Research

The source of syntactic island effects has been a topic of considerable debate within linguistics and psycholinguistics. Explanations fall into three basic categories: grammatical theories, which posit specific grammatical constraints that exclude extraction from islands; grounded theories, which posit grammaticized constraints that have arisen to adapt to constraints on learning or parsing; and reductionist theories, which analyze island effects as emergent consequences of non-grammatical constraints on the sentence parser, such as limited processing resources. In this article we present two studies designed to test a fundamental prediction of one of the most prominent reductionist theories: that the strength of island effects should vary across speakers as a function of individual differences in processing resources. We tested over three hundred native speakers of English on four different island-effect types (whether, complex NP, subject, and adjunct islands) using two different acceptability rating tasks (seven-point scale and magnitude estimation) and two different measures of working-memory capacity (serial recall and n-back). We find no evidence of a relationship between working-memory capacity and island effects using a variety of statistical analysis techniques, including resampling simulations. These results suggest that island effects are more likely to be due to grammatical constraints or grounded grammaticized constraints than to limited processing resources.

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 its limited purview and duties are shared such that all the data is accounted for. I argue for the former. Under the second option introduced above, RNR is derived either by means of one particular operation or a different one. That is, the term “right-node raising” is better seen as a surface-level description for a family of derivations: some stemming from an application of the first operation, the others via the second (as argued by Barros and Vicente (2010)). If this were the case it would be a sharp departure from the assumptions of most work in RNR and require critical investigation. When investigated further, there turns out to be no motivation to analyze RNR as being derived in two entirely separate ways. This being the case, the RNR dilemma remains.

Bengali/Bangla is unusual among South Asian languages in that it uses numerical classifiers. In this paper, I propose a new analysis of the DP structure in Bangla motivated by data previously unaccounted for and typological concerns. Specifically, I propose that Bangla has DP-internal NP movement to Spec,DP to mark definiteness, that the numeral and classifier form separate heads in the syntax, and that there is noun to classifier movement when there is no overt classifier. I propose a feature for each of these phenomena, and attempt to explain the ungrammatical examples using principled reasons de- rived from this structure. Also, I give an analysis for the quantificationally approximate construction, in which the classifier appears on the left of the numeral. I claim that the model presented in this paper can account for these constructions, and that the differences found between “classifier-compatible” nouns and “classifier-less” nouns with regard to the quantificationally approximate structures follows naturally from my analysis.

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 as a consequence of the different types of alternatives Modal Bases make available for semantic computation.

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, while modifying s in ways that have predictable effects on the nonlinguistic cognitive systems recruited to evaluate S. Extant work in perceptual psychology offers opportunities for eliciting judgments from speakers in highly controlled settings where something is known about the cognitive systems that speakers recruit when endorsing or rejecting a target sentence. In such settings, behavioral data can reveal aspects of how the human language system interfaces with other systems of cognition that are presumably shared with other species. As an illustration, we focus on the quantificational word “most” and how perception of numerosity is related to the meaning of “Most of the dots are blue,” in the hope that studies of other perceptual systems may provide analogous opportunities for investigating how words are related to prelinguistic representations.

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 counterparts. The proposed syntax and semantics illustrates a more general conception of edges and their relation to the so-called duality of semantics.

A review of **Minds and Language: A dialogue with Noam Chomsky in the Basque Country**, edited by Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, [Juan Uriagereka](/~juan/), 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 nominal and verbal domains. In addition, our discussion and data, drawn from English, Spanish, and Bulgarian, suggest that the semantic contribution of "more" can be given a uniform analysis.

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 heights (e.g. Cinque 1999) and that modals may act as unselective binders (Heim 1982), we extend Beghelli and Stowell’s topological approach to quantifier scope interactions in order to formulate a novel syntactic account of the ECP.