Evolution of Language and Cognition: Recursion in CG
Yoshihisa NAKAMURA
Kanazawa University“Evidence from cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology is converging
on the conclusion that the functioning of the brain can be characterized by
two different types of cognition having somewhat different functions anddifferent strengths and weaknesses.”(Stanovich 2004:34) To capture these
two types of cognition, we propose two modes of cognition, one of which istermed Interactional mode (or I-mode) to emphasize the growing convictionthat cognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregivenmind but is rather the one that emerges through the interaction between thesubject and the object of cognition. (In an extreme form of the interaction, thesubject and object of cognition are not differentiated; they are one, e.g. in thesense of Buddhist psychology.) This cognition mode is diagramed as in Figure
1. The ellipse depicts the ‘field of cognition,’ the circle (C) shows a cognizer ora conceptualizer, and the rectangle with a circle in it represents a state ofaffairs that emerges through the interaction. The double-headed arrow
indicates some interaction between the conceptualizer and the event. The
broken-line arrow stands for a cognitive process to construe the event.
Figure 1: I-mode

Figure 2: D-mode

Cdisplacement
CWe claim that we might tend to view the world or the state of affairs as if weare not involved in the interaction by displacing ourselves from theinteraction and view the state of affairs from outside of the field of cognitionin I-mode. This type of cognition is called Displaced mode of cognition(hereafter D-mode cognition), which is illustrated as Figure 2 above.

We argue that the cognitive transition from I-mode to D-mode iscritical to the evolution of language. The distancing and objectifying function(cf. Langacker 2008:444) and the virtual vs. actual grounding (cf. Langacker
2009:268) in D-mode make a conceptual base for the emergence of recursive
construction which is identified as “the only uniquely human component of
the faculty of language by Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (2002: 1569), whereas
displacement itself is a decisive factor for the emergence of grammaticalconstructions at layer V of the 6-layer scenario of the evolution of grammar(Heine and Kuteva 2007:306). It is at layer V that categories that aresuggestive of concepts relating to displacement and subordination/recursion,
such as pronouns, definite articles, relative clause markers, complementizers,
case markers and tense markers are attested. Relative and complement
markers are formal means for presenting clausal subordination leading torecursion, whereas pronouns and definite markers allow for displaced
reference and tense markers represent states of affairs as detached from thehere-and-now. In this way the grammatical constructions at layer V shows
the characteristics of D-mode (i.e. displacement and objectification). If thesecategories are the decisive feature of human language as Heine and Kuteva
claim, the cognitive transition from I- to D- modes is claimed to be critical tothe emergence of human language.
The same functions of D-mode may work for the ‘humanique’combinatory nature of language (Hauser 2009, Boeckx 2010) and for theemergence of cooperative communication (Tomasello 2008).
References
Boeckx, C.2010. Language in Cognition: Uncovering Mental Structure andthe Rules behind them. Wiley-Blackwell.
Hauser, M. 2009. The possibility of impossible cultures. Nature 460.190-6.
Hauser, M., Chomsky, N. and W.T. Fitch. 2002. The language faculty: Whatis it, who has it, and how did it evolve. Science, vol.298. 1569-79.
Heine, B. and T. Kuteva. 2007. The Genesis of Grammar: A Reconstruction.
OUP.
Langacker, R.W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. OUP.
Langacker, R.W. 2009. Investigations in Cognitive Grammar. Mouton.
Stanovich, K. E. 2004. The Robot’s Rebellion. The University of Chicago Press.
Tomasello, M. 2008. Origins of Human Communication. MIT.

Syntactic and semantic properties of Japanese nominative marker ga
Koichi TAKEZAWA
University of Tsukuba

It has been observed since the earliest days of Japanese generative syntax (Kuroda 1965,Kuno 1973) that the nominative case marker ga in Japanese appears in different syntactic
positions, and also that ga-marked NPs receive different semantic interpretations (“neutraldescription” and “exhaustive listing”) depending on the predicate types with which theyco-occur. In this presentation, I attempt to provide a unified account of the following usagesof ga with a special focus on the status of Tense in Japanese.
Observation 1: Subject/major subject (Kuno 1973, etc.)(1) John-ga

asi-gahaya-i-Nom leg-Nom fast-Pres‘John is a fast runner’Observation 2: Object/major object with stative predicates(2) John-wa hidariasi-ga

hiza-gamage-rare-na-i	  ‘Taro cannot bend his right knee’-Top right leg-Nom knee-Nom bend-can-not-Pres

Observationt 3: “nominative ECM” with spontaneous verbs (Takezawa 1993, 1999)(3) John-wa

Mary-ga-Topmiryokuteki-niomoe-ta-Nom attractive-be(inf) seem-Past

cf. John-wa

Mary-o-Top

miryokuteki-ni‘Mary seemed to John to be attractive’omot-ta-acc attractive-be(inf) think-Past‘John considered Mary to be attractive’

