bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Nominalizations
Authors: Lang Ewald , Zimmermann Ilse
Published: January 2021

The present volume is a selection of the papers presented in workshops at ZAS in Berlin in November 2000 and at theUniversity of Tübingen in April 2001, devoted to synchronic and, diachronic aspects of various types of nominalizations. Nominalization has a long history in linguistic research. Its nature can only be captured by taking into account the interface between morphology, syntax and semantics on the one hand, and the interface between semantics and conceptual structure on the other.
interface of lexical semantics and conceptual structure deverbal and denominal nominalizations
Authors: Von Heusinger Klaus
Published: January 2021

Nominalizations can refer to events, instances of events or participants in an event. The particular reference is determined by the lexical semantics of the base and the suffix, and by the conceptual structure of the base. The comparison between deverbal and denominal nominalization in -ata in Italian reveals that the conceptual structure plays a crucial role in determining the reference of a nominalization. Italian nominalizations of -ata are productively derived from verbal and nominal bases. Derivations from verbal bases refer to a single event denoted by the base. Derivations from a nominal base N denote events or results corresponding to a limited number of pattems, such as a hit by N, a characteristic action of N, a period of N, a quantity that is contained in N, etc. The paper argues that the function of the suffix operates on the lexical meaning of the base, but the con~positiono f the lexical meaning of the base with the lexical meaning of the suffix is restricted by the conceptual properties of the base.
interaction of syllabification and voicing perception in American English
Authors: De Jong Kenneth , Nagao Kyoko , Lim Byung-jin
Published: January 2021

The current paper explores these two sorts of phonetic explanations of the relationship between syllabic position and the voicing contrast in American English. It has long been observed that the contrast between, for example, /p/ and /b/ is expressed differently, depending on the position of the stop with respect to the vowel. Preceding a vowel within a syllable, the contrast is largely one of aspiration. /p/ is aspirated, while /b/ is voiceless, or in some dialects voiced or even an implosive. Following a vowel within a syllable, both /p/ and /b/ both tend to lack voicing in the closure and the contrast is expressed largely by dynamic differences in the transition between the previous vowel and the stop. Here, vowel and closure duration are negatively correlated such that the /p/ has a shorter vowel and longer closure duration. This difference is often enhanced by the addition of glottalization to /p/. In addition to these differences, there are additional differences connected to higher-level organization involving stress and feet edges. To make the current discussion more tractable, we will restrict ourselves to the two conditions (CV and VC) laid out above.
On the early development of aspect in Greek and Russian child language, a comparative analysis
Authors: Stephany Ursula , Voeikova Maria
Published: January 2021

The category of aspect is grammaticized in both Greek and Russian opposing perfective and imperfective verb forms in all inflectional categories except the nonpast (‘present’). Despite these similarities there are important differences in the way the aspectual systems function in the two languages. While in Greek nearly all verbs oppose a perfective to a given imperfective grammatical form, Russian aspect is more strongly lexicalized with pairs of imperfective and perfective lexemes not only differing aspectually, but also as far as their lexical meanings are concerned. This is especially true of perfective verbs formed by prefixes as compared to their imperfective bases. Thus, in pairs of prefixed and unprefixed dynamic verbs, the derived prefixed (perfective) member has a telic meaning while its unprefixed (imperfective) counterpart is atelic (e.g. sjest’ (PFV) ‘to eat up’ vs. jest’ (IPF) ‘to eat’). Such derived perfective verbs may in turn be “secondarily” imperfectivized by suffixation furnishing the only “true” perfective/imperfective pairs of verbs (e.g. sjest’ (PFV) ‘to eat up’ vs. sjedat’ (IPF) ‘to eat up’ (iterative)). “Secondary” imperfectives do not occur in our child data.

In this pilot study, we will analyze the tense-aspect-mood forms of the 20 most frequent verbs with equivalent meanings occurring in the longitudinal audiotaped data of a Greek and a Russian boy between 2;1 and 2;3 (their entire lexical inventories comprise approx. 100 verbs each).

We adopt a constructivist perspective on the development of aspect in Greek and Russian child language and will show that in spite of a broad inventory of imperfective and perfective verb forms to be found in the speech of both children aspect has not yet developed into a generalized grammatical category, but is strongly dependent on aktionsart (stative/dynamic, telic/atelic) in both languages. While this results in a strong preference for perfective verb forms of telic verbs and of imperfective forms of atelic ones in the speech of the Greek boy, the Russian child tends to use the unmarked members.
Questions and focus
Authors: Eckardt Regine
Published: January 2021

Der vorliegende Band präsentiert zwei Arbeiten, die sich im Themenkreis Frage - Fokus bewegen.

