‘Biolinguistics’: Some foundational problems
Robert Levine
Ohio State University
The ‘Biolinguistics’ program seeks to establish specific neuroanatomical models
corresponding to the representations and operations characterizing the species-specificlanguage faculty in human beings. Yet after decades of research, no neural structures
corresponding to specific linguistic structures, rules, constraints or principles have everbeen identified. A key to biolinguistics’ failure is, I suggest, its long-term adherence totwo dubious assumptions: (i) a kind of literalism in envisaging the relationship between
neural anatomy and linguistic representations, reflecting a seriously misconstrual ofMarr’s (1982) tripartite division of cognition, and (ii) a view of such representations asobjects fundamentally different from other components of human cognitive capacity. (ii)
rests on the premise that phrase markers are the optimal formal representation of natural
language sentences, despite major empirical difficulties that syntactic accounts basedhierarchical phrase structure face in handling a wide variety of grammatical patterns,
including non-canonical coordinations and ellipsis constructions. In contrast, prooftheoretic approaches such as type-logical grammar do not face these difficulties, and theirfoundational assumptions link language to the higher-order cognitive functions
supporting deductive reasoning. This conclusion offers a very promising alternative tothe current, essentially result-free ‘Biolinguistic’ paradigm.

Anti-reconstruction Effects and Object Shift in Japanese
Nobuhiro Miyoshi
Asahikawa Medical University
Japanese has a group of expressions that typically take wide scope over negation. Amongthese are focus particles like dake (=only), mo (=also), sae(=even) and the disjunction ka(=or). Take a look at (1), where the particle dake (=only) attached to the object ringo(=apple) takes obligatory wide scope over negation.
(1)

Masao-wa ringo-dake tabe-nakatta
Masao-Top apple-only eat-Neg.Past‘lit. Masao didn’t eat only apples.’(only > Neg, *Neg > only)This obligatory wide scope phenomenon can be broken down into the following twoquestions. First, given that Japanese is a scope-rigid language, should (1) count as evidence
for obligatory TP movement into TP domain as Shibata (2015) argues? Second, why is thenarrow scope reading of dake (=only) unavailable in (1)? In other words, do we need somespecial mechanism to derive the anti-reconstruction effects observed in (1)?
In this talk, I argue that the answers to both questions are negative, by demonstratingthat the particles in question are positive polarity items (PPIs) in that they exhibit rescuing
effects in the sense of Szabolcsi (2004) and Yoshimoto (2014).
PPIs are, by definition, unable to take narrow scope with respect to clausemate negation
as shown in (2).
(2)

a. Masao didn’t eat somethingb. *Masao-wa nanika tabe-nakatta
Masao-Top something eat-Neg.Past‘lit. Masao didn’t eat something.’(*Neg > some)(*Neg > some)

However, Szabolcsi (2004) points out that PPIs taking scope below clausemate negation canbe rescued as in (3) and proposes (4). Yoshimoto (2014) claims that the rescuing effects arealso observed in Japanese.
(3)
(4)
(5)

a. I don’t think John didn’t call someone(✔Neg> Neg >some)b. If we don’t call someone we are doomed.
(✔Neg > some)
PPIs do not occur in the immediate scope of a clausemate anti-additive
operator AA-Op, unless [AA-Op > PPI] itself is in an NPI licensing context.
a. Masao-wa nanika tabe-zu-ni-wa irare nakatta.(✔Neg> Neg >some)
Masao-Top something eat-Neg-Prt-Top can.be-Neg-Past‘Masao could not help eating something’b. Naika tabe-nakere-ba, Masao-wa sinu (✔Neg > some)

something eat-Neg-if Masao-Top die.Pres‘lit. Masao will die, if he doesn’t eat something’Now consider (6), where the narrow scope reading of dake (=only) is available.
(6)

a. Masao-wa ringo-dake tabe-zu-ni-wa irare nakatta (✔Neg > Neg > only)
Masao-Top something eat-Neg-Prt-Top can.be-Neg-Past‘Masao could not help eating only apples’
b. Niku-dake tabe-nakere-ba Masao-wa benpi-ni nara-nai (✔Neg > only)
meat-only eat-Neg-if Masao-Top, Masao constipation become-Neg‘lit. Masao will not be constipated, if he doesn’t eat only meat’

The present claim is that the particle dake is a PPI. The absence of the narrow scope readingof dake in (1) immediately follows from this claim, since PPIs cannot stay under the scopeof their clausemate negation. Another implication of the narrow scope reading of dake in(6) is that object shift across negation does not have to be obligatory in Japanese. Thus, we
do not need to introduce any extra mechanism to deal with (1), because scrambling suffices
to derive the anti-reconstruction effects.