Observation 4: Subject-to-subject raising (Takezawa 1999)(4) a. John-ga

yame-ru-yoo-da-Nom quit-Pres-likely-be(Pres)b. John-ga‘It is likely that John will quit’

yame-soo-da-Nom quit-likely-be(Pres)‘John is likely to quit’

Observation 5: stage level/individual level distinction of predicates and existentialinterpretations of nominative NPs (Suzuki 2013, cf. Diesing 1992)(5) a. gakusei-ga

3-nin

student-Nom
b. *gakusei-ga

hadasi-da

3-Count bare-footed-be(Pres)
3-nin

students-Nom 3-Count(6) a. *John-wa bengosi-ga

syooziki-da(Pres)honest-be
3-nin-Top lawyer-Nom 3-Countb. John-wa

bengosi-o-Top lawyer-Acc
cf. John-wa

bengosi-ga‘Three students are bare-footed’‘Three students are honest’kirai-da(Pres)
hate‘John hates three lawyers’

3-ninkirat-te-i-ru

3-Count

hate-Asp-be-Pres

3-nin‘John hates three lawyers’

ir-u-Top lawyer-Nom 3-Count need-Pres‘John needs three lawyers’By examining the above data, I would like to argue that ga is uniformly
assigned/checked/licensed by finite Tense (Takezawa 1987), and that the different semanticinterpretations of ga-marked NPs can be accounted for in terms of their structural relations
with Tense (Suzuki 2013).
【References】
Diesing, M. 1992. Indefinites. MIT Press.
Kuno, S. 1973. The structure of the Japanese language. MIT Press.
Kuroda, S-Y. 1965. Generative Grammatical Studies in the Japanese Language. PhD. Dis. MIT.
Takezawa, K. 1987. A Configurational Approach to Case-marking in Japanese. Ph.D. dis., Univ. of Washington.
Takezawa, K. 1993. “A comparative study of seem and omoe,” In Argument Structure: Its Syntax andAcquisition, H. Nakajima and Y. Otsu eds., 75-102. Kaitakusha.
Takezawa, K. 1999. “Syntactic structures and derivations of epistemic verb constructions with an infinitival
complement,” In Comparative syntax of Japanese, Korean, Chinese and English. Yukinori Takuboed. 187-206. Kyushu Univ.
Suzuki, A. 2013. Jutsugo-kara mita meisiku-no kaishaku-nikansuru tougoteki kenkyuu (A syntactic study ofnominal interpretations form the viewpoint of predicate types) MA Thesis, Univ. of Tsukuba.

Newness, Givenness and Focus
Christopher Tancredi
Keio Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies
In English, every sentence is pronounced with a pattern of accented and unaccented words.
The choice of what words to accent and what words to leave unaccented is not arbitrary,
however. In particular there are several general tendencies that can be discerned. Words that
encode old information tend not to bear an accent; phrases that encode information being
highlighted or emphasized tend to bear an accent; and phrases that encode new information
also tend to bear an accent. While clear in broad outline, however, explaining the details ofaccent location has proven a formidable task. Early attempts to do so (Chomsky 1971,Selkirk 1984) aimed to derive accent location entirely from focus marking. This led among
other things to formal analyses of focus like that of Rooth (1992,1995) and of givenness likethose of Tancredi (1992) and Schwarzschild (1999). Later, evidence began to mount (Rooth1996, Beaver 2004, Selkirk 2008) that expressions could qualify simultaneously as focused
and as given. Additionally, it was shown (Katz & Selkirk 2012) that new expressions arephonetically distinct from focused expressions even when both bear accents. This paper
pursues the theoretical consequences of these later observations, and argues that neither focus
nor givenness can be reduced to the other.
Examples with expressions that are simultaneously focused and given can be seen below.
(1) John saw Mary and Sue saw Bill. Then,LIZ saw HER/#’er/#HER and TOM saw HIM/#’im/#HIM(2) John saw Mary. In fact, he ONLY saw HER/#’er/#HERIn (1), the pronouns her and him are overtly contrasted with one another while at the sametime being identified with their antecedents in the first sentence. The contrast is indicative offocus, while the antecedence signals givenness. Phonetically, in this case we find that thepronoun cannot bear an accent, as expected if givenness marking is obligatory. However, thepronouns also cannot be completely reduced, unlike other occurrences of given pronouns,suggesting that the pronouns are also focused. In (2) we find the same phonetic effects on thepronoun her with the same theoretical consequences. However, here we have even stronger
evidence of focus: focus is needed for the pronoun to associate with only.
Additional evidence for the distinct behavior of focus and givenness comes fromexamples where the focused and given parts of a sentence relate to separate antecedents.
Such a case can be seen in (3B), where him, marked as given, has its givenness licensed by
the occurrence of John in (A), while the focused associate of only, i.e. Mary tripped him, iscontrasted with that was an accident in (C).
(3) A: Many people know that John1 fell.
B: Most of them, however, only know that [MARY TRIPPED him1,G]5,F
C: They don’t know that [that was an accident]5.
Of particular significance is the fact that the phrase that contrasts with Mary tripped him does
not contain a potential antecedent for him, while no phrase that contains an antecedent for him
can be plausibly analyzed as contrasting with Mary tripped him. This suggests not only that
focus and givenness are distinct, but that they are each sensitive to independent features. In(3) I employ F to mark focused expressions and G to mark given expression. (3) shows that
focus is not sensitive to G while givenness is not sensitive to F.
To account for the examples in (1) – (3), I propose to combine Rooth’s semantics forfocus with a modified version of Schwarzschild’s semantics for givenness that is sensitive toG-marking rather than F-marking. Schwarzschild’s analysis as a whole, however, suffersfrom over-generation. In particular, in addition to correctly predicting the acceptability of(4a), it also wrongly predicts that (4b) should be acceptable as well.