Während die Konruenz von Fragen und Fokussierung in einem Kernbereich von Daten gut etabliert ist, bleibt weitgehend unverstanden, welcher Teil der (jeweils sprachspezifischen) Daten im Umfeld von Frageform und Fokussierungskonstruktionen eine kontingente "Korona" dieses Kernbereichs darstellt bzw. wie weit der systematische Zusammenhang zwischen Fragen und Fokussierung reicht. Beide Arbeiten tragen zu einem besseren Verständnis dieses Aspekts bei.
Anti-structure preservation effects in optimality theory
Authors: Hall Tracy Alan
Published: January 2021

The present study examines a particular kind of rule blockage – referred to below as an 'antistructure-preservation effect'. An anti-structure-preservation effect occurs if some language has a process which is preempted from going into effect if some sequence of sounds [XY] would occur on the surface, even though other words in the language have [XY] sequences (which are underlyingly /XY/). It will be argued below that anti-structure-preservation effects can be captured in Optimality Theory in terms of a general ranking involving FAITH and MARKEDNESS constraints and that individual languages invoke a specific instantiation of this ranking. A significant point made below is that while anti-structure-preservation effects can be handled straightforwardly in terms of constraint rankings they typically require ad hoc rule-specific conditions in rule-based approaches.
On correlation between the emergence of finite verbs and the development of utterances in Russian and German
Authors: Gagarina Natalia Vladimirovna , Bittner Dagmar
Published: January 2021

The study examines the hypotheses that the acquisition of the finite verb is an indispensable and linking constituent of the development of SVO utterances. Four apparently separate or at least separable processes are analysed over 6 months in one Russian and one German child: a) the emergence of verbs in the child’s utterances, b) the occurrence of correctly inflected (finite) verb forms, c) the development of multi-component utterances containing a verb, and c) the emergence of (potential) subjects and objects. Russian and German exhibit rich verb morphology, and in both languages finiteness is strongly correlated with inflectional categories like person, number and tense. With both children we find a correlation in the temporal order of these four processes and – what is more relevant for our study – a dependency of a certain development on the utterance level on the emergence of finite verbs. Further, our investigation shows that language-specific development comes in to play already when children start to acquire verb inflection and becomes more contrastive when we observe the onset of the production of the SVO utterances.
Antipassive and specificity in Tagalog
Authors: Aldridge Edith
Published: January 2021

It is common knowledge in the field of Philippine linguistics that an ang-marked direct object in a non-actor focus clause must be definite or generic, while a ng-marked object in an actor focus clause typically receives a nonspecific interpretation. However, in contexts like wh-questions, the oblique object in an antipassive may be interpreted as specific, as noted by Schachter & Otanes (1972), Maclachlan & Nakamura (1997), Rackowski (2002), and others. […] In this paper, I propose to account for the specificity effects […] within the analysis of Tagalog syntax put forth by Aldridge (2004). I analyze Tagalog as an ergative language […]. Cross linguistically, antipassive oblique objects receive a nonspecific interpretation, while absolutives are definite or generic. I show in this paper how the Tagalog facts can be subsumed under a general account of ergativity.
Towards a typology of Austronesian pronominal clisis
Authors: Bilings Loren , Kaufman Daniel
Published: January 2021

This paper reports ongoing work on the following aspects of Austronesian clisis: the relative ordering of multiple clitics, the position of the clitic cluster.
Infix allomorphy in Ida'an-Begak
Authors: Goudswaard Nelleke
Published: January 2021

Ida'an-Begak is a Western Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by approximately 6,000 people on the east coast of Sabah, Malaysia, Borneo and belongs to the Sabahan subgroup of the North Borneo subgroup (Blust 1998). Ida'an-Begak has three dialects, Ida'an, spoken in the villages of Segama to the west of Lahad Datu, Ida'an Sungai spoken in the Kinabatangan and Sandakan districts, and Begak spoken in Ulu Tungku, to the east of Lahad Datu (Banker 1984).1 Moody (1993) deals with Ida'an; this paper concentrates on the Begak dialect. In this paper I will present new data gathered in the field and provide an analysis of the allomorphy. The study is based on spontaneous data as well as examples elicited from my language informants.
Consequential 'O-clauses in Tongan and licensing of null anaphors
Authors: Otsuka Yuko
Published: January 2021

In what follows, we will first put forward the claim that syntactic ergativity results from morphological ergativity by examining relativization and pea-coordination in Tongan (Section 2). In Sections 3 and 4, we compare 'O-constructions with pea-constructions to conclude a) that unlike pea, 'O should be regarded as a complementizer rather than a conjunction; and b) that the gap in 'O-clauses is not an outcome of deletion, but a null anaphor. We will then discuss a Minimalist approach to binding proposed by Reuland (2001) and see how it accounts for the distribution and behavior of proSE in Tongan. Some implications of the current proposal are discussed in Section 6, with section 7 in conclusion.
Discourse particles in the left periphery
Authors: Zimmermann Malte
Published: January 2021

