Mayfest 2025 - Constraints on Meaning
When and why are certain meanings missing?
Research
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Featured Research News
Optional agreement in Santiago Tz'utujil (Mayan) is syntactic
Agreement is optional only for complements, and is conditioned by whether the argument is a DP or a reduced nominal.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s):Theodore Levin, Paulina Lyskawa *21 and Rodrigo Ranero *21
Dates:
Publisher: Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft
Publisher: Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft
Some Mayan languages display optional verbal agreement with 3pl arguments (Dayley 1985; Henderson 2009; England 2011). Focusing on novel data from Santiago Tz’utujil (ST), we demonstrate that this optionality is not reducible to phonological or morphological factors. Rather, the source of optionality is in the syntax. Specifcally, the distinction between arguments generated in the specifer position and arguments generated in the complement position governs the pattern. Only base-complements control agreement optionally; base-specifers control agreement obligatorily. We provide an analysis in which optional agreement results from the availability of two syntactic representations (DP vs. reduced nominal argument). Thus, while the syntactic operation Agree is deterministic, surface optionality arises when the operation targets two diferent sized goals.
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Proxy Control: A new species of control in grammar
In German and Italian, 'Maria asked Bill to leave early' may be used to mean that Maria sought permission for people she represents. Aaron and Sandhya provide an analysis.
Contributor(s): Aaron DolianaNon-ARHU Contributor(s):
Sandhya Sundaresan
Dates:
Publisher: Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
Publisher: Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
The control dependency in grammar is conventionally distinguished into two classes: exhaustive (i→i) and non-exhaustive (i→i + (j)). Here, we show that, in languages like German and Italian, some speakers allow a new kind of “proxy control” which differs from both, such that, for a controller i, and a controllee j, j = proxy(i). The proxy function picks out a set of individuals that is discourse-pragmatically related to i. For such speakers, the German/Italian proxy control equivalent of the sentence: “Mariai asked Billj (for permission) [PRO𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑥𝑦(𝑖)proxy(i) to leave work early]” would thus mean that Maria asked Bill for permission for some salient set of individuals related to herself to leave early. We examine the theoretical and empirical properties of this new control relation in detail, showing that it is irreducible to other, more familiar referential dependencies. Using standard empirical diagnostics, we then illustrate that proxy control can be instantiated both as a species of obligatory control (OC) and non-obligatory control (NOC) in German and Italian and develop a syntactic and semantic model that derives each and details the factors conditioning the choice between the two. We also investigate the factors that condition different degrees of exhaustiveness (exhaustive vs. partial vs. proxy) in control, which then sheds light on why proxy control obtains in some languages, but not others and, within a language, is possible for some speakers but not others.
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Processing adjunct control: Evidence on the use of structural information and prediction in reference resolution
How does online comprehension of adjunct control ("before eating") compare to resolution of pronominal anaphora ("before he ate")?
Contributor(s): Alexander Williams, Ellen LauNon-ARHU Contributor(s):
Jeffrey J. Green *18, Michael McCourt *21
Dates:
Publisher: Glossa
Publisher: Glossa
The comprehension of anaphoric relations may be guided not only by discourse, but also syntactic information. In the literature on online processing, however, the focus has been on audible pronouns and descriptions whose reference is resolved mainly on the former. This paper examines one relation that both lacks overt exponence, and relies almost exclusively on syntax for its resolution: adjunct control, or the dependency between the null subject of a non-finite adjunct and its antecedent in sentences such as Mickey talked to Minnie before ___ eating. Using visual-world eyetracking, we compare the timecourse of interpreting this null subject and overt pronouns (Mickey talked to Minnie before he ate). We show that when control structures are highly frequent, listeners are just as quick to resolve reference in either case. When control structures are less frequent, reference resolution based on structural information still occurs upon hearing the non-finite verb, but more slowly, especially when unaided by structural and referential predictions. This may be due to increased difficulty in recognizing that a referential dependency is necessary. These results indicate that in at least some contexts, referential expressions whose resolution depends on very different sources of information can be resolved approximately equally rapidly, and that the speed of interpretation is largely independent of whether or not the dependency is cued by an overt referring expression.
Transparency and language contact: The case of Haitian Creole, French, and Fongbe
Haitian Creole supports the hypothesis that language contact leads to more transparent relations between meaning and form.
