We argue that there is an implicit view in psycholinguistics that phonological acquisition is a 'two-stage' process: phonetic categories are first acquired, and then subsequently mapped onto abstract phoneme categories. We present simulations that suggest two problems with this view: first, the learner might mistake the phoneme-level categories for phonetic-level categories and thus be unable to learn the relationships between phonetic-level categories; on the other hand, the learner might construct inaccurate phonetic-level representations that prevent it from finding regular relations among them. We suggest an alternative conception of the phonological acquisition problem that sidesteps this apparent inevitability, and present a ...

Standard
 generative
 grammars
 describe
 language
 in
 terms
 that
 appear
 distant
 from
 considerations
 of
 everyday,
 real‐time
 language
 processes.
 To
 some
 this
 is
 a
 critical
 flaw,
 while
 to
 others 
this 
is 
a 
clear 
virtue.
 One
 type 
of 
generative 
grammar 
defines 
a 
well‐formed
 sentence
 as 
a 
static, 
structured
 representation 
that 
simultaneously
 satisfies 
all 
relevant 
constraints 
of 
the
 language,
 with 
no 
regard 
to 
how
 the 
representation 
is 
assembled 
(e.g., 
Sag,
 Wasow, 
& 
Bender,
 2003).
 Another
 type
 of
 generative
 grammar
 defines
 a
 well‐formed
 sentence
 as
 a
 derivation,
 or
 sequence
 of
 representations,
 that
 describes
 how
 the
 sentence
 is
 gradually
 assembled,
 often
 including 
various ...

There is a dilemma in current studies of right-node raising (RNR): The main approaches to the construction make fundamentally contradictory predictions that account for overlapping sets of data points. In this paper I argue that no single current analysis can account for the range of data and argue against the possibility that the analyses work in concert to account for the data. That is, given that current analyses each account for some but not the entirety of the documented data, there are two logical possibilities: 1) None of the analyses are correct. 2) More than one analysis is correct in ...

In this paper I pursue the idea that a modal's flavor is determined by its attachment height. The various interpretations of the Hindi future marker gaa, which is taken to be a modal, are discussed. The idea put forth is that modal flavor is indirectly constrained by the semantic type of the modal’s prejacent instead of being solely determined via contextual assignment. Modal Bases are re-envisioned as being comprised of different types of alternatives (worlds, world-time pairs, etc.), rather than just sets of worlds determined by different accessibility relations. The correlation between height and attachment site falls out ...

Idealizing, a speaker endorses or rejects a (declarative) sentence S in a situation s based on how she understands S and represents s. But relatively little is known about how speakers represent situations. Linguists can construct and test initial models of semantic competence, by supposing that sentences have representation-neutral truth conditions, which speakers represent somehow; cf. Marr's (1982) Level One description of a function computed, as opposed to a Level Two description of an algorithm that computes outputs given inputs. But this leaves interesting questions unsettled. One would like to find cases in which S can be held fixed ...

This paper discusses whether or not verbs have thematic arguments or whether they just have an event variable. The paper discusses some evidence in favor of the Neo-Davidsonian position that verbs only have an event variable. Based on this evidence, the paper develops a transparent mapping hypothesis from syntax to logical form where each Spell-Out domain corresponds to a conjunct at logical form. The paper closes by discussing the nature of compositionality for a Conjunctivist semantics.

It is often said that the meaning of an interrogative sentence is a set of answers. This raises questions about how the meaning of an interrogative is compositionally determined, especially if one adopts an I-language perspective. By contrast, we argue that I-languages generate semantic instructions (SEMs) for how to assemble concepts of a special sort and then prepare these concepts for various uses - e.g., in declaring, querying, or assembling concepts of still further complexity. We connect this abstract conception of meaning to a specific (minimalist) conception of complementizer phrase edges, with special attention to wh-questions and their relative clause ...

A review of Minds and Language: A dialogue with Noam Chomsky in the Basque Country, edited by Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, Juan Uriagereka, and Pello Salaburu, Oxford University Press, 2010.

This squib investigates parallels between nominal and verbal comparatives. Building on key insights of Hackl (2000) and Bale & Barner (2009), we show that more behaves uniformly when it combines with nominal and verbal predicates: (i) it cannot combine with singular count NPs or perfective telic VPs; (ii) grammatical properties of the predicates determine the scale of comparison—plural marked NPs and habitual VPs are compared on a scale of cardinality, whereas mass NPs and perfective (atelic) VPs are (often) compared along non-cardinal, though monotonic, scales. Taken together, our findings confirm and strengthen parallels that have independently been drawn between the ...

Von Fintel and Iatridou (2003) observed a striking pattern of scopal non-interaction between phrases headed by strong quantifiers like every and epistemically interpreted modal auxiliaries. Tancredi (2007) and Huitink (2008) observed that von Fintel and Iatridou’s proposed constraint, the Epistemic Containment Principle (ECP), does not apply uniformly: it does not apply to strong quantifiers headed by each. We consider the ECP effect in light of the differential behavior of each and every in the environment of wh-, negative, and generic operators as described by Beghelli and Stowell (1997). Assuming that epistemic and root modals merge at two different syntactic ...

A central goal of modern generative grammar has been to discover invariant properties of human languages that reflect 'the innate schematism of mind that is applied to the data of experience' and that 'might reasonably be attributed to the organism itself as its contribution to the task of the acquisition of knowledge'. Candidates for such invariances include the structure dependence of grammatical rules, and in particular, certain constraints on question formation. Various 'poverty of stimulus' (POS) arguments suggest that these invariances reflect an innate human endowment, as opposed to common experience: Such experience warrants selection of the grammars acquired only ...

This thesis is concerned with the nature of memory access during the construction of long-distance dependencies in online sentence comprehension. In recent years, an intense focus on the computational challenges posed by long-distance dependencies has proven to be illuminating with respect to the characteristics of the architecture of the human sentence processor, suggesting a tight link between general memory access procedures and sentence processing routines (Lewis & Vasishth 2005; Lewis, Vasishth, & Van Dyke 2006; Wagers, Lau & Phillips 2009). The present thesis builds upon this line of research, and its primary aim is to motivate and defend the hypothesis that the parser ...

