …


The Variable Expression Of Transitive Subject And Possesor In Wayuunaiki (Guajiro), Andres M. Sabogal Jul 2018

The Variable Expression Of Transitive Subject And Possesor In Wayuunaiki (Guajiro), Andres M. Sabogal

Linguistics ETDs

In Wayuunaiki, verbal affixes cross-reference clausal arguments in various ways. Most notably, there are two ways to express transitive subjects, and two ways to express possessors. Much like voice alternatives, the variable expression of subject and possessor impart different perspectives on a situation type, but unlike traditional voice categories, syntactic valence remains equal. This dissertation characterizes these constructions with a specific question in mind: what do these two cross-referencing alternations communicate and what influences their usage? To answer these questions, I consider the linguistic properties observed in the usage of these constructions in narratives (Jusayú 1986, 1994), and informal conversations. …


Amount Relatives Redux, Jon Ander Mendia Nov 2017

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 …


Processing Of The English Verb Particle Construction In Persons With Aphasia, David Lopez Jun 2017

Processing Of The English Verb Particle Construction In Persons With Aphasia, David Lopez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examined comprehension of verb particle constructions in persons with aphasia (PWA) and young and older typical adults according to the semantic classes by Jackendoff (2002). The experimental task focused on the following three classes of verb particle constructions: idiomatic, directional, and aspectual verb particles. Movement of the object NP also was examined. The study involved a picture-matching task counterbalanced for each participant. The results revealed that PWAs showed slower than normal overall processing, slower processing of aspectual verb forms, and slower processing of syntactic form regardless of movement. Error analysis revealed a bias toward the meaning of the …


Fragments And Clausal Ellipsis, Andrew Weir Nov 2014

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 …


La Restricción Del Pronombre Explícito En Los Hablantes De Herencia Hispano, Ewelina Barski Nov 2012

La Restricción Del Pronombre Explícito En Los Hablantes De Herencia Hispano, Ewelina Barski

Ewelina Barski, PhD

A talk given on my dissertation topic, discussing Spanish heritage speakers in Canada and their interpretation of the Overt Pronoun Constraint. The talk was presented at a 4th year Spanish linguistics class - Spanish in Contact (SP4412F) - at Western University. The presentation was done in Spanish.


The Opc In Spanish And Polish Monolingual Speakers, Ewelina Barski Dec 2011

The Opc In Spanish And Polish Monolingual Speakers, Ewelina Barski

Ewelina Barski, PhD

A variety of studies have documented the acquisition of the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC) (Montalbetti, 1984) in second language speakers (Kanno 1997, Pérez-Leroux & Glass 1999, Rothman & Iverson, 2007) but none have looked at the OPC from an experimental perspective. This paper takes an experimental approach to the OPC focusing on the mental representation of the OPC in Spanish and Polish monolinguals going beyond L2 speakers and probing into the interpretations that monolinguals assign to pronouns (null and overt) with quantified and referential antecedents. Specifically, I aim to investigate whether there is a difference in how monolinguals treat different …


The Opc: An Experimental Approach, Ewelina Barski Dec 2010

The Opc: An Experimental Approach, Ewelina Barski

Ewelina Barski, PhD

A variety of studies have documented the acquisition of the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC) (Montalbetti 1984) in second language speakers (Kanno 1997, Pérez-Leroux & Glass 1999, Rothman & Iverson 2007). This study is an experimental approach to the Overt Pronoun Constraint in native Spanish speakers. Much has been said about this constraint but very few data have been collected to corroborate the asymmetry between referential NPs and quantified antecedents. According to the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC) (Montalbetti, 1984) unlike the null pronoun, the overt pronoun can never refer back to a quantified expression (1) or a WH-word (2): The overt …


Great Coffee, That Maxwell House!, Ileana Paul Dec 2007

Great Coffee, That Maxwell House!, Ileana Paul

Ileana Paul

No abstract provided.


Nl-Soar Update, Deryle W. Lonsdale Jun 2003

Nl-Soar Update, Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.