This article analyses the German discourse particle wohl 'I suppose', 'presumably' as a syntactic and semantic modifier of the sentence types declarative and interrogative. It is shown that wohl does not contribute to the propositional, i.e. descriptive content of an utterance. Nor does it trigger an implicature. The proposed analysis captures the semantic behaviour of wohl by assuming that it moves to SpecForceP at LF, from where it can modify the sentence type operators in Force0 in compositional fashion. Semantically, a modification with wohl results in a weaker commitment to the proposition expressed in declaratives and in a request for a weaker commitment concerning the questioned proposition in interrogatives. Cross-linguistic evidence for a left-peripheral position of wohl (at LF) comes from languages in which the counterpart of wohl occurs in the clausal periphery overtly. Overall, the analysis sheds more light on the semantic properties of the left periphery, in particular of the functional projection ForceP.
What African languages tell us about accent typology
Authors: Downing Laura J.
Published: January 2021

The goal of this paper is to survey the accent systems of the indigenous languages of Africa. Although roughly one third of the world’s languages are spoken in Africa, this continent has tended to be underrepresented in earlier stress and accent typology surveys, like Hyman (1977). This one aims to fill that gap. Two main contributions to the typology of accent are made by this study of African languages. First, it confirms Hyman's (1977) earlier finding that (stem-)initial and penult are the most common positions, cross-linguistically, to be assigned main stress. Further, it shows that not only stress but also tone and segment distribution can define prominence asymmetries which are best analyzed in terms of accent.
Merging methods of speech visualization
Authors: Fagel Sascha
Published: January 2021

The author presents MASSY, the MODULAR AUDIOVISUAL SPEECH SYNTHESIZER. The system combines two approaches of visual speech synthesis. Two control models are implemented: a (data based) di-viseme model and a (rule based) dominance model where both produce control commands in a parameterized articulation space. Analogously two visualization methods are implemented: an image based (video-realistic) face model and a 3D synthetic head. Both face models can be driven by both the data based and the rule based articulation model.

The high-level visual speech synthesis generates a sequence of control commands for the visible articulation. For every virtual articulator (articulation parameter) the 3D synthetic face model defines a set of displacement vectors for the vertices of the 3D objects of the head. The vertices of the 3D synthetic head then are moved by linear combinations of these displacement vectors to visualize articulation movements. For the image based video synthesis a single reference image is deformed to fit the facial properties derived from the control commands. Facial feature points and facial displacements have to be defined for the reference image. The algorithm can also use an image database with appropriately annotated facial properties. An example database was built automatically from video recordings. Both the 3D synthetic face and the image based face generate visual speech that is capable to increase the intelligibility of audible speech.

Other well known image based audiovisual speech synthesis systems like MIKETALK and VIDEO REWRITE concatenate pre-recorded single images or video sequences, respectively. Parametric talking heads like BALDI control a parametric face with a parametric articulation model. The presented system demonstrates the compatibility of parametric and data based visual speech synthesis approaches.
Learning to control an articulatory synthesizer by imitating real speech
Authors: Howard Ian S. , Huckvale Mark A.
Published: January 2021

The goal of our current project is to build a system that can learn to imitate a version of a spoken utterance using an articulatory speech synthesiser. The approach is informed and inspired by knowledge of early infant speech development. Thus we expect our system to reproduce and exploit the utility of infant behaviours such as listening, vocal play, babbling and word imitation. We expect our system to develop a relationship between the sound-making capabilities of its vocal tract and the phonetic/phonological structure of imitated utterances. At the heart of our approach is the learning of an inverse model that relates acoustic and motor representations of speech. The acoustic to auditory mappings uses an auditory filter bank and a self-organizing phase of learning. The inverse model from auditory to vocal tract control parameters is estimated using a babbling phase, in which the vocal tract is essentially driven in a random manner, much like the babbling phase of speech acquisition in infants. The complete system can be used to imitate simple utterances through a direct mapping from sound to control parameters. Our initial results show that this procedure works well for sounds generated by its own voice. Further work is needed to build a phonological control level and achieve better performance with real speech.
Towards a 3D articulatory model of velum based on MRI and CT images
Authors: Serrurier Antoine , Badin Pierre
Published: January 2021

This paper describes the processing of MRI and CT images needed for developing a 3D linear articulatory model of velum. The 3D surface that defines each organ constitutive of the vocal and nasal tracts is extracted from MRI and CT images recorded on a subject uttering a corpus of artificially sustained French vowels and consonants. First, the 2D contours of the organs have been manually extracted from the corresponding images, expanded into 3D contours, and aligned in a common 3D coordinate system. Then, for each organ, a generic mesh has been chosen and fitted by elastic deformation to each of the 46 3D shapes of the corpus. This has finally resulted in a set of organ surfaces sampled with the same number of 3D vertices for each articulation, which is appropriate for Principal Component Analysis or linear decomposition. The analysis of these data has uncovered two main uncorrelated articulatory degrees of freedom for the velum's movement. The associated parameters are used to control the model. We have in particular investigated the question of a possible correlation between jaw / tongue and velum's movement and have not find more correlation than the one found in the corpus.
prosody and syntax of focus in Chitumbuka
Authors: Downing Laura J.
Published: January 2021