Many syntactic phenomena have received competing accounts, either in terms of formal grammatical mechanisms, or in terms of independently motivated properties of language processing mechanisms (“reductionist” accounts). A variety of different types of argument have been put forward in efforts to distinguish these competing accounts. This article critically examines a number of arguments that have been offered as evidence in favour of formal or reductionist analyses, and concludes that some types of argument are more decisive than others. It argues that evidence from graded acceptability effects and from isomorphism between acceptability judgements and on-line comprehension profiles are less decisive. In ...

Although there is broad agreement that many ERP components reflect error signals generated during an unexpected linguistic event, there are least two distinct aspects of the process that the ERP signals may reflect. The first is the content of an error, which is the local discrepancy between an observed form and any expectations about upcoming forms, without any reference to why those expectations were held. The second aspect is the cause of an error, which is a context-aware analysis of why the error arose. The current study examines the processes involved in prediction of past tense marking on verbal morphology ...

Our understanding of human learning is increasingly informed by findings from multiple fields—psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and education. A convergence of insights is forging a “new science of learning” within cognitive science, which promises to play a key role in developing intelligent machines (1, 2). A long-standing fundamental issue in theories of human learning is whether there are specialized learning mechanisms for certain tasks or spheres of activity (domains). For example, is learning how to open a door (turning the handle before pulling) the same kind of “learning” as putting up and taking down scaffolding (where disassembly must ...

Mammalian cortex is known to contain various kinds of spatial encoding schemes for sensory information including retinotopic, somatosensory, and tonotopic maps. Tonotopic maps are especially interesting for human speech sound processing because they encode linguistically salient acoustic properties. In this study, we mapped the entire vowel space of a language (Turkish) onto cortical locations by using the magnetic N1 (M100), an auditory-evoked component that peaks approximately 100 msec after auditory stimulus onset. We found that dipole locations could be structured into two distinct maps, one for vowels produced with the tongue positioned toward the front of the mouth (front vowels ...

Recent ERP findings challenge the widespread assumption that syntactic and semantic processes are tightly coupled. Syntactically well-formed sentences that are semantically anomalous due to thematic mismatches elicit a P600, the component standardly associated with syntactic anomaly. This ‘thematic P600’ effect has been attributed to detection of semantically plausible thematic relations that conflict with the surface syntactic structure of the sentence, implying a processing architecture with an independent semantic analyzer. A key finding is that the P600 is selectively sensitive to the presence of plausible verb-argument relations, and that otherwise an N400 is elicited (The hearty meal was devouring ... vs. The ...

This paper explores two possible connections between the diagnostics for morphological and semantic markedness. One possibility, a positive correlation, predicts that if a grammatical feature is diagnosed as being morphologically marked then it should also be semantically marked. This possibility follows as a consequence of the assumption that features are interpreted as restrictions on denotations. The second possibility, a negative correlation, predicts that if a grammatical feature is diagnosed as being morphologically marked then it should be semantically unmarked. This systematic inconsistency follows from the assumption that features are interpreted as augmenting functions. In our exploration of number marking, we ...

We revisit the purported locality constraint of Quantifier Raising (QR) by investigating children's and adults' interpretation of ACD sentences, where the interpretation depends on the landing site targeted by QR out of an embedded clause. When ACD is embedded in a nonfinite clause, 4-year-old children and adults access the embedded and matrix interpretations. When ACD is embedded in a finite clause, and the matrix interpretation is generally believed to be ungrammatical, children and even some adults access both readings. This set of findings allows for the possibility that the source of QR's reputed locality constraint may instead be ...

This paper proposes an Interface Transparency Thesis concerning how linguistic meanings are related to the cognitive systems that are used to evaluate sentences for truth/falsity: a declarative sentence S is semantically associated with a canonical procedure for determining whether S is true; while this procedure need not be used as a verification strategy, competent speakers are biased towards strategies that directly reflect canonical specifications of truth conditions. Evidence in favor of this hypothesis comes from a psycholinguistic experiment examining adult judgments concerning ‘Most of the dots are blue’. This sentence is true if and only if the number of ...

Research on the neuronal underpinnings of speaker identity recognition has identified voice-selective areas in the human brain with evolutionary homologues in non-human primates who have comparable areas for processing species-specific calls. Most studies have focused on estimating the extent and location of these areas. In contrast, relatively few experiments have investigated the time-course of speaker identity, and in particular, dialect processing and identification by electro- or neuromagnetic means. We show here that dialect extraction occurs speaker-independently, pre-attentively and categorically. We used Standard American English and African-American English exemplars of ‘Hello’ in a magnetoencephalographic (MEG) Mismatch Negativity (MMN) experiment. The MMN ...

Sabbagh (2008) makes an empirical argument concerning the derivation of right node raising (RNR) sentences in Tagalog. He notes that all and only the syntactic constituents that can undergo typical leftward wh-movement can serve as the shared element, or target, of a RNR sentence. Therefore, he argues, a movement analysis would be the most plausible for Tagalog RNR. However, when investigated further, the parallelism does not hold. A greater variety of elements can serve as the RNR target than can be wh-moved, contrary to what Sabbagh claims. The fact that elements that cannot undergo A-bar movement can still act as ...

This paper is an investigation of freezing properties related to subjects and objects. Starting out by giving an account of the most prominent Norwegian properties, it then turns to a comparative study between primarily English and Norwegian indirect objects. This comparative study will be shown to have important consequences for the approach to indirect objects. It will be argued that although recent studies are able to capture central aspects of indirect objects, they are inadequate when it comes to accounting for freezing properties. In the present paper, freezing effects are understood in terms of agreement properties, most notably Case agreement ...

This paper extends Fox & Sauerland’s (1996) analysis of scope illusions and argues that what looks like inverse scope readings in clefts with indefinite NP pivots are really illusory cases of scope inversion. Instead, inverse scope comes about due to generic quantification over situations. Furthermore, the present paper adds to Fox and Sauerland by observing differences between "a" and "some" indefinites, where only the former yields illusory scope.

This dissertation revisits subject island effects (Ross 1967, Chomsky 1973) cross-linguistically. Controlled acceptability judgment studies in German, English, Japanese and Serbian suggest that extraction out of specifiers is consistently degraded compared to extraction out of complements, indicating that the Condition on Extraction domains (CED, Huang 1982) is still empirically viable, contrary to recent claims (Stepanov 2007). As a consequence, recent treatments of the CED in terms of Multiple Spell-Out (Uriagereka 1999) are still tenable. First, a series of NP-subextraction experiments in German using 'was für'-split is discussed. The results indicate that subject island effects cannot be reduced to freezing ...

