Mayfest 2025 - Constraints on Meaning
When and why are certain meanings missing?
Research
Research at our top-ranked department spans syntax, semantics, phonology, language acquisition, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics.
Connections between our core competencies are strong, with theoretical, experimental and computational work typically pursued in tandem.
A network of collaboration at all levels sustains a research climate that is both vigorous and friendly. Here new ideas develop in conversation, stimulated by the steady activity of our labs and research groups, frequent student meetings with faculty, regular talks by local and invited scholars and collaborations with the broader University of Maryland language science community, the largest and most integrated language science research community in North America.
Featured Research News
The structure-sensitivity of memory access: Evidence from Mandarin Chinese
Interpretation of a reflexive pronoun requires consultation of memory for prior context. What role does the syntax of that context play in guiding that process? Brian Dillon reports a study on Mandarin Chinese.
Contributor(s): Colin PhillipsNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Brian Dillon, Wing Yee Chow, Matt Wagers, Taomei Guo, Fengqin Liu
Dates:
The present study examined the processing of the Mandarin Chinese long-distance reflexive ziji to evaluate the role that syntactic structure plays in the memory retrieval operations that support sentence comprehension. Using the multiple-response speed-accuracy tradeoff (MR-SAT) paradigm, we measured the speed with which comprehenders retrieve an antecedent for ziji. Our experimental materials contrasted sentences where ziji's antecedent was in the local clause with sentences where ziji's antecedent was in a distant clause. Time course results from MR-SAT suggest that ziji dependencies with syntactically distant antecedents are slower to process than syntactically local dependencies. To aid in interpreting the SAT data, we present a formal model of the antecedent retrieval process, and derive quantitative predictions about the time course of antecedent retrieval. The modeling results support the Local Search hypothesis: during syntactic retrieval, comprehenders initially limit memory search to the local syntactic domain. We argue that Local Search hypothesis has important implications for theories of locality effects in sentence comprehension. In particular, our results suggest that not all locality effects may be reduced to the effects of temporal decay and retrieval interference.
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Agreement and its Failures
Omer Preminger investigates how the obligatory nature of predicate-argument agreement is enforced by the grammar.
Contributor(s): Omer Preminger
Dates:
Publisher: MIT Press
Publisher: MIT Press
In this book, Omer Preminger investigates how the obligatory nature of predicate-argument agreement is enforced by the grammar. Preminger argues that an empirically adequate theory of predicate-argument agreement requires recourse to an operation, whose obligatoriness is a grammatical primitive not reducible to representational properties, but whose successful culmination is not enforced by the grammar.
Preminger’s argument counters contemporary approaches that find the obligatoriness of predicate-argument agreement enforced through representational means. The most prominent of these is Chomsky’s “interpretability”-based proposal, in which the obligatoriness of predicate-argument agreement is enforced through derivational time bombs. Preminger presents an empirical argument against contemporary approaches that seek to derive the obligatory nature of predicate-argument agreement exclusively from derivational time bombs. He offers instead an alternative account based on the notion of obligatory operations better suited to the facts. The crucial data involves utterances that inescapably involve attempted-but-failed agreement and are nonetheless fully grammatical. Preminger combines a detailed empirical investigation of agreement phenomena in the Kichean (Mayan) languages, Zulu (Bantu), Basque, Icelandic, and French with an extensive and rigorous theoretical exploration of the far-reaching consequences of these data. The result is a novel proposal that has profound implications for the formalism that the theory of grammar uses to derive obligatory processes and properties.
Measuring Predicates
A unified semantics for comparative constructions, departing from the view that predicates themselves express measure functions, via one morpheme to express measurement: "much".
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Alexis Wellwood
Dates:
Determining the semantic content of sentences, and uncovering regularities between linguistic form and meaning, requires attending to both morphological and syntactic properties of a language with an eye to the notional categories that the various pieces of form express. In this dissertation, I investigate the morphosyntactic devices that English speakers (and speakers of other languages) can use to talk about comparisons between things: comparative sentences with, in English, more... than, as... as, too, enough, and others. I argue that a core component of all of these constructions is a unitary element expressing the concept of measurement.