Contributor(s): Luisa Seguin
Dates:
Publisher: Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 35(2)
Publisher: Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 35(2)
When communicating speakers map meaning onto form. It would thus seem obvious for languages to show a one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form, but this is often not the case. This perfect mapping, i.e. transparency, is indeed continuously violated in natural languages, giving rise to zero-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-one opaque correspondences between meaning and form. However, transparency is a mutating feature, which can be influenced by language contact. In this scenario languages tend to evolve and lose some of their opaque features, becoming more transparent. This study investigates transparency in a very specific contact situation, namely that of a creole, Haitian Creole, and its sub- and superstrate languages, Fongbe and French, within the Functional Discourse Grammar framework. We predict Haitian Creole to be more transparent than French and Fongbe and investigate twenty opacity features, divided into four categories, namely Redundancy (one-to-many), Fusion (many-to-one), Discontinuity (one meaning is split in two or more forms,) and Form-based Form (forms with no semantic counterpart: zero-to-one). The results indeed prove our prediction to be borne out: Haitian Creole only presents five opacity features out of twenty, while French presents nineteen and Fongbe nine. Furthermore, the opacity features of Haitian Creole are also present in the other two languages.
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There is a simplicity bias when generalising from ambiguous data
How do phonological learners choose among generalizations of differing complexity?
Contributor(s): Adam LiterNon-ARHU Contributor(s):
Karthik Durvasula
Dates:
Publisher: Phonology 37(2)
Publisher: Phonology 37(2)
How exactly do learners generalize in the face of ambiguous data? While there has been a substantial amount of research studying the biases that learners employ, there has been very little work on what sorts of biases are employed in the face of data that is ambiguous between phonological generalizations with different degrees of complexity. In this article, we present the results from three artificial language learning experiments that suggest that, at least for phonotactic sequence patterns, learners are able to keep track of multiple generalizations related to the same segmental co-occurrences; however, the generalizations they learn are only the simplest ones consistent with the data.
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Null Objects in Korean: Experimental Evidence for the Argument Ellipsis Analysis
Experimental evidence supports an analysis of Null Object constructions in Korean as instances of object ellipsis.
Contributor(s): Jeffrey LidzNon-ARHU Contributor(s):
Chung-hye Han, Kyeong-min Kim, Keir Moulton
Dates:
Null object (NO) constructions in Korean and Japanese have receiveddifferent accounts: as (a) argument ellipsis (Oku 1998, S. Kim 1999, Saito 2007, Sakamoto 2015), (b) VP-ellipsis after verb raising (Otani and Whitman 1991, Funakoshi 2016), or (c) instances of base-generated pro (Park 1997, Hoji 1998, 2003). We report results from two experiments supporting the argument ellipsis analysis for Korean. Experiment 1 builds on K.-M. Kim and Han’s (2016) finding of interspeaker variation in whether the pronoun ku can be bound by a quantifier. Results showed that a speaker’s acceptance of quantifier-bound ku positively correlates with acceptance of sloppy readings in NO sentences. We argue that an ellipsis account, in which the NO site contains internal structure hosting the pronoun, accounts for this correlation. Experiment 2, testing the recovery of adverbials in NO sentences, showed that only the object (not the adverb) can be recovered in the NO site, excluding the possibility of VP-ellipsis. Taken together, our findings suggest that NOs result from argument ellipsis in Korean.
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The structure of Polish numerically-quantified expressions
What is the syntax of "five witches" in Polish, with genitive on "witches", accusative on "five", and third-singular-neuter agreement on a verb? Paulina Lyskawa gives a new answer that manages to preserve ordinary theories of case and agreement.
Contributor(s): Paulina LyskawaNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Paulina Lyskawa
Dates:
Cross-linguistically, numerically-quantified expressions vary in terms of their internal syntactic structure (e.g. the category of the numeral, its position in the nominal projection) as well as interaction with the external syntax (e.g. occurring in the subject positions, determining agreement and concord). Here, I investigate Polish numerically-quantified expressions of the 5+ type, such as pięć czarownic ‘five witches’, focusing on three morphosyntactic properties: the genitive case on the quantified noun, the accusative case on the numeral, and the occurrence of 3sg neuter verbal agreement. I argue that all of these properties can be captured within existing theories of case and agreement, in terms of a null head that takes the quantified noun phrase as its complement, and a numeral phrase as its specifier. Genitive on the noun is structural, accusative on the numeral is licensed by a null preposition, and default agreement is a result of the case-discriminating nature of verbal agreement. This proposal has implications for the broader theory of agreement and case assignment in Slavic languages and beyond.