This dissertation investigates adults and children's sentence processing mechanisms, with a special focus on how multiple levels of linguistic representation are incrementally computed in real time, and how this process affects the parser's ability to later revise its early commitments. Using cross-methodological and cross-linguistic investigations of long-distance dependency processing, this dissertation demonstrates how paying explicit attention to the procedures by which linguistic representations are computed is vital to understanding both adults' real time linguistic computation and children's reanalysis mechanisms. The first part of the dissertation uses time course evidence from self-paced reading and eye tracking studies (reading ...

Systems that process natural language must cope with and resolve ambiguity. In this dissertation, a model of language processing is advocated in which multiple inputs and multiple analyses of inputs are considered concurrently and a single analysis is only a last resort. Compared to conventional models, this approach can be understood as replacing single-element inputs and outputs with weighted sets of inputs and outputs. Although processing components must deal with sets (rather than individual elements), constraints are imposed on the elements of these sets, and the representations from existing models may be reused. However, to deal efficiently with large (or ...

This paper explores the role of learning in generative grammar, highlighting interactions between distributional patterns in the environment and the innate structure of the language faculty. Reviewing three case studies, it is shown how learners use their language faculties to leverage the environment, making inferences from distributions to grammars that would not be licensed in the absence of a richly structured hypothesis space.

This article is concerned with how to characterize and constrain the typology of reduplication and affixation, given Raimy’s (1999 et seq.) precedence-based theory of phonological representations as directed graphs. First, we establish a typology of attested reduplication and infixation anchor points based on an empirical survey. We then extend the SEARCH and COPY algorithms proposed by Mailhot & Reiss (2007) for long-distance assimilation (harmony) processes to the morphological domain, proposing modifications to reconcile this formalism with Raimy’s. Finally, we argue for an amended version of a proposal by Idsardi & Shorey (2007) regarding the process by which ‘looped’ representations created ...

Inspired by Partee (2010), this paper defends a broad thesis that all modifiers, including numeral modifiers, are restrictive in the sense that they can only restrict the denotation of the NP or VP they modify. However, the paper concentrates more narrowly on numeral modification, demonstrating that the evidence that motivated Ionin & Matushansky (2006) to assign non-restrictive, privative interpretations to numerals – assigning them functions that map singular sets to sets containing groups – is in fact consistent with restrictive modification. Ionin & Matushansky (2006)’s argument for this type of interpretation is partly based on the distribution of Turkish numerals which exclusively combine ...

In this thesis I explore the syntactic and semantic properties of movement and adjunction in natural language, and suggest that these two phenomena are related in a novel way. In a precise sense, the basic pieces of grammatical machinery that give rise to movement, also give rise to adjunction. In the system I propose, there is no atomic movement operation and no atomic adjunction operation; the terms "movement" and "adjunction" serve only as convenient labels for certain combinations of other, primitive operations. As a result the system makes non-trivial predictions about how movement and adjunction should interact, since we do ...

Though preschoolers in certain experimental contexts strongly prefer to interpret ambiguous sentences containing quantified NPs and negation on the basis of surface syntax (e.g., Musolino’s (1998) “observation of isomorphism”), contextual manipulations can lead to more adult-like behavior. But is isomorphism a purely pragmatic phenomenon, as recently proposed? In Experiment 1, we begin by isolating the contextual factor responsible for children’s improvement in Musolino and Lidz (2006). We then demonstrate in Experiment 2 that this factor can be used to prime inverse scope interpretations. To remove pragmatics from the equation altogether, we show in Experiment 3 that the ...

Crosslinguistically, the same modal words can be used to express a wide range of interpretations. This crosslinguistic trend supports a Kratzerian analysis, where each modal has a core lexical entry and where the difference between an epistemic and a root interpretation is contextually determined. A long standing problem for such a unified account is the equally robust crosslinguistic correlation between a modal’s interpretation and its syntactic behavior: epistemics scope high (in particular higher than tense and aspect) and roots low, a fact which has led to proposals that hardwire different syntactic positions for epistemics and roots (cf. Cinque’s ...

The electrophysiological response to words during the ‘N400’ time window (approximately 300–500 ms post-onset) is affected by the context in which the word is presented, but whether this effect reflects the impact of context on access of the stored lexical information itself or, alternatively, post-access integration processes is still an open question with substantive theoretical consequences. One challenge for integration accounts is that contexts that seem to require different levels of integration for incoming words (i.e., sentence frames vs. prime words) have similar effects on the N400 component measured in ERP. In this study we compare the effects ...

According to Kratzer (2003), the thematic relation Theme, construed very generally, is not a ‘‘natural relation.’’ She says that the ‘‘natural relations’’ are ‘‘cumulative’’ and argues that Theme is not cumulative, in contrast to Agent. It is therefore best, she concludes, to remove Theme from the palette of semantic analysis. Here I oppose the premises of Kratzer’s argument and then introduce a new challenge to her conclusion, based on the resultative construction in Mandarin. The facts show that Theme and Agent are on equal footing, insofar as neither has the property that Kratzer’s conjecture requires of a natural ...

This paper discusses the interaction of aspect and modality, and focuses on the puzzling implicative effect that arises when perfective aspect appears on certain modals: perfective somehow seems to force the proposition expressed by the complement of the modal to hold in the actual world, and not merely in some possible world. I show that this puzzling behavior, originally discussed in Bhatt (1999) for the ability modal, extends to all modal auxiliaries with a circumstantial modal base (i.e., root modals), while epistemic interpretations of the same modals are immune to the effect. I propose that implicative readings are contingent ...

We identify three components of any learning theory: the representations, the learner’s data intake, and the learning algorithm. With these in mind, we model the acquisition of the English anaphoric pronoun one in order to identify necessary constraints for successful acquisition, and the nature of those constraints. Whereas previous modeling efforts have succeeded by using a domain-general learning algorithm that implicitly restricts the data intake to be a subset of the input, we show that the same kind of domain-general learning algorithm fails when it does not restrict the data intake. We argue that the necessary data intake restrictions ...

