Research

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Traditionally, acquisition of syntactic knowledge and the development of sentence comprehension behaviors have been treated as separate disciplines. This paper reviews a growing body of work on the development of incremental sentence comprehension mechanisms, and discusses how a better understanding of the developing parser can shed light on two linking problems that plague language acquisition research. The first linking problem is that children’s behavioral data that are observable to researchers do not provide a transparent window into the developing grammar, as children’s immature linguistic behaviors may reflect the immature parser. The second linking problem is that the input data that researchers investigate may not correspond veridically to the intake data that feed the language acquisition mechanisms, as the developing parser may misanalyze and incorrectly represent the input. Based on reviews of child language comprehension studies that shed light on these two linking problems, it is argued that further research is necessary to closely integrate parser development and acquisition of syntactic knowledge.

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.

Masha Polinsky and Omer Preminger on the notion of Abstract Case.