Semantics and Pragmatics Commons^™

Navajo Classification And Coercion, Theodore B. Fernald, Mary Ann Willie

Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas

No abstract provided.

The Problem Of Quechua -Nka Distributivity Vs. Group Forming, Martina Faller

Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas

No abstract provided.

Multiple Questions In And About Yiddish, Molly Diesing

Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas

No abstract provided.

Discontinuous Qps And Lf Interference Effects In Passamaquoddy, Benjamin Bruening, Vivian Lin

Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas

No abstract provided.

Argument And Event Structure In Yukatek Verb Classes, J. Bohnemeyer

Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas

No abstract provided.

Plurality In Sk̲Wx̲Wú7mesh (Squamish Salish): A Look At Reduplication, Leora Bar-El

Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Ji-Yung Kim, Adam Werle

Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas

No abstract provided.

Processing Coercion In A First, Non-Dominant Language: Mandarin-English Heritage Bilinguals, Christina N. Dadurian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent work in heritage language grammars has shown variability in L1 competence, despite high proficiency in both languages. While sources of variation have been debated, little attention has been given to the role of language dominance. This thesis uses a self-paced listening task to explicitly investigate the roles of language dominance and pragmatic competence in how heritage speakers of Mandarin Chinese process aspectual coercion in their non-dominant home language, as compared to late bilinguals. Specifically, constructions that vary in acceptability and salience in input between Mandarin and English are tested: Iterative coercion, complement event coercion of entity NPs, and perfective …

On The Temporal Interpretation Of Epistemic Modals: Evidence From Palestinian Arabic, Alaa M. Sharif

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis aims to contribute to the understanding of temporal interpretation of epistemic modals in Palestinian Arabic (PA), and develop a cross-linguistic analysis. The epistemic necessity modal akeed and the epistemic possibility modal yimkin in PA exhibit similar temporal configurations to English epistemic modals must and might, respectively. We argue for a unified underlying structure to account for the temporal configurations. The linearized combination of the epistemic modal, a silent present tense morpheme and an aspectual head morpheme derive either a present-oriented reading when the aspectual head is empty, or a future-oriented reading in presence of a silent prospective …

The Grammatical Systems Of Attentionworthiness: Positional Signals And Invariant Meanings In Spanish Word Order, Eduardo Ho-Fernández

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents a Columbia School analysis of word order phenomena in Spanish. The data was sourced from a corpus of manually collected utterances extracted from six volumes of Latin American short stories written in the twentieth century. The study employs various qualitative and quantitative techniques in order to test the various hypotheses offered as explanations of the distributional problems selected for the study. The observations roughly correspond to word orders that the grammatical tradition describes as having to do with either verbs with one argument (SV, VS, OV, VO) or verbs with two arguments (SVO, OVS, VSO, VOS, SOV, …

F-Constructions In Yucatec Maya, Judith Tonhauser

Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas

Yucatec Maya, like many other Mayan languages, features a set of constructions, including relative clauses, content questions and focus constructions, that is uniquely characterized by the occurrence of the so-called Agent Focus verb form. The challenge posed by these constructions is to account for why a special verb form occurs only in these constructions. I argue that this is the case because these constructions (which I refer to as F-constructions) share particular structural and semantic properties.

Early Time Reference In Inuktitut Child Language: The Role Of Event Realization And Aspectual Interpretation, Mary Swift

Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas

In Inuktitut, a polysynthetic language spoken by the Inuit of arctic Quebec, a single temporally unmarked verb form is interpreted as either perfective or imperfective, depending on the telicity of the verb stem. The theoretical framework of Bohnemeyer and Swift (in press) explains this alignment pattern with the notion of event realization, that is, the entailment of occurrence of an event (at a certain time). This paper traces the role of event realization and aspectual interpretation in the development of time reference in children acquiring Inuktitut. These children exhibit three developmental phenomena that appear puzzling or contradictory in comparison with …

Temporal Interpretation In Navajo, Carlota S. Smith, Ellavina Perkins, Theodore Fernald

Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas

We discuss temporal location in Navajo. Considering whether Navajo has the category of tense, we argue for a multi-feature approach. We propose, among other features, that tense contributes to atemporal meanings in conditionals and counter-factuals. On this basis we show three kinds of temporal forms in Navajo: a Future tense; Past and Future particles with some tense properties; and temporal adverbials. All are optional, so that many sentences have no direct temporal forms.