The notion that children use statistical distributions present in the input to acquire various aspects of linguistic knowledge has received considerable recent attention. But the roles of learner's initial state have been largely ignored in those studies. What remains unclear is the nature of learner's contribution. At least two possibilities exist. One is that all that learners do is to collect and compile accurately predictive statistics from the data, and they do not have antecedently specified set of possible structures (Elman, et al. 1996; Tomasello 2000). On this view, outcome of the learning is solely based on the ...

This dissertation examines the elliptical structures of (a) sluicing (John called someone, but I don't know who!), (b) fragment answers (A: Who did John call?, B: Mary!), (c) gapping (John is eating ice-cream, and Mary apple pie!), and (d) Right Node Raising (John cooked and Mary ate the apple pie!) in Turkish and gives a PF-deletion-based analysis of all these elliptical structures. As to sluicing and fragment answers, evidence in support of PF-deletion comes from P-(non-)stranding and Case Matching, respectively. Further, these elliptical structures are island-insensitive in Turkish. As to gapping, this study gives a movement + deletion ...

The goal of this dissertation is to show that even at the earliest (non-invasive) recordable stages of auditory cortical processing, we find evidence that cortex is calculating abstract representations from the acoustic signal. Looking across two distinct domains (inferential pitch perception and vowel normalization), I present evidence demonstrating that the M100, an automatic evoked neuromagnetic component that localizes to primary auditory cortex is sensitive to abstract computations. The M100 typically responds to physical properties of the stimulus in auditory and speech perception and integrates only over the first 25 to 40 ms of stimulus onset, providing a reliable dependent measure ...

This dissertation focuses on effective combination of data-driven natural language processing (NLP) approaches with linguistic knowledge sources that are based on manual text annotation or word grouping according to semantic commonalities. I gainfully apply fine-grained linguistic soft constraints -- of syntactic or semantic nature -- on statistical NLP models, evaluated in end-to-end state-of-the-art statistical machine translation (SMT) systems. The introduction of semantic soft constraints involves intrinsic evaluation on word-pair similarity ranking tasks, extension from words to phrases, application in a novel distributional paraphrase generation technique, and an introduction of a generalized framework of which these soft semantic and syntactic constraints can be ...

This dissertation explores the hypothesis that predictive processing—the access and construction of internal representations in advance of the external input that supports them—plays a central role in language comprehension. Linguistic input is frequently noisy, variable, and rapid, but it is also subject to numerous constraints. Predictive processing could be a particularly useful approach in language comprehension, as predictions based on the constraints imposed by the prior context could allow computation to be speeded and noisy input to be disambiguated. Decades of previous research have demonstrated that the broader sentence context has an effect on how new input is ...

A variety of studies have demonstrated that organizing stimuli into categories can affect the way the stimuli are perceived. We explore the influence of categories on perception through one such phenomenon, the perceptual magnet effect, in which discriminability between vowels is reduced near prototypical vowel sounds. We present a Bayesian model to explain why this reduced discriminability might occur: It arises as a consequence of optimally solving the statistical problem of perception in noise. In the optimal solution to this problem, listeners’ perception is biased toward phonetic category means because they use knowledge of these categories to guide their inferences ...

Since Ross (1967), it has been observed that there are configurations from which otherwise unbounded movement operations cannot occur, and they are called islands. Ellipsis and resumption are known to have a peculiar property to 'repair' island violations. Each chapter of this thesis discusses a case of ellipsis/resumption to examine in what cases movement out of an island becomes licit by those strategies. Chapter 2 discusses the elliptical construction called sluicing, and argues for the PF-deletion analysis of sluicing (Merchant 2001, originated from Ross 1969). I will show that ECP violations made by adjunct sluicing cannot be repaired by ...

One of the main challenges in the study of cognition is how to connect brain activity to cognitive processes. In the domain of language, this requires coordination between two different lines of research: theoretical models of linguistic knowledge and language processing on the one side and brain sciences on the other. The work reported in this dissertation attempts to link these two lines of research by focusing on one particular aspect of linguistic processing, namely lexical access. The rationale for this focus is that access to the lexicon is a mandatory step in any theory of linguistic computation, and therefore ...

Much work has demonstrated so-called attraction errors in the production of subject–verb agreement (e.g., ‘The key to the cabinets are on the table’, [Bock, J. K., & Miller, C. A. (1991). Broken agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 23, 45–93]), in which a verb erroneously agrees with an intervening noun. Six self-paced reading experiments examined the online mechanisms underlying the analogous attraction effects that have been shown in comprehension; namely reduced disruption for subject–verb agreement violations when these ‘attractor’ nouns intervene. One class of theories suggests that these effects are rooted in faulty representation of the number of the subject ...

The meaning of ‘most’ can be described in many ways. We offer a framework for distinguishing semantic descriptions, interpreted as psychological hypotheses that go beyond claims about sentential truth conditions, and an experiment that tells against an attractive idea: ‘most’ is understood in terms of one-to-one correspondence. Adults evaluated ‘Most of the dots are yellow’, as true or false, on many trials in which yellow dots and blue dots were displayed for 200ms. Displays manipulated the ease of using a “one-to-one with remainder” strategy, and a strategy of using the Approximate Number System to compare of (approximations of) cardinalities. Interpreting ...

Measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) has been fundamental to our understanding of how language is encoded in the brain. One particular ERP response, the N400 response, has been especially influential as an index of lexical and semantic processing. However, there remains a lack of consensus on the interpretation of this component. Resolving this issue has important consequences for neural models of language comprehension. Here we show that evidence bearing on where the N400 response is generated provides key insights into what it reflects. A neuroanatomical model of semantic processing is used as a guide to interpret the pattern of activated regions ...

This dissertation is concerned with whether the sentence processor can compute plausible relations among a cluster of neighboring open class words without taking into account the relationships between these words as dictated by the structure of the sentence. It has been widely assumed that compositional semantics is built on top of syntactic structures (Heim & Kratzer, 1998; Pollard & Sag, 1994). This view has been challenged by recent electrophysiological findings (Kim and Osterhout, 2005; Kuperberg, 2007; van Herten et al., 2005, 2006) that appear to show that semantic composition can proceed independently of syntactic structure. This dissertation investigates whether the evidence for ...