References
Shibata, Yoshiyuki (2015) Negative structure and object movement in Japanese, Journal of
East Asian Linguistics 24, 217-269
Szabolcsi, Anna (2004) Positive polarity – negative polarity, Natural Language andLinguistic Theory 22, 409–452.
Yoshimoto, Yasushi (2014) On the rescuing of positive polarity items in Japanese, Ryudai
Review of Euro-American Studies 58, 111-133.

Lexical Creativity: Contrastive Focus Reduplication and Constructional Reduplication
Naoyuki Ono
Tohoku University
In this talk, I would like to address the question of lexical creativity, i.e. how the coining of
new words takes place in the lexicon and how existing words are manipulated into novel lexical
combinations, through a discussion of a certain type of word formation in English and Japanese.
The word formation process that I will focus on is the so-called Contrastive Focus Reduplication(CFR) in English (Ghomeshi et al. 2004) and Constructional Reduplication (CR) in Japanese (Ono2015). As the names suggest, both of them are a type of reduplication, and thus they have somesimilar formal and semantic properties in common. But despite their apparent similarities, there aresome fundamental differences between them. In this talk, I will show that they exhibit someparallelisms in form and meaning, but at the same time they differ crucially from each other. Finally,
I will attempt to explicate the reason that superficially similar lexical processes differ from one
language to another.
Most research on CFR in English has largely focused on its semantic properties (Horn 2006,
Ghomeshi et al. 2004, Song and Lee 2014, among others). Researchers agree, more or less, that any
particular CFR picks out a prototypical reading of the reduplicated word; for instance, thereduplicated expression salad-salad in “I’ll make the tuna salad, and you make the SALAD-salad”(Ghomeshi et al. 2004: 308) is said to denote a prototypical instance of a category denoted by thebase noun, i.e. something like “a green salad” in this case. Likewise, a CR in Japanese, such as
onnanoko-onnanoko sita (girl-girl) in the following sentence “onnanoko-onnanoko sita onna ga
sukidesuka” (lit. Do you like a girl-girl woman?) signals the most prototypical meaning of the
reduplicated word onnanoko (girl). Thus, CFR and CR commonly serve to single out, as Horn
(2006: 15) puts it, “an element or subset of extension of the noun corresponding to a true, real,
default, or prototype category member”.
What is more interesting about the semantics of CFR and CR is that the interpretation of a
reduplicated expression is often heavily dependent on contextual factors. The meanings of CFR andCR vary depending on the context in which they occur. Researchers have pointed out that an
instance of CFR, e.g. coffee-coffee, can signal a literal meaning, in contrast with its figurative
meaning, with no reference to prototypicality (Ghomeshi et al. 2004: 315). Thus, a CFR merely
picks out a contextually salient reading and the reference to prototype is one of the possible senses.
Similarly, a CR may convey varying senses; e.g., in yasai-yasai sita suupe (lit. vegetable-vegetablesoup), the CR usually picks out a sense of an ample amount of (or sometimes an excessive amountof) the entity expressed by the noun; thus, yasai-yasai sita (vegetable-vegetable) in this case does
not mean a prototypical amount of vegetable.
The context-dependency of CFR and CR may follow from, or at least be closely related withthe fact that CFR and CR are a phenomena of colloquial language. Widlitzki (2016) has pointed outthat, based on a corpus study she conducted, CFRs most frequently emerge in contexts where theintended meanings are clarified by the speaker and they tend to appear in blogs maintained by
women and young speakers. Ono (2015) has revealed that CRs are completely different fromconventional N-N or A-A reduplications in Japanese, such as yama-yama (mountain-mountain) or
hiro-biro (wide-wide) in that the conventional reduplications express plurality of individual entities
or intensifying meaning, independent of the context.
Some researchers have pointed out that a prototype analysis does not satisfactorily account forthe semantics of CFR since prototypes of a category vary depending on the contexts and speaker’s
background knowledge. This fact leads Song and Lee (2011) to propose a “dynamic” prototype
analysis where CFRs are only interpretable in relation with relevant alternative categories in the
discourse. Ono (2015) has observed, in contrast, that CR in Japanese does not exhibit as muchcontextual variability as English CFR does. Instead, a CR is viewed as a degree modifier in which adenotation of the reduplicated noun is turned into a scalable object. Ono proposed a scale structure
analysis of CR and claimed that the prototypicality of a category signaled by CR follows from ascalar interpretation of the object.
The question is why this is so. I would like to suggest that the difference is boiled down to thelexical resources that CFR and CR make use of when the coining of novel lexical expressions takes
place. I would claim that the lexical resource that delivers CFRs to the English lexicon iscompounding; whereas the lexical resource that creates CR in Japanese is reduplication of mimetic(or onomatopoeic) words, such as sube-sube (smooth). Compounding and mimetic reduplication arehighly productive lexical processes in each language. Thus, the productivity of CFR and CR
crucially hinges on the productivity of their lexical resources. CFR and CR are creative lexical
formations at the level of colloquial speech. We are able to try to explain lexical creativity as afunction of lexical resources from which the lexical processes originate and contextual factors inwhich the lexical processes are used.
References
Ghomeshi, Jila, Ray Jackendoff, Nicole Rosen, and Kevin Russell (2004) Contrastive Focus
Reduplication in English (The SALAD-Salad Paper). Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
22, 307-357.
Horn, Laurence (2006) Speaker and Hearer in Neo-Gricean Pragmatics. Waiguoyi 164, 2-26.
Ono, Naoyuki (2015) Koobunteki Tyoohukugo Keisei--Onnanoko Onnanoko Sita Onna o Megutte[Constructional Reduplication Formation: Onnanoko-onnanoko sita onna]. (2015) Yoko
Yumoto and Naoyuki Ono (eds.) Goiimiron no Atarasii Kanoosei o Sagutte [Exploring the New
Possibility of Lexical Semantics], 463-489. Kaitakusha.
Song, Myounghyoun and Chungmin Lee (2011) CF-reduplication in English: Dynamic Prototype
and Contrastive Focus Effects. Proceedings of SALT 21, 444-462.
Widlitzki, Bianca (2016) Talk Talk, Not Just Small Talk: Exploring English Contrastive Focus
Reduplication with the Help of Corpora. ICAME Journal 40, 119-142.