This paper presents a sketch of the prosodic, syntactic and morphological means of expressing focus in Chitumbuka, an underdescribed Bantu language of Malawi. The chief prosodic correlate of focus is boundary narrowing – rephrasing conditioned by focus – which is used not only to signal in situ focus but also in syntactic and morphological focus constructions. Of theoretical importance is the fact that rephrasing does not lend culminative prominence to the focused constituent. Although Chitumbuka has culminative sentential stress, its position remains fixed at the right edge of the clause, independent of the position of focus. This makes Chitumbuka a challenge for theories of focus prosody which claim that the focused constituent must have culminative sentential prominence.
Locative inversion in Otjiherero: more on morphosyntactic variation in Bantu
Authors: Marten Lutz
Published: January 2021

This paper discusses locative inversion constructions in Otjiherero against the background of previous work by Bresnan and Kanerva (1989) on the construction in Chichewa, and Demuth and Mmusi (1997) on Setswana and related languages. Locative inversion in Otjiherero is structurally similar to locative inversion in Chichewa and Setswana, but differs from these languages in that there are fewer thematic restrictions on predicates undergoing locative inversion. As Otjiherero has a three-way morphological distinction of locative subject markers, this shows that there is no relation between agreement morphology and thematic restrictions in locative inversion, confirming the result of Demuth and Mmusi. The availability of transitive predicates to participate in locative inversion in Otjiherero furthermore raises questions about the relation between locative inversion, valency, and applicative marking, and these are addressed in the paper, although further research is needed for a full analysis. In terms of function of the locative subject markers, Otjiherero presents, like Chishona, a split system where all markers support locative readings, but where one of them is also used in expletive contexts. In contrast to Chishona, though, this is the class 16, rather than the class 17 marker.
Agreement properties and word order in comparative Bantu
Authors: Morimoto Yukiko
Published: January 2021

Agreement is traditionally viewed as a cross-referencing device for core arguments such as subjects and (primary) objects.1 In this paper, I discuss data from Bantu languages that lead to a radical departure from this generally accepted position: agreement in a subset of Bantu languages cross-references a (sentential) topic rather than the subject. The crucial evidence for topic agreement comes from a construction known as subject-object (S-O) reversal, where the fronted patient agrees with what has uniformly been taken to be a `subject marker'. The correct analysis of S-O reversal as a topic construction with `topic agreement' explains a range of known facts in the languages in question. Furthermore, synchronic variation across Bantu in the presence/absence of S-O reversal and in the properties of the (topic/subject) agreement marker suggests a diachronic path from topic to subject marking. The systematic variation and covariation in the syntax of Bantu languages and the historical picture that it offers would be missed altogether if we continue to reject the idea that the notion of topic can be deeply grammaticized in the form of agreement.
You only need a scalar "only"
Authors: Krasikova Sveta , Zhechev Ventsislav
Published: January 2021

We propose a compositional analysis for sentences of the kind "You only have to go to the North End to get good cheese", referred to as the Sufficiency Modal Construction in the recent literature. We argue that the SMC is ambiguous depending on the kind of ordering induced by only. So is the exceptive construction – its cross-linguistic counterpart. Only is treated as inducing either a 'comparative possibility' scale or an 'implication-based' partial order on propositions. The properties of the 'comparative possibility' scale explain the absence of the prejacent presupposition that is usually associated with only. By integrating the scalarity into the semantics of the SMC, we explain the polarity facts observed in both variants of the construction. The sufficiency meaning component is argued to be due to a pragmatic inference.
president and the man on the street: definite descriptions and proper names across possible situations
Authors: Rothschild Daniel
Published: January 2021

Kripke's "modal argument" uses consideration about scope within modal contexts to show that proper names and definite descriptions must be of two different semantic types. I reexamine the data that is used to motivate Kripke's argument, and suggest that it, in fact, indicates that proper names behave exactly like a certain type of definite description, which I call "particularized" descriptions.
Feature-placing, localizability, and the semantics of existential sentences
Authors: Szekely Rachel
Published: January 2021

Many analyses of existential sentences have focused attention on determining which of its elements constitutes the logical subject and predicate, and this has proven to be a not uncontroversial topic of research. Some, from both syntactic and semantic points of view, have argued that there is a subject (cf. Williams 1994) others that it is a predicate (cf. Moro 1997). Similarly, some have argued that the associate NP is a logical subject, others that it is apredicate (Higginbotham 1987).

One logical possibility that has not (to my knowledge) been pursued in the linguistics literature is that these statements are not of the form subject-predicate, a possibility that has been taken up in the philosophical literature by P.F. Strawson (1959). He claims that there are such statements and that their form is simpler than that of subject-predicate statements because it does not, and cannot, involve an expression that makes reference to an individual. Not involving reference to an individual, these sentences are therefore are made true by different means than a subject-predicate statement whose truth, in the simplest cases, depends on the denotation of the subject being a member of the denotation of the predicate. Of interest from the point of view of the present discussion is his claim that existential statements are examples of this kind of statement, which he calls a feature-placing statement. The truth of a statement of the form feature-placer requires that something with the set of features denoted by the associate NP exist at the location or coordinates expressed by the placer. In an existential sentence we can take the associate NP as the feature-denoting expression and the coda-XP as the placer.
Russian predicative clefts: tensions between semantics and pragmatics
Authors: Verbuk Anna
Published: January 2021