The theory that I develop departs from the standard degree-theoretic analysis of the semantics of comparatives in three crucial respects: first, gradable adjectives do not (partially or wholly) denote measure functions; second, degrees are introduced compositionally; and three, the introduction of degrees arises uniformly from the semantics of the expression much. These ideas mark a return to the classic mor- phosyntactic analysis of comparatives found in Bresnan (1973), while incorporating and extending semantic insights of Schwarzschild (2002, 2006). Of major interest is how the dimensions for comparison observed across the panoply of comparative constructions vary, and these are analyzed as a consequence of what is measured (individuals, events, states, etc.), rather than which expressions invoke the measurement.
This shift in perspective leads to the observation of a number of regularities in the mapping between form and meaning that could not otherwise have been seen. First, the notion of measurement expressed across comparative constructions is familiar from some explications of that concept in measurement theory (e.g. Berka 1983). Second, the distinction between gradable and non-gradable adjectives is formally on a par with that between mass and count nouns, and between atelic and telic verb phrases. Third, comparatives are perceived to be acceptable if the domain for measurement is structured, and to be anamolous otherwise. Finally, elaborations of grammatical form reflexively affect which dimensions for comparison are available to interpretation.
The Cognitive Basis for Encoding and Navigating Linguistic Structure
Dan Parker investigates when we are and are not prone to illusions of grammaticality, comparing the online processing of anaphors and NPIs.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Daniel Parker
Dates:
This dissertation is concerned with the cognitive mechanisms that are used to encode and navigate linguistic structure. Successful language understanding requires mechanisms for efficiently encoding and navigating linguistic structure in memory. The timing and accuracy of linguistic dependency formation provides valuable insights into the cognitive basis of these mechanisms. Recent research on linguistic dependency formation has revealed a profile of selective fallibility: some linguistic dependencies are rapidly and accurately implemented, but others are not, giving rise to “linguistic illusions”. This profile is not expected under current models of grammar or language processing. The broad consensus, however, is that the profile of selective fallibility reflects dependency-based differences in memory access strategies, including the use of different retrieval mechanisms and the selective use of cues for different dependencies. In this dissertation, I argue that (i) the grain-size of variability is not dependency-type, and (ii) there is not a homogenous cause for linguistic illusions. Rather, I argue that the variability is a consequence of how the grammar interacts with general-purpose encoding and access mechanisms. To support this argument, I provide three types of evidence. First, I show how to “turn on” illusions for anaphor resolution, a phenomena that has resisted illusions in the past, reflecting a cue combinatorics scheme that prioritizes structural information in memory retrieval. Second, I show how to “turn off” a robust illusion for negative polarity item (NPI) licensing, reflecting access to the internal computations during the encoding and interpretation of emerging semantic/pragmatic representations. Third, I provide computational simulations that derive both the presence and absence of the illusions from within the same memory architecture. These findings lead to a new conception of how we mentally encode and navigate structured linguistic representations.
Syntactic Head Movement and its Consequences
Assimilating head movement to phrasal movement.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Kenshi Funakoshi
Dates:
This thesis attempts to assimilate head movement as far as possible to phrasal movement. In particular, I argue that if we assume that the computational system of natural languages does not discriminate head movement from phrasal movement in terms of locality and the possible mode of operation, a distributional difference between these two types of movement can be explained by the interaction between a locality constraint and an anti-locality constraint to which syntactic movement operations are subject, and crosslinguistic variations in the possibility of what I will call headless XP-movement and headless XP-ellipsis can be reduced to parameters that are responsible for the possible number of specifiers. For this purpose, this dissertation discusses a number of syntactic phenomena: nominative object constructions in Japanese, long head movement constructions in Slavic and Romance languages, multiple topicalization in Germanic languages, predicate cleft constructions in Hebrew, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Yiddish, remnant VP-fronting constructions in Polish, a difference between VP-ellipsis and pseudo-gapping in English, null object constructions in Hebrew, Tagalog, Russian, European Portuguese, Japanese, Bantu languages, Persian, and Serbo-Croatian, and yes/no reply constructions in Irish and Finnish.