Theoretical Shortcomings:
Counterexamples to Word Stress Treatments in English
Eiji Yamada
Fukuoka University
In this talk, I will examine how certain types of exceptions are dealt with in major treatments of word stress in English. I will then suggest a new analysis of main stress assignment,
as well as subsidiary stress assignment.
First to be mentioned here is Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky and Halle (1968))(henceforth, SPE). In SPE, main and subsidiary stress assignment are comprehensively accounted for by the Main Stress Rule (MSR) and auxiliary rules with the help of cyclic application. For example, in the còndênsátion word type, whose internal structure is taken to be[[condéns]V ation]N, the MSR and auxiliary rules provide the stress pattern còndênsátion withprimary stress on the penultimate vowel sá, tertiary stress on the second syllable dên, andsecondary stress on the first syllable còn ((´) = main stress, (`) = secondary stress, (ˆ) = tertiary stress or full vowel without stress reduction to schwa). Note that in this case the positionof primary stress in the verb is inherited by the noun as tertiary stress (stress “inheritance”
with so-called “transparency”) by the cyclic application of MSR from the innermost constituent, the verb, to the next higher level of the word structure, the noun (also termed “cyclicity”).
This contrasts with the còmpensátion word type without tertiary stress on the second syllable
pen, since its base verb does not have primary stress on that position, i.e. [cómpensàt]V ion]N.
This account meets a serious problem in the ìnformátion word type. It seems natural toconsider the noun ìnformátion to be derived from the base verb infórm as in [[infórm]Vation]N. As the rule stands now, however, it incorrectly predicts the stress pattern*ìnfôrmátion with tertiary stress on the second syllable; in fact, ìnformátion does not havetertiary stress in that position. Words of this class are counterexamples to cyclicity and transparency. Thus, in SPE words of this type are postulated to have a “flat” structure as[information]N without an internal base verb (SPE: 112, 161) in the underlying phonologicalrepresentation. However, this kind of treatment of counterexamples creates both a “cyclicity”
and an “opacity” problem in the theory.
In subsequent studies, however, the problem of the “exceptional” treatment of this class ofwords does not seem to be completely solved in Liberman and Prince (1977), Hayes (1980),
Halle and Vergnaud (1987: 251), or others. In other words, the counterexamples remain in
their theories.
Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky (1993), and others; hereafter, OT) has inverted
this approach. Rules and their cyclic application are abolished in favor of violable constraints.
In effect, the ìnformátion word type becomes the norm, while the còndênsátion word type ismade the exception. Since there are no derivations in (classic) OT, the ìnformátion word typeseems to fit best for their purposes, as the word does not show any stress inheritance effect on
the second syllable. On the other hand, the còndênsátion word type with a stress inheritanceeffect on the second syllable poses a difficulty in their account. We can say that this constitutes one of the counterexamples to OT.
For this class of counterexamples, Pater (2000) for example suggests that the words
should be placed in a specially marked set in the lexicon as S1 (a set-1); only one type ofhighest-ranked, specially assumed constraint will then be activated on this set, giving thedesired output. This, too, constitutes an ad hoc “exceptional” treatment of counterexamples.
