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.
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Featured Research News
Advanced second language learners' perception of lexical tone contrasts
Mandarin tones are difficult for advanced L2 learners. But the difficulty comes primarily from the need to process tones lexically, and not from an inability to perceive tones phonetically.
Contributor(s): Ellen LauNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Eric Pelzl, Taomei Guo, Robert DeKeyser
Dates:
It is commonly believed that second language (L2) acquisition of lexical tones presents a major challenge for learners from nontonal language backgrounds. This belief is somewhat at odds with research that consistently shows beginning learners making quick gains through focused tone training, as well as research showing advanced learners achieving near-native performance in tone identification tasks. However, other long-term difficulties related to L2 tone perception may persist, given the additional demands of word recognition and the effects of context. In the current study, we used behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) experiments to test whether perception of Mandarin tones is difficult for advanced L2 learners in isolated syllables, disyllabic words in isolation, and disyllabic words in sentences. Stimuli were more naturalistic and challenging than in previous research. While L2 learners excelled at tone identification in isolated syllables, they performed with very low accuracy in rejecting disyllabic tonal nonwords in isolation and in sentences. We also report ERP data from critical mismatching words in sentences; while L2 listeners showed no significant differences in responses in any condition, trends were not inconsistent with the overall pattern in behavioral results of less sensitivity to tone mismatches than to semantic or segmental mismatches. We interpret these results as evidence that Mandarin tones are in fact difficult for advanced L2 learners. However, the difficulty is not due primarily to an inability to perceive tones phonetically, but instead is driven by the need to process tones lexically, especially in multisyllable words.
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Syntactic Structures after 60 Years: The Impact of the Chomskyan Revolution in Linguistics
A collection reflecting on Chomsky's 1957 classic, with several essays by Maryland faculty and alumni.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Pritty Patel-Grosz, Charles Yang
Dates:
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
A collection reflecting on Chomsky's 1957 classic, with several essays by Maryland faculty and alumni.
The explanatory power of linguistic theory
Jeff Lidz details evidence for the Predicate Internal Subject Hypothesis, and shows how its abstractness supports the "considerable sophistication" that the Chomskyan tradition imputes to the child learner.
Contributor(s): Jeffrey Lidz
Dates:
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
Jeff Lidz details evidence for the Predicate Internal Subject Hypothesis, and shows how its abstractness supports the "considerable sophistication" that the Chomskyan tradition imputes to the child learner.
Back to the Future: Non-generation, filtration, and the heartbreak of interface-driven minimalism
Syntax is not a system that freely generates structures and then selectively filters them, contrary to common versions of the Minimalist Program.
Contributor(s): Omer Preminger
Dates:
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
This paper argues that the filtration-based approach to syntactic competence adopted in the context of minimalist syntax (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2001), where freely-assembled syntactic outputs are filtered at the interfaces with the sensorimotor (SM) and conceptual-intentional (C-I) systems, is empirically wrong. The solution, I argue, is a return to a non-generation alternative, of the kind put forth in Syntactic Structures (Chomsky 1957).
Grammaticalized number, implicated presuppositions, and the plural
An experimental study on the meaning and markedness of plural morphology.
Contributor(s): Adam LiterNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Adam Liter, Tess Huelskamp, Christopher C. Heffner, Cristina Schmitt
Dates:
Plural morphology exhibits differing interpretations across languages. For example, in downward entailing contexts in English, the plural receives a one or more (or inclusive) interpretation, whereas in Korean-like languages the plural always receives a more than one (or exclusive) interpretation, regardless of context. Previous experimental work using an artificial language suggests that such differences may follow from structural properties of these languages (Liter, Heffner & Schmitt 2017), namely lack of grammaticalization of the plural/singular distinction. In this paper we adopt Sauerland, Anderssen & Yatsushiro’s (2005) implicated presupposition analysis of the plural (the English plural is semantically unmarked, whereas the Korean plural is semantically marked, carrying a presupposition that the cardinality of its referent is greater than one) in order to test two hypotheses about the interpretation of the plural. Using an artificial language learning paradigm identical to that in Liter, Heffner & Schmitt (2017) with non-grammaticalized number but with a much greater frequency of singular/plural NPs in the input, we test (i) whether semantic markedness of the plural should be linked to the non-grammaticalization of the number paradigm; or (ii) whether semantic markedness follows from insufficient statistical evidence for simplifying the lexical entry for the plural. Our results show that participants continue to assign an exclusive interpretation to plural morphology under the scope of negation, which is compatible with the hypothesis that non-grammaticalized number entails semantic markedness.
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Semantic information and the syntax of propositional attitude verbs
The syntactic distribution of mental state verbs, like "think" and "want", is correlated interestingly with their meaning and usage. But what exactly are the correlations? Aaron White reports a statistical study.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Aaron S. White
Dates:
Propositional attitude verbs, such as think and want, have long held interest for both theoretical linguists and language acquisitionists because their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties display complex interactions that have proven difficult to fully capture from either perspective. This paper explores the granularity with which these verbs’ semantic and pragmatic properties are recoverable from their syntactic distributions, using three behavioral experiments aimed at explicitly quantifying the relationship between these two sets of properties. Experiment 1 gathers a measure of 30 propositional attitude verbs’ syntactic distributions using an acceptability judgment task. Experiments 2a and 2b gather measures of semantic similarity between those same verbs using a generalized semantic discrimination (triad or “odd man out”) task and an ordinal (Likert) scale task, respectively. Two kinds of analyses are conducted on the data from these experiments. The first compares both the acceptability judgments and the semantic similarity judgments to previous classifications derived from the syntax and semantics literature. The second kind compares the acceptability judgments to the semantic similarity judgments directly. Through these comparisons, we show that there is quite fine‐grained information about propositional attitude verbs’ semantics carried in their syntactic distributions—whether one considers the sorts of discrete qualitative classifications that linguists traditionally work with or the sorts of continuous quantitative classifications that can be derived experimentally.