Russian predicate cleft constructions have the surprising property of being associated with adversative clauses of the opposite polarity. I argue that clefts are associated with adversative clauses because they have the semantics of S-Topics in Büring's (1997, 2000) sense of the term. It is shown that the polarity of the adversative clause is obligatorily opposed to that of the cleft because the use of a cleft gives rise to a relevance-based pragmatic scale. The ordering principle according to which these scale
When the donkey lost its fleas: persistence, contxtual restriction, and minimal situations
Authors: Zweig Eytan
Published: January 2021

This paper revisits the question of whether propositions in situation semantics must be persistent (Kratzer (1989)). It shows that ignoring persistence causes empirical problems to theories which use quantification over minimal situations as a solution for donkey anaphora (Elbourne (2005)), while at the same time modifying these theories to incorporate persistence makes them incompatible with the use of situations for contextual restriction (Kratzer (2004)).
Encoding focus in Kanuri verbal morphology: predication focus and the "Kanuri focus shift"
Authors: Wolff H. Ekkehard , Löhr Doris
Published: January 2021

Focus on verbal operators such as aspect or tense ("predication focus", lucidly described by Hyman & Watters (1984) under the label "auxiliary focus") has been noticed to exist in African languages of Afroasiatic and Niger-Congo affiliation, but not so far in Saharan. The Saharan language Kanuri is assumed to have substantially reorganized its TAM system, particularly in the perfective aspect domain (Cyffer [2006] dates major changes between the years 1820 and 1900). The paper discusses, for the first time in Kanuri scholarship, the existence of a neat subsystem of predication focus marking by suffix in the perfective aspect which is made up of a total of six conjugational paradigms that uniformly encode predication focus by suffix {-ò}. Kanuri dialects differ in strategies and scope of focus marking encoded in verb morphology. In the light of data from the Yerwa (Nigeria) and Manga (Niger) dialects the paper discusses some "anomalies" with regard to general focus theory which we account for by describing the "Kanuri Focus Shift" as a diachronic process which is responsible for leftward displacement of scope of focus.
Focus and prominence in Chichewa, Chitumbuka and Durban Zulu
Authors: Downing Laura J.
Published: January 2021

Much work on the interaction of prosody and focus assumes that, crosslinguistically, there is a necessary correlation between the position of main sentence stress (or accent) and focus, and that an intonational pitch change on the focused element is a primary correlate of focus. In this paper, I discuss primary data from three Bantu languages – Chichewa, Durban Zulu and Chitumbuka – and show that in all three languages phonological re-phrasing, not stress, is the main prosodic correlate of focus and that lengthening, not pitch movement, is the main prosodic correlate of phrasing. This result is of interest for the typology of intonation in illustrating languages where intonation has limited use and where, notably, intonation does not highlight focused information in the way we might expect from European stress languages.
prosody of Símákonde relative clauses
Authors: Manus Sophie
Published: January 2021

Símákonde is an Eastern Bantu language (P23) spoken by immigrant Mozambican communities in Zanzibar and on the Tanzanian mainland. Like other Makonde dialects and other Eastern and Southern Bantu languages (Hyman 2009), it has lost the historical Proto-Bantu vowel length contrast and now has a regular phrase-final stress rule, which causes a predictable bimoraic lengthening of the penultimate syllable of every Prosodic Phrase. The study of the prosody / syntax interface in Símákonde Relative Clauses requires to take into account the following elements: the relationship between the head and the relative verb, the conjoint / disjoint verbal distinction and the various phrasing patterns of Noun Phrases. Within Símákonde noun phrases, depending on the nature of the modifier, three different phrasing situations are observed: a modifier or modifiers may (i) be required to phrase with the head noun, (ii) be required to phrase separately, or (iii) optionally phrase with the head noun.
Introduction
Authors: Downing Laura J.
Published: January 2021

In spite of this long history, most work to date on the phonology-syntax interface in Bantu languages suffers from limitations, due to the range of expertise required: intonation, phonology, syntax. Quite generally, intonational studies on African languages are extremely rare. Most of the existing data has not been the subject of careful phonetic analysis, whether of the prosody of neutral sentences or of questions or other focus structures. There are important gaps in our knowledge of Bantu syntax which in turn limit our understanding of the phonology-syntax interface. Recent developments in syntactic theory have provided a new way of thinking about the type of syntactic information that phonology can refer to and have raised new questions: Do only syntactic constituent edges condition prosodic phrasing? Do larger domains such as syntactic phases, or even other factors, like argument and adjunct distinctions, play a role? Further, earlier studies looked at a limited range of syntactic constructions. Little research exists on the phonology of focus or of sentences with non-canonical word order in Bantu languages. Both the prosody and the syntax of complex sentences, questions and dislocations are understudied for Bantu languages. Our project aims to remedy these gaps in our knowledge by bringing together a research team with all the necessary expertise. Further, by undertaking the intonational, phonological and syntactic analysis of several languages we can investigate whether there is any correlation among differences in morphosyntactic and prosodic properties that might also explain differences in phrasing and intonation. It will also allow us to investigate whether there are cross-linguistically common prosodic patterns for particular morpho-syntactic structure.
Wh-questions in Chewa and Tumbuka: positions and prosodies
Authors: Downing Laura J.
Published: January 2021