This dissertation discusses how pragmatic factors contribute to children's behavior in interpreting scopally ambiguous forms. In particular, we look at children's interpretation of negated sentences involving disjunction in the object (NegDisjunction). Languages like English and Chinese allow scope interaction between negation and disjunction of this kind of strings and thus two corresponding interpretations: the narrow scope disjunction interpretation (the NSD, meaning "neither"), thus the wide scope disjunction interpretation (the WSD, meaning "not this or not that"); but languages like Japanese only allow the WSD. Previous studies found out that children of different languages accessed the NSD instead of ...

This dissertation is concerned with the problem of how structured linguistic representations interact with the architecture of human memory. Much recent work has attempted to unify real-time linguistic memory with a general content-addressable architecture (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; McElree, 2006). Because grammatical principles and constraints are strongly relational in nature, and linguistic representation hierarchical, this kind of architecture is not well suited to restricting the search of memory to grammatically-licensed constituents alone. This dissertation investigates under what conditions real-time language comprehension is grammatically accurate. Two kinds of grammatical dependencies were examined in reading time and speeded grammaticality experiments: subject-verb agreement licensing ...

This dissertation investigates the contributions of the parser and extra-linguistic information in the selection of a final interpretation of scopally ambiguous strings, integrating data from both children and adults into our understanding of language processing. Previous research has found an advantage for surface scope interpretations in adult sentence processing (Tunstall,1998 & Anderson,2003) and in children's interpretive preferences (Musolino and Lidz, 2006). In light of these findings, we investigate two central questions. One, what is the source of the advantage for surface scope interpretations in adults? Two, what factors contribute to children's ultimate adherence to surface scope interpretations ...

The focus of this dissertation is syntactic movement and its relationship to surface semantics, morphology, and licensing relations in syntax, with an emphasis on Spanish and English. Chapter 2 argues that Herburger's (2000) Neo-Davidsonian approach to the semantics of focus, as syntactically implemented by Uriagereka (2005), allows for a unified treatment of new information focus and contrastive focus (focus movement to the left periphery and in situ focus) in Spanish. The diverse positions that the focused element can take in the sentence are claimed to be determined by contextual anchoring mechanisms of Raposo and Uriagereka (1995). This entails a ...

This article presents three studies that investigate when syntactic constraints become available during the processing of long-distance backwards pronominal dependencies (backwards anaphora or cataphora). Earlier work demonstrated that in such structures the parser initiates an active search for an antecedent for a pronoun, leading to gender mismatch effects in cases where a noun phrase in a potential antecedent position mismatches the gender of the pronoun [Van Gompel, R. P. G. & Liversedge, S. P. (2003). The influence of morphological information on cataphoric pronoun assignment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 29, 128–139]. Results from three self-paced reading studies ...

This dissertation investigates a set of phenomena in Standard Arabic at the syntax-morphology interface, providing an analysis for each within the assumptions of the minimalist program, particularly those related to mechanisms of formal feature licensing. Among the issues discussed are the subject-verb agreement asymmetry, case-assignment, default agreement, nominative Themes, as well as interactions between tense, negation, and modality heads. In this regard, I provide an analysis for word order alternation in the language in terms of left dislocation rather than via movement, showing that the language does not show A-movement effects in SVO orders, passives, raising constructions, or object shift ...

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of language-specific constraints on scope interpretation by Japanese preschool children. Several constructions in Japanese do not allow scope interpretations that the corresponding English sentences do allow. First, in Japanese transitive sentences with multiple quantificational arguments, an inverse scope interpretation is disallowed, due to the Rigid Scope Constraint. Second, Japanese logical connectives cannot be interpreted under the scope of local negation, due to their Positive Polarity. Thirdly, in Japanese infinitival complement constructions with implicative matrix verbs like wasureru ("forget") the inverse scope interpretation is required, due to the Anti-Reconstruction Constraint. The main goal of this research ...

Current interest in automatic sentiment analysis is motivated by a variety of information requirements. The vast majority of work in sentiment analysis has been specifically targeted at detecting subjective statements and mining opinions. This dissertation focuses on a different but related problem that to date has received relatively little attention in NLP research: detecting implicit sentiment, or spin, in text. This text classification task is distinguished from other sentiment analysis work in that there is no assumption that the documents to be classified with respect to sentiment are necessarily overt expressions of opinion. They rather are documents that might reveal ...

There has always been interest in the methodology of acceptability judgment collection, as well as the reliability of the results. It seems, though, that the past several years have seen an increase in the number of studies employing formal experimental techniques for the collection of acceptability judgments, so much so that the term experimental syntax has come to be applied to the use of those techniques. The question this dissertation asks is whether the extent of the utility of experimental syntax is to find areas in which informal judgment collection was insufficient, or whether there is a complementary research program ...

This dissertation investigates the mechanism of language acquisition given the boundary conditions provided by linguistic representation and the time course of acquisition. Exploration of the mechanism is vital once we consider the complexity of the system to be learned and the non-transparent relationship between the observable data and the underlying system. It is not enough to restrict the potential systems the learner could acquire, which can be done by defining a finite set of parameters the learner must set. Even supposing that the system is defined by n binary parameters, we must still explain how the learner converges on the ...

This dissertation examines Agree, a narrow syntactic, long-distance operation underlying phi-agreement in the grammar. Taking the strong minimalist thesis (cf. Chomsky 2000) as my point of departure, I question Agree on both conceptual and empirical grounds. On the conceptual side, the operation is suspect first for its language-specific character. Second, it also fails to be justified on the grounds of general architectural constraints and legibility requirements. Further, evidences of various long-distance agreement from across languages examined here question the empirical basis for Agree built throughout the previous literature. As far as this is true, I contend that the faculty of ...

Both the external world and our internal world are full of changing activities , and the question of how these two dynamic systems are linked constitutes the most intriguing and fundamental question in neuroscience and cognitive science. This study specifically investigates the processing and representation of sound dynamic information in human auditory cortex using magnetoencephalography (MEG), a non-invasive brain imaging technique whose high temporal resolution (on the order of ~1ms) makes it an appropriate tool for studying the neural correlates of dynamic auditory information. The other goal of this study is to understand the essence of the macroscopic activities reflected in ...