In such cases aspectual information gives pragmatic cues to the temporal location of a situation. The key factor is boundedness: in the default case, unbounded situations are …

Not Even In Samish, Scott Shank

Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas

In this paper I examine the particle daL in Samish, which means “just” in non-negative environments and “(not) even” in negative contexts. I initially consider treating daL as a negative polarity item in this second use, and construct a semantic analysis which respects the intuition that it is fundamentally an exclusive particle. The investigation reveals that the major commonality between scalar exclusive particles and scalar additive particles in negative environments is an identical scalar presupposition. The discussion then turns to parallel particles in German and Dutch, and to the minimizer/diminisher distinction in English. I conclude that in the negative cases …

Toward The Tenseless Analysis Of A Tenseless Language, Benjamin Shaer

Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas

In this paper, I argue, based on data from West Greenlandic, that languages can be truly tenseless, in the sense that their inflectional systems contain no node dedicated to the encoding of relations between speech time and reference time. My idea is that the burden of encoding temporal information actually falls mostly on the VP rather than on tense; so that true tenselessness entails neither a radical indeterminacy in the temporal interpretation of tenseless sentences nor a radically different description of the linguistic properties of tensed and tenseless languages, as some have claimed.

Situation Types In American Sign Language, Christian Rathmann

Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas

Several kinds of situation types have often been distinguished in the literature: states, activities, semelfactives, achievements and accomplishments. Since these situation types relate to properties of states and events that occur in the world, they are understood in any language. It is at the linguistic level that situation types are claimed to be encoded differently across languages. This paper argues that all five situation types are manifested at the linguistic level in American Sign Language and is thus chiefly concerned with identifying the linguistic means that ASL uses to distinguish one situation type from another. Examples of linguistic means include …

Is Todo N In Brazilian Portuguese A Quantifier?, Roberta Pires De Oliveira

Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas

This paper investigates whether todo N (universal quantifier + noun phrase) in Brazilian Portuguese is existential (an indefinite) or a universal. It concludes that it is a universal with a modal trait. The first section shows that todo N has properties which distinguish it from definite universal phrases. These properties may be explained by Matthewson’s (2001) suggestion concerning the semantic structures of every and all. Within such an approach, todo N would not be a quantifier. This hypothesis finds support in Negrão’s (2002) analysis, which claims that todo N is an indefinite. Based on Dayal (1998) and Saeboe’s (2001) analyses …

Reference To Contexts In Zuni Temporal And Modal Domains, Lynn Nichols

Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas

Counterfactual interpretation is constructed from two evaluation contexts plus morphology that indicates that the worlds in one of these contexts are located outside the other context serving as a basis of reference (Nichols 2003a). In Zuni (and English), the morphology used to indicate this relation between contexts is also used for 'past' temporal reference. This study argues that 'past' morphology in its temporal interpretation shares the same basic meaning as the modal cases: past tense specifies the type of relationship between a Reference Context and some other context of evaluation. While in English the temporal Reference Context is the Utterance …

Generic Sentences With Indefinite And Bare Subjects In Brazilian Portuguese, Ana Müller

Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas

This paper addresses the semantics of two types of generic sentences in Brazilian Portuguese (BPg): generic sentences with Indefinite Subjects (IS); and generic sentences with Bare Numberless (BN) subjects. The two types of sentences are both instances of generic quantification. Nonetheless, they differ in their semantics: IS sentences are more normative, whereas BN sentences are more descriptive. I show that Greenberg’s 2002 approach for IS and Bare Plural English generic sentences holds for IS and BN generic sentences in BPg, and that the differences between the two sentences should be attributed to the fact that they express different kinds of …

Demonstrative Pseudo-Binding In San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec, Felicia Lee

Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas

Pronouns in San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec (SLQZ), an Otomanguean language of southern Mexico, are subject to Principle C, rather than Principle B, and resist A' as well as A-binding. However, they may be coreferenced with ccommanding lexical demonstratives. Demonstratives crosslinguistically show anomalous coreference behavior; this paper shows that SLQZ pronouns are themselves nonquantificational demonstratives. This proposal will also shed light on the debate over whether demonstratives should be classified as quantificational or nonquantificational: I will argue that SLQZ shows that both types exist, and their quantification properties (or lack of them) are responsible for the possible coreference relations between them.