This paper presents a preliminary survey of the positions and prosodies associated with Wh-questions in two Bantu languages spoken in Malawi. The paper shows that the two languages are similar in requiring focused subjects to be clefted. Both also require 'which' questions and 'because of what' questions to be clefted or fronted. However, for other non-subjects Tumbuka rather uniformly imposes an IAV (immediately after the verb) requirement, while Chewa does not. In both languages, we found a strong tendency for there to be a prosodic phrase break following the Wh-word. In Tumbuka, this break follows from the general phrasing algorithm of the language, while in Chewa, I propose that the break can be best understood as following from the inherent prominence of Wh-words.
tnology of wh-questions in Luganda
Authors: Hyman Larry M. , Katamba Francis X.
Published: January 2021

The purpose of this paper is to show how WH questions interact with the complex tonal phenomena which we summarized and illustrated in Hyman & Katamba (2010). As will be seen, WH questions have interesting syntactic and tonal properties of their own, including a WH-specific intonation. The paper is structured as follows: After an introduction in §1, we successively discuss non-subject WH questions (§2), subject WH questions (§3), and clefted WH questions (§4). We then briefly present a tense which is specifically limited to WH questions (§5), and conclude with a brief summary in §6.
Locative inversion in Cuwabo
Authors: Guérois Rozenn
Published: January 2021

This paper proposes a detailed description of locative inversion (LI) constructions in Cuwabo, in terms of morphosyntactic properties and thematic restrictions. Of particular interest are the use of disjoint verb forms in LI, and the co-existence of formal and semantic LI, which challenges the widespread belief that the two constructions cannot be found in the same language.
TAM-full object-verb order in the Mbam languages of Cameroon
Authors: Mous Maarten
Published: January 2021

Nen and Nyokon are unique among the Bantu languages in allowing full nominal objects between the tense/aspect marker and the verb. Despite the fact that the two languages are neighbours and related they make different use of this positional option. In Nen the position is the default one for objects and the post-verbal position renders an object discrete and suitable for quantified objects and for contrast. In Nyokon the position before the verb is functionally equivalent to the one after the verb. The difference is related to the fact that Nyokon allows the preverbal object only in certain tenses whereas in Nen it is not restricted. But contrasted objects in Nyokon too appear after the verb. There is a construction in which both positions are filled with a constituent. This construction is modelled on a secondary predication construction.
note on bare-passives in (selected) Bantu and Western Nilotic Languages
Authors: Hamlaoui Fatima
Published: January 2021

In the present paper, we concentrate on (selected) Bantu and Nilotic bare-passive strategies and lay out the basis for a typology of transitive passive constructions in these languages. We argue that bare-passives constitute an optimal strategy to change prominence relations between arguments, in languages that strongly hold to the default mapping between the highest thematic role available and the grammatical subject (i.e. Spec,TP). The Nilotic and Bantu languages discussed here differ in their way of satisfying this default mapping. In particular, impersonal bare-passives satisfy it by resorting to an agentive place-holder (an indefinite subject marker) and realizing the logical agent as a lower thematic/semantic role (e.g. instrument or locative). Left-dislocation and so called 'subjectobject' reversal bare-passives realize the default matching between agent and subject in a more straightforward way, but locate the patient in a higher argument position within the inflectional domain (Spec,TopP). As argued in Hamlaoui and Makasso (2013) and Hamlaoui (2013), and in line with Noonan (1977), the present languages display a clauseinternal split between subjecthood (being the grammatical subject in Spec,TP) and topicality (being the subject of the predication, in an inflectional-domain internal Spec,TopP).
deutsche komitative Konnektor 'wobei' in administrativen Texten und seine Entsprechungen im Italienischen
Authors: Masiero Federica
Published: January 2021

This paper deals with German 'wobei'-clauses and their Italian counterparts. Based on a corpus study of administrative texts, we identify the type and frequency of the Italian constructions that correspond to 'wobei'-clauses. In particular, we will assess to what extent the Italian converb construction gerundio correlates with 'wobei'-clauses. More specifically, we will focus on the thesis put forward by Haspelmath (1995) and Breindl (2014), according to which comitativity is expressed by converb constructions when it applies to state of affairs.
Focus constraints on ellipsis - an unalternatives account
Authors: Assmann Muriel , Büring Daniel , Jordanoska Izabela , Prüller Max
Published: January 2021

