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.
A network of collaboration at all levels sustains a research climate that is both vigorous and friendly. Here new ideas develop in conversation, stimulated by the steady activity of our labs and research groups, frequent student meetings with faculty, regular talks by local and invited scholars and collaborations with the broader University of Maryland language science community, the largest and most integrated language science research community in North America.
Featured Research News
The relationship between parsing and generation
Do speaking and comprehension use the same mechanisms in building grammatical structure? Shota Momma and Colin Phillips say Yes.
Contributor(s): Colin PhillipsNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Shota Momma
Dates:
Humans use their linguistic knowledge in at least two ways: on the one hand, to convey what they mean to others or to themselves, and on the other hand, to understand what others say or what they themselves say. In either case, they must assemble the syntactic structures of sentences in a systematic fashion, in accordance with the grammar of their language. In this article, we advance the view that a single mechanism for building sentence structure may be sufficient for structure building in comprehension and production. We argue that differing behaviors reduce to differences in the available information in either task. This view has broad implications for the architecture of the human language system and provides a useful framework for integrating largely independent research programs on comprehension and production by both constraining the models and uncovering new questions that can drive further research.
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Wait a second! Delayed impact of argument roles on on-line verb prediction
"Those thieves, the police... arrested." That ending makes more sense than would "arrested." But Wing Yee Chow and collaborators show that in real time comprehension, predictions like this take a bit more time than you might expect.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Wing-Yee Chow
Dates:
Comprehenders can use rich contextual information to anticipate upcoming input on the fly, but recent findings suggest that salient information about argument roles may not impact verb prediction. We took advantage of the word order properties of Mandarin Chinese to examine the time course with which argument role information impacts verb prediction. We isolated the contribution of argument role information by manipulating the order of pre-verbal noun phrase arguments while holding lexical information constant, and we examined its effects on accessing the verb in long-term semantic memory by measuring the amplitude of the N400 component. Experiment 1 showed when the verb appeared immediately after its arguments, even strongly constraining argument role information failed to modulate the N400 response to the verb. An N400 effect emerged in Experiment 2 when the verb appeared at a greater delay. Experiment 3 corroborated the contrast between the first two experiments through a within-participants manipulation of the time interval between the arguments and the verb, by varying the position of an adverbial phrase. These results suggest time is a key factor governing how diverse contextual information contributes to predictions. Here argument role information is shown to impact verb prediction, but its effect is not immediate.
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The Minimalist Program after 25 years
What were the original goals of the Minimalist Program, and what are they now? Norbert Hornstein clarifies.
Contributor(s): Norbert Hornstein
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The Minimalist Program (MP) has been around for about 25 years, and anecdotal evidence suggests that conventional wisdom thinks it a failure. This review argues that MP has been a tremendous success and has more than met the very high goals it had set for itself. This does not imply that there is not more to be done. There is, a lot more. But the problems are those characteristic of successful and ongoing research programs. Why the perception of failure? It arises from a misunderstanding concerning the aims of the minimalist project and what, given these aims, it is reasonable to expect. Once we clear up the nature of MP’s goals, we will be better placed to judge (and appreciate) how far it has come.
Learning what 'can' and 'must' can and must mean
A single modal auxiliary, such as "can" or "must", can be used to say what is possible or necessary relative to a variety of different grounds: "Sam can't have left the house, because she can't leave before dinner." How do kids figure this out?
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Ailis Cournane
Dates:
This corpus study investigates how children figure out that functional modals like must can express various flavors of modality. We examine how modality is expressed in speech to and by children, and find that the way speakers use modals may obscure their polysemy. Yet, children eventually figure it out. Our results suggest that some do before age 3. We show that while root and epistemic flavors are not equally well-represented in the input, there are robust correlations between flavor and aspect, which learners could exploit to discover modal polysemy.
Dutch 'must' more structure
In Dutch you can say "Liv must a bike" to mean she needs to have bike, but not to mean she probably has one. But why, when the same is not true for "Liv must have a bike"?