This paper presents three experiments which examine the effect of lexical surface frequency on sentence processing and the interaction between surface frequency and syntactic prediction. The first two experiments make use of the self-paced reading paradigm to show that processing time differences due to surface frequency (e.g., the frequency of cats not including occurrences of cat), which have previously been demonstrated in isolated word tasks like lexical decision, also give rise to reaction time differences in sentence processing tasks, in this case for singular and plural English nouns. The second experiment investigates whether a prediction for the number morpheme ...

The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of the nature of finiteness and A-movement by looking at control phenomena in Japanese, where verbal morphology sometimes does not help to identify finiteness of clauses. In so doing, the thesis addresses empirical and theoretical questions that arise from analyses of Japanese control and attempts to resolve them. The first part of the thesis, chapter 2, investigates obligatory control (OC) into tensed clauses, where embedded predicates are morphosyntactically marked for tense. Recent findings about the obligatory control/non-obligatory control dichotomy leads to the observation that tensed subordinate clauses that ...

This thesis aims to reveal the mechanisms and constraints involving in long-distance dependency formation in the static knowledge of language and in real-time sentence processing. Special attention is paid to the grammar and processing of island constraints. Several experiments show that in a head-final language like Japanese global constraints like island constraints are applied long before decisive information such as verb heads and relative heads, are encountered. Based on this observation, the thesis argues that there is a powerful predictive mechanism at work behind real time sentence processing. A model of this predictive mechanism is proposed. This thesis examines the ...

In parasitic-gap constructions an illicit gap inside a syntactic island becomes acceptable in combination with an additional licit gap, a result that has interesting implications for theories of grammar. Such constructions hold even greater interest for the question of the relation between grammatical knowledge and real-time language processing. This article presents results from two experiments on parasitic-gap constructions in English in which the parasitic gap appears inside a subject island, before the licensing gap. An offline study confirms that parasitic gaps are acceptable when they occur inside theinfinitival complement of a subject NP, but not when they occur inside a ...

This dissertation is a case study of the syntax of the left periphery, using exclamatives in English and Japanese. In the first part, I discuss exclamatives in Japanese in detail by focusing on the properties of the exclamative wh-phrases and particles that function as licensors for wh-phrases in exclamatives. We argue that licensing exclamatives involves at least three functional heads: Finite, Focus, and Mood. Especially, the necessity of the Mood head differentiates exclamatives from interrogatives. On the other hand, we claim that having these three functional projections does not type the clause as exclamative, and show that the presence of ...

This dissertation explores the syntax and semantics of positive and comparative gradable adjectives. A detailed study of intransitive (tall) and transitive (patient with Mary) adjectives is provided with special emphasis on phrases that express the standard of comparison, such as tall for a jockey, tall compared to Bill, and taller than Bill. It is shown that standard expressions, surprisingly, behave differently both syntactically and semantically. There are four main conclusions. First, a syntactic analysis is provided in which all standard expressions are introduced by unique degree morphemes in the extended projection of the adjective. Each morpheme and the standard expression ...

The dissertation consists of theoretical and experimental studies of multiple interrogatives (i.e., sentences containing more than one wh-phrase, like Who bought what?). First, I examine the status of Superiority effects in contexts with and without subject-aux(iliary) inversion cross-linguistically. The relevant contrast from English is between Who bought what?, ??What did who buy?, and I wonder what who bought., where () indicates a greater degree of unacceptability by native speakers than (??). I argue that the presence of subject-aux inversion in main clauses in English is responsible for the given asymmetry, and I attribute the degraded status of ??What did who ...

This dissertation addresses a foundational debate regarding the role of structure and abstraction in linguistic representation, focusing on representations at the lexical level. Under one set of views, positing abstract morphologically-structured representations, words are decomposable into morpheme-level basic units; however, alternative views now challenge the need for abstract structured representation in lexical representation, claiming non-morphological whole-word storage and processing either across-the-board or depending on factors like transparency/productivity/surface form. Our cross-method/cross-linguistic results regarding morphological-level decomposition argue for initial, automatic decomposition, regardless of factors like semantic transparency, surface formal overlap, word frequency, and productivity, contrary to alternative views of ...

The main goal of the work in this dissertation is to investigate pre-verbal structure building effects in languages with different configurations such as Spanish, Galician and Basque, by means of using different pre-verbal cues in order to show that syntactic structure can be both interpreted and anticipated before the verbal head. I examine the syntax of Clitic-Left Dislocations (CLLDs) and other kinds of left-dislocations in Spanish and then analyze their processing. I concentrate on the use of clitic pronouns in Spanish and Galician in CLLD constructions that require the presence of the clitic pronoun to interpret the left-dislocated phrase and ...

This dissertation discusses children's understanding of semantic contribution of the universal quantifier every and its interactions with negation from a logico-semantic perspective. The universal quantifier every evokes an asymmetric entailment pattern in its first and second arguments (e.g., Ladusaw, 1979), which influences both sentential meanings and inferential relations among them. Whereas several studies have revealed children's sophisticated ability to compose the meanings of sentences containing every (e.g., Gualmini 2005), far less is known about whether children's knowledge about every can be extended to the level of meaning comparison, i.e., to the computation of the ...

This dissertation investigates aspects of auditory scene analysis such as the detection of a new object in the environment. Specifically I try to learn about these processes by studying the temporal dynamics of magnetic signals recorded from outside the scalp of human listeners, and comparing these dynamics with psychophysical measures. In total nine behavioral and Magneto-encephalography (MEG) brain-imaging experiments are reported. These studies relate to the extraction of tonal targets from background noise and the detection of change within ongoing sounds. The MEG deflections we observe between 50-200 ms post transition reflect the first stages of perceptual organization. I interpret ...

The present thesis is concerned with the syntax of constructions variously referred to as 'applicative', 'ditransitive', or 'multiple object' constructions: constructions that contain arguments that transcend the traditional subject-object characterization. The present thesis is also concerned with how the syntax of such constructions yields the interpretive effects that previous research has identified. In this thesis I try to remedy the inadequacies and limitations of previous accounts. As far as the syntax of applicatives is concerned, my analysis necessitates the rejection of phase-based derivation, and requires an emphasis on anti-locality, a rethinking of the phenomenon of successive cyclicity, and a renewed ...

