Mayfest 2024
The science of linguistic diversity.
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.
This dissertation discusses children's understanding of semantic contribution of the universal quantifier every and its interactions with negation from a logico-semantic perspective. The universal quantifier every evokes an asymmetric entailment pattern in its first and second arguments (e.g., Ladusaw, 1979), which influences both sentential meanings and inferential relations among them. Whereas several studies have revealed children's sophisticated ability to compose the meanings of sentences containing every (e.g., Gualmini 2005), far less is known about whether children's knowledge about every can be extended to the level of meaning comparison, i.e., to the computation of the inferential relations among every-sentences. We thus investigate whether children are able to apply their knowledge about every to the calculation of the inference relations between every-sentences. In particular, this dissertation aims to experimentally examine children's ability to evaluate the inferences between every-sentences. We first report an experiment featuring the Truth Value Judgment Task (e.g., Crain and Thornton 1998), reconfirming children's adult-like ability to compose individual sentence meanings involving every. We then introduce two novel experimental methodologies, the Prediction-Rephrase Task and the Demand-Fulfillment Task, designed to assess children's ability to evaluate inferences between the entailing and entailed sentences. Three experiments utilizing these new tasks demonstrate that children's highly sophisticated knowledge about every is appropriately applied in comparing meaning relations involving every across-propositionally. Additionally, we present experiments that reveal children's adult-like knowledge regarding the semantic interaction between every and negation (e.g., Ludlow 2002) in both composing and comparing sentential meanings; these findings provide the evidence showing children's adult-like linguistic representations of the sentences, in which the structural relation between every and negation determines the patterns of inferences. Taken together, these studies demonstrate children's adult-like knowledge regarding the semantics of every that is applied both in the composition and comparison of sentential meanings, as well as their adult-like knowledge about the interaction between every and negation. In addition, our development of the two new experimental methodologies has made possible further steps toward the full understanding of semantic competence in child language, not only at the level of meaning composition but also at the level of meaning comparison.
A number of recent electrophysiological studies of sentence processing have shown that a subclass of syntactic violations elicits very rapid ERP responses, occurring within around 200 ms of the onset of the violation. Such findings raise the question of how it is possible to diagnose violations so quickly. This paper suggests that very rapid diagnosis of errors is possible specifically in situations where the diagnosis problem is tightly constrained by specific expectations generated before the critical word is presented. In an event-related potentials (ERP) study of visual sentence reading participants encountered violations of a word order constraint (...Max’s of...) that has elicited early ERP responses in previous studies. Across conditions the illicit sequence was held constant, while sentence context was used to manipulate the expectation for a noun following the possessor Max’s, by manipulating the possibility of ellipsis of the head noun. Results showed that the anterior negativity elicited by the word category violation was attenuated when the availability of ellipsis reduced the expectation for a noun in the position of the offending preposition of, with divergence between conditions starting around 200 ms after the onset of the violation. This suggests a role for structural expectations in accounting for very fast syntactic diagnosis processes.
Read More about The role of prediction in rapid syntactic analysis
In this thesis, I propose a syntactic structure for verbs which directly encodes their event complexities. I present a model that is 'internalist' in the Chomskyan sense: Aktionsart properties of predicates are not a real-world affair, but the interpretation of a mind structure. For this purpose, I base my proposal on the Dimensional Theory of Uriagereka (2005, forthcoming). Syntactic constructs are in this view the results of operations that create increasingly complex objects, based on an algorithm that is homo-morphic with the structure of numerical categories. First, I propose that Aktionsart can be read off from structural complexities of syntactic objects and their associated 'theta-roles'. Specifically, I present the SAAC Hypothesis: Syntactic complexity in a verb is reflected in the number of syntactic arguments it takes. This approach, within the confines of the Dimensional Theory, results in an emergent 'thematic hierarchy': Causer > Agent > Locative > Goal > Theme. I test the accuracy of this hierarchy and concomitant assumptions through paradigms like the control of implicit arguments, selectional properties of verbs, extractions, aspect-sensitive adverbials, etc. Second, I argue that the verbal structure I propose is syntactically and semantically real, by extending the proposal in Lasnik (1999) on VP ellipsis from inflectional to derivational morphology. I discuss two contrasting methods of morphological amalgamation in English and Japanese, executed in Syntax and PF, respectively. This demonstrates a tight network of entailment patterns that holds of verbs, derived crucially from the architecture I argue for. Third, an analogous point is made through the structural positionings of causative and inchoative derivational morphemes in Japanese. There, each order of structural complexity has a profound impact on the class of eventualities a derivational morpheme can describe. 'Dimensional talks' are observed between certain derivational morphemes, which presumably find their roots in operations of the computational system within the Dimensional Theory. I show that the verbal structure in Japanese reflects directly an underlying bi-clausality that I argue for, in terms of derivational morphemes, further supporting a natural mapping between syntax and semantics. This is, in the end, an attempt for a 'Minimalist' theory of Aktionsart.
In this thesis, I present evidence that structural Case in Korean is not absolutely semantically inert. It can have a focus flavor in some contexts, for example, stacked Case and Case attached to an adverb/adverbial and a verb. This sort of Case feature may not be an embarrassment for the good design of language. I discuss the Resultative Construction in a derivational approach. We compare the Resultative Construction between English and Korean in pursuit of finding out the underlying cause for differences between the two languages.