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The scope of children’s scope: Representation, parsing and learning
What do young children know about quantifier scope?
Contributor(s): Jeffrey Lidz
Dates:
This paper reviews some developmental psycholinguistic literature on quantifier scope. I demonstrate how scope has been used as a valuable probe into children’s grammatical representations, the nature of children’s on-line understanding mechanisms, and the role that experience plays in language acquisition. First, children’s interpretations of certain scopally ambiguous sentences reveals that their syntactic representations are hierarchical, with the c-command relation playing a fundamental role in explaining interpretive biases. Second, children’s scope errors are explained by incremental parsing and interpretation mechanisms, paired with difficulty revising initial interpretations. Third, a priming manipulation reveals that children’s clauses, like those of adults, are represented with predicate-internal subjects. Finally, data on scope variation in Korean reveals that in the absence of disambiguating evidence, parameter setting is an essentially random process. Together, these discoveries reveal how the developmental psycholinguistics of scope has proved a valuable tool for probing issues of grammar, parsing and learning
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Young children's conception of knowledge
Young children make mistakes in understanding uses of "know." But does that show difficult with the concept of knowledge? Probably not, argues Rachel Dudley.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Rachel Dudley
Dates:
How should knowledge be analyzed? Compositionally, as having constituents like belief and justification, or as an atomic concept? In making arguments for or against these perspectives, epistemologists have begun to use experimental evidence from developmental psychology and developmental linguistics. If we were to conclude that knowledge were developmentally prior to belief, then we might have a good basis to claim that belief is not a constituent of knowledge. In this review, I present a broad range of developmental evidence from the past decade and discuss some of the implications it has for the proper analysis of knowledge. The orthodox perspective from the developmental literature was one where children fail to understand belief and knowledge concepts until later in childhood (around 4–5 years of age), with typical asymmetries in belief attribution and knowledge attribution. But what emerges from both a discussion of newer findings and a contextualization of older findings is a picture of development whereby core competence with belief and knowledge concepts emerges much earlier than previously thought (in the first or second year of life) that apparent failures in later childhood may be explained by other aspects of development than conceptual development and that there is no clear evidence that knowledge attributions emerge earlier than belief attributions.
Three-Year-Olds’ Understanding of Desire Reports Is Robust to Conflict
Our mental states don't always depict the actual word: beliefs can be wrong and desires, unsatisfied. Kate Harrigan argues that even 3-year-olds understand this, contrary to some claims, as they understand sentences that describe unsatisfied wants.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Kaitlyn Harrigan
Dates:
In this paper, we present two experiments with 3-year-olds, exploring their interpretation of sentences about desires. A mature concept of desire entails that desires may conflict with reality and that different people may have conflicting desires. While previous literature is suggestive, it remains unclear whether young children understand that (a) agents can have counterfactual desires about current states of affairs and (b) agents can have desires that conflict with one’s own desires or the desires of others. In this article, we test preschoolers’ interpretation of want sentences, in order to better understand their ability to represent conflicting desires, and to interpret sentences reporting these desires. In the first experiment, we use a truth-value judgment task (TVJT) to assess 3-year-olds’ understanding of want sentences when the subject of the sentence has a desire that conflicts with reality. In the second experiment, we use a game task to induce desires in the child that conflict with the desires of a competitor, and assess their understanding of sentences describing these desires. In both experiments, we find that 3-year-olds successfully interpret want sentences, suggesting that their ability to represent conflicting desires is adult-like at this age. Given that 3-year-olds generally display difficulty attributing beliefs to others that conflict with reality or with the child’s own beliefs, these findings may further cast some doubt on the view that children’s persistent difficulty with belief (think) is caused by these kinds of conflicts.
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Unaccusativity in sentence production
Shota Momma argues that sentence planning in speech production manifests the grammatical distinction between unaccusative and unergative intransitives.
Contributor(s): Colin PhillipsNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Shota Momma, L. Robert Slevc
Dates:
Linguistic analyses suggest that there are two types of intransitive verbs: unaccusatives, whose sole argument is a patient or theme (e.g., fall), and unergatives, whose sole argument is an agent (e.g., jump). Past psycholinguistic experiments suggest that this distinction affects how sentences are processed: for example, it modulates both comprehension processes (Bever and Sanz 1997, Friedmann et al. 2008) and production processes (Kegl 1995, Kim 2006, M. Lee and Thompson 2004, J. Lee and Thompson 2011, McAllister et al. 2009). Given this body of evidence, it is reasonable to assume, as we do here, that this distinction is directly relevant to psycholinguistic theorizing. However, especially in production, exactly how this distinction affects processing is unknown, beyond the suggestion that unaccusatives somehow in- volve more complex processing than unergatives (see M. Lee and Thompson 2011). Here we examine how real-time planning processes in production differ for unaccusatives and unergatives. We build on previous studies on lookahead effects in sentence planning that show that verbs are planned before a deep object is uttered but not before a deep subject is uttered (Momma, Slevc, and Phillips 2015, 2016). (We use terms like deep subject in a theory-neutral fashion, with no intended commitment to a specific syntactic encoding.) This line of research sheds light on the broader issue of how the theory of argument structure relates to sentence production.