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Headedness and the Lexicon: The Case of Verb-to-Noun Ratios
Is there a correlation between the relative size of a lexical class, such as verbs in relation to nouns, and whether members of that class precede or follow a dependent in phrases they head? This paper finds that there is.
Contributor(s): Maria PolinskyNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Lilla Magyar
Dates:
This paper takes a well-known observation as its starting point, that is, languages vary with respect to headedness, with the standard head-initial and head-final types well attested. Is there a connection between headedness and the size of a lexical class? Although this question seems quite straightforward, there are formidable methodological and theoretical challenges in addressing it. Building on initial results by several researchers, we refine our methodology and consider the proportion of nouns to simplex verbs (as opposed to light verb constructions) in a varied sample of 33 languages to evaluate the connection between headedness and the size of a lexical class. We demonstrate a robust correlation between this proportion and headedness. While the proportion of nouns in a lexicon is relatively stable, head-final/object-verb (OV)-type languages (e.g., Japanese or Hungarian) have a relatively small number of simplex verbs, whereas head-initial/verb-initial languages (e.g., Irish or Zapotec) have a considerably larger percentage of such verbs. The difference between the head-final and head-initial type is statistically significant. We, then, consider a subset of languages characterized as subject-verb-object (SVO) and show that this group is not uniform. Those SVO languages that have strong head-initial characteristics (as shown by the order of constituents in a set of phrases and word order alternations) are characterized by a relatively large proportion of lexical verbs. SVO languages that have strong head-final traits (e.g., Mandarin Chinese) pattern with head-final languages, and a small subset of SVO languages are genuinely in the middle (e.g., English, Russian). We offer a tentative explanation for this headedness asymmetry, couched in terms of informativity and parsing principles, and discuss additional evidence in support of our account. All told, the fewer simplex verbs in head-final/OV-type languages is an adaptation in response to their particular pattern of headedness. The object-verb/verb-object (OV/VO) difference with respect to noun/verb ratios also reveals itself in SVO languages; some languages, Chinese and Latin among them, show a strongly OV ratio, whereas others, such as Romance or Bantu, are VO-like in their noun/verb ratios. The proportion of nouns to verbs thus emerges as a new linguistic characteristic that is correlated with headedness.
Enough time to get results? An ERP investigation of prediction with complex events
How quickly can verb-argument relations be computed to impact predictions of a subsequent argument? This paper examines the question by comparing two kinds of compound verbs in Mandarin, and neural responses to the following direct object.
Contributor(s): Ellen LauNon-ARHU Contributor(s):
Chia-Hsuan Liao (*20)
Dates:
How quickly can verb-argument relations be computed to impact predictions of a subsequent argument? We take advantage of the substantial differences in verb-argument structure provided by Mandarin, whose compound verbs encode complex event relations, such as resultatives (kid bit-broke lip: 'the kid bit his lip such that it broke') and coordinates (store owner hit-scolded employee 'the store owner hit and scolded an employee'). We tested sentences in which the object noun could be predicted on the basis of the preceding compound verb, and used N400 responses to the noun to index successful prediction. By varying the delay between verb and noun, we show that prediction is delayed in the resultative context (broken-BY-biting) relative to the coordinate one (hitting-AND-scolding). These results present a first step towards temporally dissociating the fine-grained subcomputations required to parse and interpret verb-argument relations.
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Syntactic category constrains lexical access in speaking
When we choose which word to speak, do nouns and verbs compete, when the express similar concepts? New evidence says No: syntactic category plays a key role in limiting lexical access.
Contributor(s): Colin PhillipsNon-ARHU Contributor(s):
Shota Momma (*16), Julia Buffinton, Bob Slevc
Dates:
We report two experiments that suggest that syntactic category plays a key role in limiting competition in lexical access in speaking. We introduce a novel sentence-picture interference (SPI) paradigm, and we show that nouns (e.g., running as a noun) do not compete with verbs (e.g., walking as a verb) and verbs do not compete with nouns in sentence production, regardless of their conceptual similarity. Based on this finding, we argue that lexical competition in production is limited by syntactic category. We also suggest that even complex words containing category-changing derivational morphology can be stored and accessed together with their final syntactic category information. We discuss the potential underlying mechanism and how it may enable us to speak relatively fluently.
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