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.
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Featured Research News
You had me at "Hello": Rapid extraction of dialect information from spoken words
MEG studies show that we detect acoustic features of dialect speaker-independently, pre-attentively and categorically, within 100 milliseconds.
Contributor(s): William IdsardiNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Mathias Scharinger, Philip Monahan
Dates:
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 as an automatic change detection response of the brain reflected dialect differences that were not entirely reducible to acoustic differences between the pronunciations of ‘Hello’. Source analyses of the M100, an auditory evoked response to the vowels suggested additional processing in voice-selective areas whenever a dialect change was detected. These findings are not only relevant for the cognitive neuroscience of language, but also for the social sciences concerned with dialect and race perception.
Problems with a Movement Analysis of Right Node Raising in Tagalog
A pragmatic reanalysis of Sabbagh's (2008) data on unacceptable cases of Right Node Raising in Tagalog.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Bradley Larson
Dates:
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 RNR targets suggests that RNR in Tagalog is not derived via A-bar movement. The instances where RNR is not allowed can be explained by the interplay between morphologically realized specificity marking of Tagalog arguments and crosslinguistic information structure requirements of RNR sentences. The position immediately prior to the gaps in RNR must represent discourse-salient new information (as in Hartmann 2000, Ha 2007). The illicit RNR sentences that Sabbagh produces fail to be acceptable because the constituents in this position are marked with a ‘‘specific’’ determiner (Schachter and Otanes 1972, Kroeger 1993), which, being specific, requires a ‘‘previously established discourse referent’’ (Enc ̧ 1991:8). That is, the pregap expressions must simultaneously represent new information and refer to an established referent, a difficult feat. Discourse-initially this is not possible for obvious reasons, and it is correctly predicted that RNR sentences with pregap, specific-marked expressions are judged unacceptable. However, in particular contexts, the otherwise unacceptable sentences are judged acceptable.
Freezing Effects and Objects
A new argument in favor of Case as a central ingredient in deriving freezing effects, based on a comparative study of A-bar extraction from and of indirect objects in Norwegian and English.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Terje Lohndal
Dates:
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. It is shown that both subjects and indirect objects disallow sub-extraction in both English in Norwegian, but that whereas English does not allow the indirect object to A-bar move, Norwegian allows this A-bar movement. The paper argues that this relates to whether Case is structural or inherent. As such, this paper offers a new argument in favor of Case as a central ingredient in deriving freezing effects.
Minimalist Construal: Two Approaches to A and B
A comparison of theories that treat binding as movement with those that treat it as agreement.
Contributor(s): Norbert HornsteinNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Alex Drummond, Dave Kush
Dates:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Until recently, mainstream minimalist theorizing has treated construal as a (CI) interface process rather than as a part of core grammar. Recently, a number of authors have resisted this categorization and tried to reduce binding and control relations to those established by movement, agreement, or some combination of the two. In this chapter we’ll compare and contrast two theories that give the grammar a privileged position with respect to the establishment of (at least some) binding relations. We’ll discuss variants of Hornstein’s (2001) movement-based analysis of construal and Reuland’s (2001, 2005) Agree-based theory of reflexive binding. For ease of exposition, we’ll refer to the former as Chain-Based Construal (CBC) and the latter as Agree-Based Construal (ABC)
A puzzle about P-stranding and a possible solution
Rightward extraposition out of a PP is ungrammatical, and yet PPs can be extraposed even when prosodically light. Why? Because Spellout is cyclic, PPs are phases, and prepositions follow their specifiers.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Alex Drummond
Dates:
Rightward extraposition out of a PP is ungrammatical, and yet PPs can be extraposed even when prosodically light. Why? Because Spellout is cyclic, PPs are phases, and prepositions follow their specifiers.
More on scope illusions
"It is a Finn that wins every race" allows that every race is won by a different Finn. But how, when "every race" should not take scope outside of the relative clause? The answer is generic quantification over situations.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Terje Lohndal
Dates:
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.
Phonological derivation by phase
An account of phonological rules in terms of syntactic phases.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Bridget Samuels
Dates:
An account of phonological rules in terms of syntactic phases.
The importance of being a complement: CED effects revisited
A suite of acceptability judgment studies on extraction out of subjects, for German, English, Japanese and Serbian.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Johannes Jurka
Dates:
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 effects (Wexler & Culicover 1981). Extraction out of in-situ subjects is degraded compared to extraction out of in-situ objects. Freezing incurs an additional cost, i.e., extraction out of moved domains is degraded compared to in-situ domains. Further results from German indicate that extraction out of in-situ unaccusative and passive subjects is en par with extraction out of objects, while extraction out of in-situ transitive and intransitive unergative subjects causes a decrease in acceptability. Additionally, extraction out of indirect objects is degraded compared to extraction out of direct objects. It is also observed that a second gap improves the acceptability of otherwise illicit 'was für'-split, a phenomenon dubbed Across-the-Board (ATB)-'was für'-split and analysed in terms of Sideward Movement (Hornstein & Nunes 2002). Furthermore, wh-extraction out of non-finite sentential arguments also shows a significant subject/object asymmetry. Experiments in English indicate that NP-subextraction yields the familiar subject/object asymmetry, while the contrast largely disappears when PPs are fronted. Further results show that ECM and passive predicates do not improve the acceptability of the extraction out of subjects. Finally, subject subextraction patterns in Japanese and Serbian are investigated. Both Long-distance scrambling and clefting out of sentential subjects in Japanese leads to a stronger degradation than out of sentential objects. PP-extraction in Serbian also shows the same subject/object asymmetry, while no such contrast is found for Left Branch Extraction.
A (surprising?) consequence of single-cycle syntax
When and why are noun phrases understood as scoping below their surface position?
Contributor(s): Howard Lasnik
Dates:
When and why are noun phrases understood as scoping below their surface position?
Commitment and Flexibility in the Developing Parser
Akira Omaki's dissertation on active prediction of wh-gaps, and revision of syntactic commitments, in the online language processing of both adults and children.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Akira Omaki
Dates:
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 and visual world) to show that long-distance dependency processing can be decomposed into a sequence of syntactic and interpretive processes. First, the reading experiments provide evidence that suggests that filler-gap dependencies are constructed before verb information is accessed. Second, visual world experiments show that, in the absence of information that would allow hearers to predict verb content in advance, interpretive processes in filler-gap dependency computation take around 600ms. These results argue for a predictive model of sentence interpretation in which syntactic representations are computed in advance of interpretive processes. The second part of the dissertation capitalizes on this procedural account of filler-gap dependency processing, and reports cross-linguistic studies on children's long-distance dependency processing. A comparison of the process of anaphor reconstruction in adults and children further suggests that verb-based thematic information is an effective revision cue for children. Finally, distributional analyses of wh-dependencies in child-directed speech are conducted to investigate how parsing constraints impact language acquisition. It is shown that the actual properties of the child parser can skew the input distribution, such that the effective distribution differs drastically from the input distribution seen from a researcher's perspective. This suggests that properties of developing perceptual mechanisms deserve more attention in language acquisition research.