A number of recent electrophysiological studies of sentence processing have shown that a subclass of syntactic violations elicits very rapid ERP responses, occurring within around 200 ms of the onset of the violation. Such findings raise the question of how it is possible to diagnose violations so quickly. This paper suggests that very rapid diagnosis of errors is possible specifically in situations where the diagnosis problem is tightly constrained by specific expectations generated before the critical word is presented. In an event-related potentials (ERP) study of visual sentence reading participants encountered violations of a word order constraint (...Max’s of ...

In this thesis, I propose a syntactic structure for verbs which directly encodes their event complexities. I present a model that is 'internalist' in the Chomskyan sense: Aktionsart properties of predicates are not a real-world affair, but the interpretation of a mind structure. For this purpose, I base my proposal on the Dimensional Theory of Uriagereka (2005, forthcoming). Syntactic constructs are in this view the results of operations that create increasingly complex objects, based on an algorithm that is homo-morphic with the structure of numerical categories. First, I propose that Aktionsart can be read off from structural complexities of syntactic ...

Turkish relative clauses display a subject/non-subject asymmetry. The subject relative (SR) is licensed for relativization from [Spec, TP]. Whereas the non-subject relative (NSR) is never acceptable for subject relativization, the SR is licensed in clauses where there is no external argument, and when relativizing a non-subject in clauses where the subject is non-specific. Within the framework of the Minimalist Program, Turkish RCs are explained in terms of satisfaction of the EPP of T by a D feature and Minimality effects. As long as no nominal expression intervenes between the relative head and [Spec, TP], the SR is licensed. The ...

In this thesis, I present evidence that structural Case in Korean is not absolutely semantically inert. It can have a focus flavor in some contexts, for example, stacked Case and Case attached to an adverb/adverbial and a verb. This sort of Case feature may not be an embarrassment for the good design of language. I discuss the Resultative Construction in a derivational approach. We compare the Resultative Construction between English and Korean in pursuit of finding out the underlying cause for differences between the two languages.

This dissertation investigates long-distance backwards pronominal dependencies (backwards anaphora or cataphora) and constraints on such dependencies from the viewpoint of language development and real-time language processing. Based on the findings from a comprehension experiment with Russian-speaking children and on real-time sentence processing data from English and Russian adults I argue for a position that distinguishes structural and non-structural constraints on backwards anaphora. I show that unlike their non-syntactic counterparts, structural constraints on coreference, in particular Principle C of the Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981), are active at the earliest stage of language development and of real-time processing. In language acquisition, the ...

This dissertation develops novel derivational mechanics for characterizing the syntactic component of human language -- Tree Contraction Grammar (TCG). TCG falls within a general class of derivationally-oriented minimalist approaches, constituting a version of a Multiple Spell Out (MSO-)system (Chomsky 1999, Uriagereka 1999, 2002). TCG posits a derivational WORKSPACE restricting the size of structures that can be active at a given stage of derivation. As structures are expanded, workspace limitations periodically force contractions of the span of structure visible to operations. These expansion-contraction dynamics are shown to have implications for our understanding of locality of dependencies, specifically regarding successive cyclic movement ...

The aim of the present study is to revisit the old debate between rationalists and empiricists in relation to language development with new longitudinal data in hand. I show that when it comes to the development of a specific piece of linguistic knowledge, namely the distribution of the third person singular morpheme -s in child English, the generativist approach can satisfactorily account for the quirks observed in the longitudinal data presented herein. First, I argue that children are not conservative learners in the sense of Tomasello (2003), but they set parameters in the sense of Crain (1991). That is to ...

Studies of adult sentence processing have established that the referential context in which sentences are presented plays an immediate role in their interpretation, such that features of the referential context mitigate, and even eliminate, so-called 'garden-path' effects. The finding that the context ordinarily obviates garden path effects is compelling evidence for the Referential Theory, advanced originally by Crain and Steedman, (1985) and extended in Altmann and Steedman (1988). Recent work by Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill and Logrip (1999) suggests, however, that children may not be as sensitive as adults to contextual factors in resolving structural ambiguities. This conclusion is not anticipated ...

In two experiments, we tested for lingering effects of verb replacement disfluencies on the processing of garden path sentences that exhibit the main verb/reduced relative (MV/RR) ambiguity. Participants heard sentences with revisions like The little girl chosen, uh, selected for the role celebrated with her parents and friends. We found that the syntactic ambiguity associated with the reparandum verb involved in the disfluency (here chosen) had an influence on later parsing: Garden path sentences that included such revisions were more likely to be judged grammatical if the reparandum verb was structurally unambiguous. Conversely, ambiguous non-garden path sentences were ...

In noisy settings, seeing the interlocutor's face helps to disambiguate what is being said. For this to happen, the brain must integrate auditory and visual information. Three major problems are (1) bringing together separate sensory streams of information, (2) extracting auditory and visual speech information, and (3) identifying this information as a unified auditory-visual percept. In this dissertation, a new representational framework for auditory visual (AV) speech integration is offered. The experimental work (psychophysics and electrophysiology (EEG)) suggests specific neural mechanisms for solving problems (1), (2), and (3) that are consistent with a (forward) 'analysis-by-synthesis' view of AV speech ...

This dissertation suggests that referential 3rdP null subjects in Modern Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and Finnish are residues of A-movement, rather than null pronouns. These grammars exhibit weak 3rdP verbal and possessive agreement morphology, and do not obey the Avoid Pronoun Principle, allowing non-emphatic overt pronouns in subject position. This state of affairs has affected the licensing of referential null subjects, which are licensed only within embedded domains. I correlate the loss of agreement with this peculiar behavior of null subjects and advance the hypothesis that BP and Finnish are not pro-drop grammars, arguing on empirical grounds that in BP and ...

This dissertation consists of an investigation of Syntactic Amalgamation (cf. Lakoff 1974): the phenomenon of combination of sentences that yields parenthetic-like constructions like (01). (01) John invited God only knows how many people to you can imagine what kind of a party. The theoretical framework adopted is the Generative-Transformational Grammar (Chomsky 1957, 1965, 1975, 1981, 1986b, 2000b), following (and elaborating on) the recent developments known as the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000a, 2001a, 2001b; Martin & Uriagereka 2000; Uriagereka 1998, 1999, 2002). As far as the representation of syntactic amalgams is concerned, the main claim made in this dissertation is that ...