This paper presents a new account of the generalization that focused elements cannotbe elided, framed within Unalternative Semantics, a framework that does away with syntacticF-marking. We propose the mirror image of the generalization: what is elided cannot introducealternatives. We implement this as a focus restriction in UAS and then go on to show howto account for MAXELIDE effects using the same technique, without making reference to anytransderivational constraints.Keywords: focus, ellipsis, alternative semantics, unalternative semantics, MaxElide, secondaryfocus.
Factors licensing embedded present tense in speech reports
Authors: Bary Corien , Altshuler Daniel , Syrett Kristen , De Swart Peter
Published: January 2021

According to Ogihara (1995), the usage of the embedded present in a speech reportsuch as John said that Mary is in the room is restricted by the cause of John’s belief (the statethat made John think that Mary is in the room): the present tense can be used only if thiscause still holds at the time that John said that Mary is in the room is uttered. This paperpresents experimental evidence demonstrating that this is only one of the factors that licensesa felicitous usage of the embedded present tense. In particular, we show that the cause ofbelief still holding is not a necessary condition, and identify two additional, sufficient (but notnecessary) factors: in cases of false belief, who is aware of the falsity of the belief and durationof the reported state. While these factors are independent, they collectively support the ideathat the present tense encodes ‘current relevance’, even in embedded contexts (e.g. Costa 1972;McGilvray 1974). This gives rise to the question of how we can derive ‘current relevance’ and,in particular, whether previous analyses of the embedded present tense are adequately equippedto do so.Keywords: tense, speech reports, double access, experiments.
Counterfactual donkeys don’t get high
Authors: Deigan Michael
Published: January 2021

I present data that suggest the universal entailments of counterfactual donkey sentencesaren’t as universal as some have claimed. I argue that this favors the strategy of attributingthese entailments to a special property of the similarity ordering on worlds provided bysome contexts, rather than to a semantically encoded sensitivity to assignment.Keywords: donkey sentences, counterfactuals, conditionals, similarity, simplification.
Linguistic barriers to logical reasoning: a new perspective on Aristotelian syllogisms
Authors: Haida Andreas , Crnič Luka , Grodzinsky Yosef
Published: January 2021

Experimental studies investigating logical reasoning performance show very high errorrates of up to 80% and more. Previous research identified scalar inferences of the sentencesof logical arguments as a major error source. We present new analytical tools to quantify theimpact of scalar inferences on syllogistic reasoning. Our proposal builds on a new classificationof Aristotelian syllogisms and a closely linked classification of reasoning behaviors/strategies.We argue that the variation in error rates across syllogistic reasoning tasks is in part due toindividual variation: reasoners follow different reasoning strategies and these strategies playout differently for syllogisms of different classes.Keywords: syllogisms, reasoning errors, individual variation, scalar inferences.
Hard cases of third readings in terms of the Standard Solution
Authors: Kusliy Petr , Vostrikova Ekaterina
Published: January 2021

Schwager (2011) and Sudo (2014) argued that there are cases of the so-called thirdreadings of attitude reports, initially discovered by Fodor (1970), that cannot be accounted forin terms of a theory of indexed world variables (Percus, 2000), which is often referred to asthe Standard Solution. More complicated alternatives to the Standard Solution have beenrecently formulated in the literature in a number of papers. We argue that all the seeminglyproblematic cases can be naturally accounted for in terms of the Standard Solution, if we takeinto account the existence of previously unrecognized elided material in these reports.Keywords: attitude reports, non-specific transparent, hard cases, Standard Solution.
Time in probabilistic causation: direct vs. indirect uses of lexical causative verbs
Authors: Martin Fabienne
Published: January 2021

It is traditionally assumed that lexical causative verbs (e.g. kill) express direct causationonly, while periphrastic (bi-clausal) causatives (e.g. cause to die) may also express indirectcausation. In favour of this constraint, Fodor famously observed that the (change of) state introducedby lexical causative verbs is not accessible for separate adverbial modification by temporal(or manner) adverbials. In this paper, I present old and new arguments against the direct causationconstraint under the definitions of directness of Fodor and Wolff. I then propose a new definitionof directness in terms of ab-initio causal sufficiency framed in Kvart’s probabilistic account ofsingular causation. I argue that directness so redefined is an implicature rather than an entailmentof lexical causative verbs, which enables me to account for old and new data. Furthermore, I accountfor why the constraint on separate modification by temporal adverbials can be relaxed witheventuality-denoting subjects.Keywords: lexical causative verbs, direct vs. indirect causation, causal sufficiency, probabilistictheories of causation, semantics/pragmatics interface.
Some kind of relative clause
Authors: Mendia Jon Ander
Published: January 2021

Amount Relatives (ARs) differ from restrictive relative clauses in that they do notrefer to a particular object denoted by the head of the relative clause, but to an amount of suchobjects (Carlson, 1977a; Heim, 1987). Traditionally, ARs have been regarded as degree expressions.In this paper I argue against this view and propose instead that amount interpretations ofrelative clauses are in fact a special case of kind interpretation.Keywords: kind reference, amounts, relative clauses.
Constraining (shifting) types at the interface
Authors: Poole Ethan
Published: January 2021