Contributor(s): Annemarie van Dooren
Dates:
In Dutch you can say "Liv must a bike" to mean she needs to have bike, but not to mean she probably has one. But why, when the same is not true for "Liv must have a bike"?
Two kinds of syntactic ergativity in Mayan
Mayan languages often distinguish transitive from intransitive subjects syntactically. But they do so in two different ways, argues Rodrigo Ranero.
Contributor(s): Rodrigo RaneroNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Jamie Douglas, Michelle Sheehan
Dates:
In this paper we argue that there are two different kinds of syntactic ergativity attested across Mayan languages. In languages that are (predominantly) VOS, the ban on A-bar extraction of the transitive subject arises because of a blocking effect of the kind proposed by Aldridge (2008), Coon et al. (2014). This explains the O>S word order but also the fact that straightforward extraction of all vP-internal material is banned. In the case of predominantly VSO languages, however, we propose that syntactic ergativity affects only the transitive subject: extraction of vP-internal adjuncts is unrestricted. This is because in S>O languages, the extraction restriction results from anti-locality, of the kind proposed by Erlewine (2016). We argue, moreover, that both kinds of syntactic ergativity in these languages ultimately arise due to defective intervention of the ergative subject in the Agree relation between INFL and the internal argument. There are essentially two ways to circumvent this problem: either S 'sidesteps' to spec INFL, or O leapfrogs to the outer spec vP.
Exhaustivity and at-issueness: Evidence from L1 Acquisition of Mandarin
"Only Art wept" foregrounds the claim that Art was alone in weeping, while "It was Art who wept" backgrounds the presumption of a single weeper. How do kids acquiring a language come to understand such distinctions?
Contributor(s): Yu'an YangNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Ying Liu
Dates:
"Only Art wept" foregrounds the claim that Art was alone in weeping, while "It was Art who wept" backgrounds the presumption of a single weeper. How do kids acquiring a language come to understand such distinctions?
Why control of PRO in rationale clauses is not a relation between arguments
"The ship was sunk to collect the insurance." The sinker may be the intended collector of insurance. But not, argue Jeff and Alexander against the common view, because of a grammatical relation between arguments in the two clauses.
Contributor(s): Alexander WilliamsNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Jeffrey Green
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"The ship was sunk to collect the insurance." The sinker may be the intended collector of insurance. But not, argue Jeff and Alexander against the common view, because of a grammatical relation between arguments in the two clauses.
Distinguishing object agreement and clitic doubling in Noun Incorporation constructions
Some languages with Noun Incorporation also have morphology that indexes the noun. Which ones? Only those where such morphology expresses agreement, and not clitic doubling, says postdoc Ted Levin.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Theodore Levin
Dates:
Some languages with Noun Incorporation also have morphology that indexes the noun. Which ones? Only those where such morphology expresses agreement, and not clitic doubling, says postdoc Ted Levin.
Exploring the abstractness of number retrieval cues in the computation of subject-verb agreement in comprehension
"The key to the cabinets are in the drawer." This sort of error in agreement has been explained in terms of cue-based memory retrieval. Zoe Schlueter asks whether the relevant cue is plural "s" or something more abstract and faithful to the grammar.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Zoe Schlueter
Dates:
Subject-verb agreement has provided critical insights into the cue-based memory retrieval system that supports language comprehension by showing that memory interference can cause erroneous agreement with non subjects: ‘agreement attraction’. Here we ask how faithful retrieval cues are in relation to the grammar. We examine the impact of conjoined singular attractors (The advice from the doctor and the nurse…), which are syntactically plural but whose plurality is introduced by a vehicle, the conjunction ‘and’, that is not an unequivocal correlate of syntactic plurality. We find strong agreement attraction, which suggests that retrieval processes do not only target unequivocal morphological correlates of syntactic plurality. However, we also find some attraction with conjoined adjective attractors (The advice from the diligent and compassionate doctor…), which is compatible with a system in which an imperfect correlate of syntactic plurality, like the word ‘and’, can become associated with the plural retrieval cue due to frequent co-occurrence with the actual target feature.