(Later in OT, the theory was modified to accept the “derivational” aspect in the stress assignment of words; however, this causes another problem, which will not be discussed here.)In the face of these issues, a new treatment was put forward for the stress assignment ofwords in English in Yamada (2010) (henceforth, PFT). In PFT, sixteen universal Positional
Functions (PFs) are postulated for American English, by which subsidiary stresses are computed by the combination of PFs triggered on the specific syllables by each condition. Thus,in PFT the ìnformátion word type and còndênsàtion word type can both be equally accounted
for within the same system, without recourse to ad hoc, “exceptional” treatment.
The next task for us is to account for the primary stress assignment of words. This has
been preliminarily achieved in Yamada (2013) but is insufficient, since it leaves words suchas désignàte (1a) and confíscatòry (1b) unexplained, where main stress is assigned to the leftof the subsidiary stress (examples cited from Halle and Vergnaud (1987: 234-255)):(1) a. désignàte exácerbàte cávalcàde ásymptòte récognìze acétylène fôrmáldeh`ydeb. álkalòid d´ynamìte inhíbitòry ântícipatòry confíscatòry defámatòry agglútinàtive
Thus, in this talk we will explore how these types of words are accounted for. The newly developed account will show that we need five Positional Functions for primary stress assignment: Heaviness, Bounded Binarity, Rhythmic Adjustment, Trace, and Monosyllable. The
gist of our account is that we postulate these five PFs with the help of Extrametricality, following Hayes (1980).
As for the désignàte word type (1a), we assume that after (i) primary stress assignment,
followed by (ii) subsidiary stress assignment, main stress is transferred to the next strong position by (iii) lexical Coordinate Axis Transformation as (i)→ designá<te># →(ii)→dèsignáte →(iii)→ désignàte. (< > = extrametricality, # = word boundary, bold type = coordinate axis).
For a word such as confíscatòry (1b), we postulate that certain suffixes are lexicallytreated as (iv) “suffixes that are stress domain” (i.e., they are treated as independent words instress assignment), following Halle and Vergnaud’s (1987) account, with (v) lexical Stress
Retraction as follows: (iv)-(i) → #(confís<c>)#(atór<y>)# → (confìsc)(atóry)# →(v)→(confísc)(atòry)# (each stress domain is enclosed by ( )).
We have shown that we can account for the main and subsidiary stress assignment ofwords in English with the use of PFs. Further, by adopting the idea of “stress domain,” we
can deal with many “exceptions” in a principled way under PFT.
Selected References
Chomsky, Noam and Morris Halle (1968) The Sound Pattern of English, Harper & Row,
New York.
Halle, Morris and Jean-Roger Vergnaud (1987) An Essay on Stress, MIT Press, Cambridge,
MA.
Hayes, Bruce (1980) A Metrical Theory of Stress Rules, Doctoral dissertation, MIT.
Liberman, Mark and Alan Prince (1977) “On Stress and Linguistic Rhythm,” Linguistic Inquiry 8, 249-336.
Pater, Joe (2000) “Non-Uniformity in English Secondary Stress: The Role of Ranked andLexically Specific Constraints,” Phonology 17, 237-274.
Prince, Alan and Paul Smolensky (1993). “Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar.” Rutgers University and University of Colorado, Boulder. Photocopy.
Yamada, Eiji (2010) Subsidiary Stresses in English, Kaitakusha, Tokyo.
Yamada, Eiji (2013) “Main Stress Assignment in English Words,” JELS 30, 229-235.
Note: All data in this talk are based on the American pronunciation in Wells (2008).