4 juny, 2024
Autors:
Jon Ander Mendia & Maria Teresa Espinal
Títol:
Non-agreeing degree constructionsEditorial: Journal of Linguistics (Cambridge University Press)
Data de publicació: Online: 4 juny 2024
Pàgines: 36 Text completThis paper deals with a construction, which we dub Non-Agreeing Degree (NAD) constructions, with the distinguishing property that the agreement pattern between subjects and degree predicates is optionally disrupted, even in languages (like Spanish) where verbs commonly agree with their subjects. We show that the agreeing versus non-agreeing alternation comes with important semantic differences for the interpretation of the degree construction. We provide a first systematic description of this type of constructions and postulate a formal syntactic and semantic analysis. We argue that NAD constructions are characterized by degree predicates that introduce a non-conventional nominal scale and by subjects that are interpreted as equally non-conventional units of measurement. We postulate an intensionalization process on the subject of NAD constructions, which we capture via a general nominalization function that allows a default as well as an ordinary agreement pattern between subject and copula.
10 gener, 2023
Autors:
Joan Mascaró & Francesc Torres-Tamarit
Títol:
Stress-dependent harmony in Asturian and harmony in situEditorial: Language, Linguistic Society of America
Data de publicació: Desembre del 2022
Pàgines: 33 Més informacióIn many cases of stress-dependent harmony the trigger is associated with a morpheme. We examine two instances of morphemic harmony where the triggering morpheme is mixed, that is, it consists of segmental material and floating features. The floating features cause stepwise raising of the stressed vowel, /a/ → [e], and /e/ → [i], /o/ → [u]. We examine in particular Felechosa Asturian, where the triggering masculine singular count morpheme usually has the exponent /-o/ and the floating features [+high] and [−low]. When the stressed vowel is mid, /-o/ raises it to high (/neɡɾ-o/ → [ˈniɣɾ-o]). When the stressed vowel is /a/, the suffix raises this vowel to [e] as predicted, but at the same time the triggering morph /-o/ raises to [u] (/blank-o/ → [ˈbleŋk-u]). This phenomenon, which we call harmony in situ, derives from the fact that, because raising is stepwise, one of the floating features cannot link to the stressed vowel, and thus it has to be realized on the trigger itself. Felechosa Asturian is compared to Ḷḷena Asturian, which does not present harmony in situ, and an optimality-theoretic analysis is provided.
29 desembre, 2022
Autors:
Evripidis Tsiakmakis, Joan Borràs-Comes & M.Teresa Espinal
Títol:
Greek non-negative min, epistemic modality, and positive biasEditorial: Natural Language & Linguistic Theory (Springer)
Data de publicació: 29 de desembre del 2022
Text completModern Greek displays two variants of the word min; one corresponds to a negative marker, and the other corresponds to an epistemic modal. We focus on the latter and provide, for the first time to our knowledge, experimental evidence on its exact interpretation, showing that (i) non-negative min is incompatible with the overt realization of polar propositional alternatives {p,¬p}, (ii) it conveys medium speaker certainty with respect to the expressed proposition p, and (iii) it encodes speaker bias in favor of p. Our findings support the novel generalization that non-negative min is uniformly interpreted as conveying that the speaker is neither unbiased nor negatively biased (as suggested by the previous literature on the topic), but positively biased with respect to a proposition p. We argue that non-negative min is a biased epistemic modal that needs to be licensed by an external non-veridical operator.
31 desembre, 2022
Autors:
Io Salmons & Anna Gavarró
Títol:
Intervention effects in Catalan agrammatismEditorial: Glossa: a journal of general linguistics (Open Library of Humanities)
Data de publicació: 31 de desembre del 2022
Text completThe goal of the present study is to test the agrammatic comprehension of clitic left dislocation and contrastive focus in Catalan, in order to evaluate the Generalised Minimality hypothesis of Grillo (2009). According to this hypothesis, the comprehension deficit observed in agrammatism is the result of the underspecification of scope-discourse features giving rise to generalised intervention effects. We conducted two sentence-picture matching tasks to assess the comprehension of clitic left dislocation and contrastive focus with nine and seven Broca’s aphasic subjects, respectively, as well as control participants. The results show that the comprehension of SVO sentences and object clitics was preserved, whereas the comprehension of object dislocations and object focalisations was compromised. These findings are consistent with the analysis of the deficit as an instance of generalised intervention effects. Yet, we also examined the prediction that a relevant syntactic feature mismatch between the subject and the object would suffice to block generalised minimality effects; in particular, the number features of subject and object were controlled for. The agrammatic subjects’ performance on mismatched sentences did not differ from their performance on sentences where the subject and the object were matched in number. These findings call the hypothesis into question and stress the need for future research.
27 febrer, 2023
Autors:
Evripidis Tsiakmakis, Joan Borràs-Comes i M.Teresa Espinal
Títol:
On the distribution and interpretation of voice in Greek anticausatives. Frontiers in PsychologyEditorial: Frontiers
Data de publicació: 23 de febrer del 2023
Pàgines: 15 Text completThis paper provides experimental evidence in support of the view that Greek does not have three productive morphological classes of anticausative verbs, but only two: the class of verbs that bear non-active voice morphology and the class of verbs that are morphologically active. Across two experiments, native Greek speakers are found to prefer for each anticausative verb either non-active or active voice morphological marking, in the presence or absence of explicit contextual information. It is also shown experimentally that native speakers prefer an interpretation that involves a specific cause for all anticausatives, especially when the existence of such a cause is favored by the contextual setting. Our empirical findings are consistent with the view that the Voice Phrase that is realized as non-active voice morphology in Greek anticausatives is expletive. From a theoretical perspective, we analyze the expletiveness of this Voice projection as the result of semantic redundancy: the Voice head of Greek anticausatives combines with a v head that encodes a redundant cause meaning component and is, therefore, interpreted merely as introducing an identity function.