This dissertation presents a Minimalist Theory of Control. As for the distribution of PRO, it provides evidence that PRO appears in a configuration of regular Structural Case assignment. This suggests that the complementary distribution between PRO and lexical subjects is not related to Case. It also provides empirical evidence against the Movement analysis of Control, which subsumes Control under Raising, and is compatible with the theoretical view that Theta Roles are configurational, rather than Features. It also renders the so-called Null Case unnecessary. The interpretation of PRO is the result of the need of the Chain of PRO to collapse ...

This dissertation investigates the topic of verbal ellipsis in English. Two main issues are addressed in this work: (i) the identity condition that restricts the application of ellipsis and (ii) the different locality restrictions that apply to elliptical constructions. The identity condition is examined from the point of view of competence, while the locality condition is given a natural answer from the processing domain. Furthermore, a parsing algorithm based on minimalist grammars is defined. Chapter 1 introduces the topic. Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 deal with the syntactic identity condition. Chapter 2 reviews some proposals in the literature, namely, Lasnik ...

A single segment representation with dynamic features (Oneseg) explains differences between the phonologies of spoken words and signs better than current multiple segments phonological representations of signs (Multiseg). A segment is defined as the largest phonological unit where combinations of features are contrastive, but permutations and repetitions aren’t. Hayes (1993) distinguishes between static features (place, handshape) which don't reference motion, and dynamic features (direction, repetition) which do. Dynamic features are the only way that a single segment representation can sequence motion. Oneseg correctly predicts that number of repetitions is not contrastive in signs, because repetition is the result ...

In this paper we bring evidence from language acquisition to bear on the debate over the relative abstractness of children’s grammatical knowledge. We first identify one aspect of syntactic representation that exhibits a range of syntactic, morphological and semantic consequences both within and across languages, namely the hierarchical structure of ditransitive verb phrases. While the semantic consequences of this structure are parallel in English, Kannada, and Spanish, the word order and morphological reflexes of this structure diverge. Next we demonstrate that children learning Kannada have command of the relation between morphological form and semantic interpretation in ditransitives with respect ...

This dissertation investigated the way in which English-speaking and Chinese- speaking children interpret ‘a’ and ‘yi-ge’ respectively in sentences containing the universal quantifier or negation. Three series of experiments were conducted, using a truth value judgement task. The first experiment examined how children interpreted unambiguous double object sentences like “Snow White gave a lady every flower” and ambiguous to-dative sentences like “The teacher gave every ball to a girl” in English and Chinese. The results showed that English-speaking children assigned a non-adult universal wide scope reading to the double object sentences, and their pattern of preference for to-dative sentences was ...

This dissertation explores some of the traditionally labeled possessive relations, and proposes a basic syntactic structure that underlies them. The two nouns act as subject and predicate in a small clause, dominated by two functional projections, where reference/agreement and contextual restrictions are checked. Looking first at container-content relations, we propose that the container is always a predicate for the content. Because in our system selection is determined in the small clause and agreement is checked in an AgrP, selection and agreement need not be determined by the same noun. Selection also distinguishes between a container and a content reading ...

This dissertation concentrates on movement dependencies under minimalist assumptions and suggests that the opposite of moving too far (standard locality) exists also, namely moving too closely: anti-locality. A theory of anti-locality will be developed that incorporates a tripartition of clause structure into Prolific Domains, areas of the clause that share a common “super-feature” or context value. The lowest Prolific Domain is responsible for thematic relations (θ-domain), the next one for agreement relations (φ- domain), and the highest one for discourse relations (ω-domain). Under this approach, anti-locality is expressed in terms of the Condition on Domain Exclusivity which simply bans Domain-internal ...

Following the spirit of Hornstein (1995), this thesis explores the possibility of eliminating entire LF A’-movement. The standard LF-movement analysis of wh-in-situ is shown to be neither conceptually desirable nor empirically adequate. Wh-in-situ are bound in situ by the abstract Q-operator via unselective quantification. A wh-adverb like weishenme (why) is subject to Q-licensing because it denotes a set of proposition and, therefore, cannot be unselectively bound. Its island effects result from the fact that this licensing must be clause-bounded. Rhetorical wh-questions (RWQ) in a wh-in-situ language are subject to unselective quantification of the same sort, but with their whs ...

This dissertation explores the way in which English-speaking children acquire the meaning of sentences containing negation and quantified noun phrases (QNPs). This investigation is based on a series of psycholinguistic experiments designed to assess children’s comprehension of sentences like ‘Every horse didn’t jump over the fence’ or ‘Cookie Monster didn’t eat two slices of pizza’ among others. The major finding is that children around the age of 5 do not interpret these sentences the way adult speakers of English do. This finding raises the following questions (a) How and why do children’s interpretations of sentences containing ...

This dissertation shows that there are syntactic constraints involved in the aspectual interpretation of the VP that involve the internal structure of the verbal complements. Although a simple compositional semantics would predict certain interpretations, the syntactic computational system has its own mechanisms, and the relevant configurations do not always obtain. Consequently, certain readings end up being blocked. Chapter 1 defines the relevant output conditions for aspectual interpretation based on the semantic work of Verkuyl (1995) and Krifka (1989), and proposes a syntactic configuration within the Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory (Chomsky 1993) at which aspect is calculated. Chapter 2 shows ...

This dissertation is concerned with movement operations within the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995). Exploring the copy theory of movement, it focusses on two issues: (i) why can traces not be phonetically realized?; and (ii) what is the theoretical status of the operation Move in a system where syntactic objects are derivationally assembled? I propose that a chain cannot surface with more than one link phonetically realized because it cannot be linearized in accordance with Kayne's (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom. Assuming that the head of a chain and its trace(s) are nondistinct copies, they induce violations of the irreflexivity ...

This thesis is concerned with developing a syntax for coordinate structures which is compatible with both the syntactic behaviour of conjunction structures and with their semantics. It argues that coordinate structures are asymmetrical, hierarchical structures that conform with X-bar theory. The conjunction head projects a phrase which is adjoined to the first conjunct. This provides an account of a number of syntactic asymmetries in conjunct ordering including agreement and binding asymmetries and provides a principled analysis of Across-the-Board extraction as instances of parasitic gaps. It further argues that the Coordinate Structure Constraint cannot be a syntactic constraint, but rather must ...