Headed tone spans: Binarity and minimal overlap
Postdoc Michael Key on the phonology of tone-spreading.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Michael Key, Lee Bickmore
Dates:
We present a theoretical framework for tone that builds on the Headed Spans theory of assimilation. We propose that spans have two important properties, which we term binarity and minimal overlap. Cilungu (Bantu, Zambia) exhibits a process of binary H tone spreading onto the following mora, and then onto the following syllable, unless an Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) violation would result. We propose two binary constraints on spans to explain this pattern. Further, Cilungu binary spreading obtains regardless of the length of the sequence of H-toned tone-bearing units (TBUs) in the input, which creates arbitrarily long output sequences of H-toned TBUs. We show that the binarity analysis can nonetheless account for this generalisation if spans are permitted to minimally overlap. A welcome consequence of permitting minimal overlap is that the No Crossing Condition can be derived (for tone) from factorial typology: candidates with supraminimal overlap are harmonically bounded in our theory. Finally, the formal and typological pathologies of non-overlapping alternative analyses are discussed.
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Immediate sensitivity to structural constraints in pronoun resolution
Real-time interpretation of pronouns is sometimes sensitive to the presence of grammatically-illicit antecedents and sometimes not. Why?
Contributor(s): Colin PhillipsNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Wing-Yee Chow, Shevaun Lewis
Dates:
Real-time interpretation of pronouns is sometimes sensitive to the presence of grammatically-illicit antecedents and sometimes not. This occasional sensitivity has been taken as evidence that structural constraints do not immediately impact the initial antecedent retrieval for pronoun interpretation. We argue that it is important to separate effects that reflect the initial antecedent retrieval process from those that reflect later processes. We present results from five reading comprehension experiments. Both the current results and previous evidence support the hypothesis that agreement features and structural constraints immediately constrain the antecedent retrieval process for pronoun interpretation. Occasional sensitivity to grammatically-illicit antecedents may be due to repair processes triggered when the initial retrieval fails to return a grammatical antecedent.
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Raising to object in wager/assure-class verbs: A PF account of the defective paradigm
"Who did Mary allege to be crazy" is much better than "*Mary alleged John to be crazy." Yuki Ito argues that is due not to the syntax of Case or NP licensing, but rather to a constraint on the linearization of syntax at PF.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Yuki Ito
Dates:
Wager‐class and assure‐class verbs exhibit a peculiarly defective paradigm where they allow ECM if the element undergoing ECM is an A′‐trace but not if the element is fully lexical. This article offers new data that reveal parallelism of these verbs with regular ECM verbs. Specifically, it is shown (i) that in wager ‐class verbs the ECM subject can remain in the embedded subject position and optionally raises to the Agreement projection of the embedding verb and (ii) that this raising to object is not possible with assure ‐class verbs due to Minimality. Based on these observations, it is suggested that the defective paradigm exhibited by wager /assure ‐class verbs stems from a PF constraint rather than a syntactic Case‐theoretic mechanism.
Additive effects of repetition and predictability on lexical semantic processing during comprehension
Word repetition and predictability have qualitatively similar and additive effects on the N400 amplitude in ERP.
Contributor(s): Ellen LauNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Wing Yee Chow, Sol Lago, Shannon Barrios, Dan Parker, Giovanna Morini
Dates:
Previous research has shown that neural responses to words during sentence comprehension are sensitive to both lexical repetition and a word’s predictability in context. While previous research has often contrasted the effects of these variables (e.g. by looking at cases in which word repetition violates sentence-level constraints), little is known about how they work in tandem. In the current study we examine how recent exposure to a word and its predictability in context combine to impact lexical semantic processing. We devise a novel paradigm that combines reading comprehension with a recognition memory task, allowing for an orthogonal manipulation of a word’s predictability and its repetition status. Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we show that word repetition and predictability have qualitatively similar and additive effects on the N400 amplitude. We propose that prior exposure to a word and predictability impact lexical semantic processing in an additive and independent fashion.
Positive expectation in the processing of allophones
Does native knowledge introduce a perceptual bias against allophones that mismatch their context?
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Michael Key
Dates:
Does native knowledge introduce a perceptual bias against allophones that mismatch their context? In German, [x] only occurs after back vowels, while [ç] occurs elsewhere. German and English listeners heard “allophonic” ([ç-x]) and “non-allophonic” ([ç-f], [x-f]) continua after front and back vowels. Vowel affected German responses to [ç-x] and [ç-f], but not [x-f]. Vowel affected English responses to all continua. The asymmetric effect on German responses is explained as a perceptual expectation of [ç] after [y]. The effect on English responses is explained by acoustic misparsing, which causes some of the vowel's spectrum to cue a spectrally similar fricative.
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