(4) a. A: John saw Mary. B: Then, BILL saw Mary.
b. A: John saw Mary. B: #Then, BILL saw John.
These examples exhibit what I call connectedness of givenness: the given verb and object not
only need to have separate antecedents, but the antecedents need to stand in the same thematic
relation as the verb and object themselves stand in. I show that this over-generation problem
can be overcome by taking G-marking in the syntax to project from a head to all of its
syntactic projections. In (4) this will result in the VPs being G-marked and hence having to
be given in addition to the verb and the object. This small modification makes it possible toretain the semantic core of Schwarzschild’s analysis of givenness.
A final and important change is needed to Schwarzschild’s analysis in relating F- and Gmarking to the distribution of pitch accents. Schwarzschild’s analysis predicts a one-to-onecorrelation between foci and pitch accents. However, we find in examples like (5) that it’s
possible for a single focus to bear multiple pitch accents.
(5) Bill went dancing. John only [drank BEER]F / [DRANK BEER]F / #[DRANK beer]FThis is problematic not only for Schwarzschild’s original analysis of givenness based on Fmarking but also for the modification proposed above based on G-marking instead. I accountfor the range of possible accentings in (5) by making accents dependent on both the absenceof G-marking and the presence of phonological phrasing. Following Truckenbrodt (1995), I
take accents to be assigned to the metrical head of a phonological phrase, and take G-marking
on an expression to be incompatible with metrical prominence. Optional accents like that on
drank in (5) then come about as a side effect of optional phonological phrasing. The role offocus on the phonology under this analysis is one of enhancing the greatest prominence
withing the focus, not of locating a pitch accent. This accounts for the lack of accent on thepronouns in (1) and (2) while also accounting for their non-reducibility.
References
Beaver, David: 2004, ‘Sense and sensitivity: explorations on the interface between focus andmeaning’, handout, Stanford University.
Chomsky, Noam: 1971, ‘Deep structure, surface structure, and semantic interpretation’, inD.D. Steinberg and L.A. Jakobovits (eds.) Semantics: An interdisciplinary reader inphilosophy, linguistics, and psychology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Katz, Jonah, and Elisabeth Selkirk: 2012, ‘Contrastive Focus vs. Discourse-New: Evidence
from Phonetic Prominence in English’, Language 87.4, 771-816.
Rooth, Mats: 1992, ‘A Theory of Focus Interpretation’, Natural Language Semantics 1, 75–116.
Rooth, Mats: 1995, ‘Focus’, in S. Lappin (ed.), The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic
Theory, Blackwell, London.
Schwarzschild, Roger: 1999, ‘Givenness, AVOIDF and other constraints on the placement ofaccent’, Natural Language Semantics 7, 141–177.
Selkirk, Elisabeth: 1984. Phonology and syntax: the relation between sound and structure.
Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Selkirk, Elisabeth: 2008. “Contrastive focus, givenness and the unmarked status of ‘discourse-new’”, Acta Linguistica Hungarica 55, 331–46.
Tancredi, Christopher: 1992, Deletion, Deaccenting and Presupposition, PhD dissertation,MIT.
Tancredi, Christopher: 2015a, “Focus and Givenness Across the Grammar”, in proceedingsof LENLS 11, (forthcoming).
Tancredi, Christopher: 2015b, “The Phonology of Accent”, in Reports of the Keio Institute ofCultural and Linguistic Studies 46.
Truckenbrodt, Hubert: 1995, Phonological Phrases: Their Relation to Syntax, Focus andProminence, PhD dissertation, MIT.