Research

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.

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"?

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.

"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?

"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.

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.

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.

The size and probability distribution of a word-form’s cohort of lexical competitors influence auditory processing and can be constrained by syntactic category information. This experiment employs noun/verb homonyms (e.g. “ache”) presented in syntactic context to clarify the mechanisms and representations involved in context-based cohort restriction. Implications for theories positing single versus multiple word-forms in cases of category ambiguity also arise. Using correlations between neural activity in auditory cortex, measured by magnetoencephalography (MEG), and standard and context-dependent cohort entropy and phoneme surprisal variables, we consider the possibility of cohort restriction on the basis of form or on the basis of category usage. Crucially, the form-conditional measure is consistent only with a single word-form view of category ambiguity. Our results show that noun/verb homonyms are derived from single category-neutral word-forms and that the cohort is restricted incrementally in context, by form and then by usage.

Relatively little is known about how linguistic structure is neurally encoded. The current study examines a relatively subtle manipulation of syntactic and semantic structure: the difference between reading a list of two noun phrases (“sunlit ponds ### green umbrellas”) and their syntactic coordination (“sunlit ponds and green umbrellas”). In two ERP experiments, the presence of the coordinator resulted in an increased anterior negativity across the entire second noun phrase, even though coordination had no direct relevance for the memory recognition task. These findings demonstrate that structural connectedness exerts strong, ongoing differences in neural activity even when structured and unstructured materials are very tightly matched in sequence and content. These differences may reflect ongoing maintenance of structure in memory, or computation of the more complex semantic or discourse representation associated with syntactic coordination.

Previous research on the acquisition of adjunct control has observed non-adultlike behavior for sentences like “John bumped Mary after tripping on the sidewalk.” While adults only allow a subject control interpretation for these sentences (that John tripped on the sidewalk), preschool-aged children have been reported to allow a much wider range of interpretations. A number of different tasks have been used with the aim of identifying a grammatical source of children’s errors. In this paper, we consider the role of extragrammatical factors. In two comprehension experiments, we demonstrate that error rates go up when the similarity increases between an antecedent and a linearly intervening noun phrase, first with similarity in gender, and next with similarity in number marking. This suggests that difficulties with adjunct control are to be explained (at least in part) by the sentence processing mechanisms that underlie similarity-based interference in adults