This paper argues that traces only range over individual semantic types and cannot betype shifted into higher types to circumvent this restriction. The evidence comes from movementtargeting positions where DPs must denote properties and the behavior of definite descriptionsin these positions. These constraints on possible traces demonstrate that syntactic operationsimpose active restrictions on permissible semantic types in natural language.Keywords: semantic types, traces, movement, reconstruction, type shifting, properties.
Alternating conj/disjunctions: the case of Japanese "-toka" and "-tari"
Authors: Smith Ryan Walter , Kobayashi Ryoichiro
Published: January 2021

This paper investigates the interpretation of Japanese -toka and -tari, two nonexhaustiveparticles that receive conjunctive interpretations in upward-entailingenvironments, but disjunctive interpretations in downward-entailing and question contexts.We analyze -toka and -tari as items that introduce unstructured sets of alternatives in aHamblin-style alternative semantics (Hamblin, 1973; Kratzer and Shimoyama, 2002), andderive their conjunctive and disjunctive readings via an interaction between these sets and thesemantics of the environment containing them.Keywords: -toka, -tari, Japanese, alternative semantics, conjunction, disjunction
Generics and typicality
Authors: Van Rooij Robert
Published: January 2021

Cimpian et al. (2010) observed that we accept generic statements of the form ‘Gsare f ’ on relatively weak evidence, but that if we are unfamiliar with group G and we learn ageneric statement about it, we still interpret it in a much stronger way: (almost) all Gs are f .This paper makes use of notions like ‘representativeness’ and ‘contingency’ from (associativelearning) psychology to provide a semantics of generics that explains why people accept genericsbased on weak evidence. We make use of the Heuristics and Biases approach of Tverskyand Kahneman (1974) and the Associative Theory of Probability Judgements to explain pragmaticallywhy people interpret generic statements in a much stronger way. The spirit of theapproach has much in common with Leslie’s (2008) cognition-based ideas about generics, butthe semantics is grounded on Cohen’s (1999) relative readings of generic sentences. The basicintuition is that a generic of the form ‘Gs are f ’ is true, not because most Gs are (or tend tohave) f , but because f is typical for G, which means that f is valuably associated with G.Keywords: generics, association, probabilities, pragmatics.
Introduction
Authors: Weber Oliver , Lindgren Josefin , Gagarina Natalia
Published: January 2021

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Einfluss von Tempus und Aspekt auf die Wahl der Verbformen in schriftlichen Texten russischsprachiger Deutschlerner
Authors: Mikhaylina Irina
Published: January 2021

This article investigates the influence of tense and aspect on the choice of verb forms in texts written by Russian-speaking learners of German. Through eight written narrations, each produced by advanced learners of German with L1-Russian and German native speakers, the use of verb forms and relevant linguistic means (perfect markers, temporal adverbs and temporal clauses) was compared and analysed.

The study shows that even very advanced Russian-speaking learners of German could not meet target language preferences in German. They tended to deploy a different temporal perspective than German native speakers (simple past instead of present tense) and they also showed an overuse of the perfect tense, especially when describing completed actions. These differences compared to the preferences of German native speakers can be explained as transfer effects from the L1 of Russian-speaking learners since – unlike in German – the grammatical aspect in Russian is obligatory and its perfective form offers an effective tool to express completeness.
The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN): Adding Mandarin to MAIN
Authors: Luo Jin , Yang Wenchun , Chan Angel , Cheng Kelly , Kan Rachel , Gagarina Natalia
Published: January 2021

This paper introduces the Mandarin version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) and describes the adaptation process. The Mandarin MAIN not only extends the empirical coverage of MAIN by including one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, but also offers an important tool to assess the narrative abilities of monolingual and bi-/ multi- lingual children acquiring Mandarin as a first, heritage, second, or additional language across the globe.
MAIN: The Slovak version and pilot data
Authors: Kapalková Svetlana , Nemcová Monika
Published: January 2021

The adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) for use with Slovak speaking children is a vital step in the process of creating a transparent evaluation of children’s narrative abilities. Since its first translation and adaptation in 2012, new pilot data from different groups of children has been collected in Slovakia. This paper describes the process of adapting the instrument to fit the Slovak language and reports on analyses of narrative production in monolingual (103 Slovak-speaking children) and bilingual (37 Slovak-English speaking) pre-school children. Within a pilot study, the story elicitation method was also compared (telling vs. retelling) within a small sample of 10 monolingual Slovak-speaking children. All results show transparent and detailed possibilities in terms of finding a meaningful evaluation that can evaluate a child’s complex narrative abilities.
The adaptation of MAIN to Turkish
Authors: Maviş İlknur , Tunçer A. Müge , Selvi Balo Semra
Published: January 2021

This paper presents a short overview of Turkey and the Turkish language, and then outlines the process of adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) to Turkish and how the Turkish MAIN has been used with monolingual and bilingual children. The grammatical features of Turkish, the critical points in the adaptation process of MAIN to Turkish and our experiences of extensive piloting of the Turkish MAIN with typically developing monolingual children are described.