bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Iconicity in multimedia performance
Authors: Moser Sibylle
Published: March 2014

This paper analyses the complexity of intermedial iconicity through the analysis of Laurie Anderson’s piece White Lily. It reveals the media aesthetic strategies by which Anderson enacts the abstract concept of time through the iconic use of language as well as through iconicity in music, gesture and computer animation. The performer’s multimodal enactment of time experience demonstrates the integration of iconic, indexical and symbolic forms of representation. The semiotic analysis of the example is based on Sebeok and Danesi’s modeling systems theory and the concept of “embodied cognition” brought forth by authors like Varela, Thompson and Rosch and Lakoff and Johnson. Thus, Anderson’s performance illustrates the tenets of a corporeal media theory that introduces the body as the founding medium of semiosis.
Semiotic foundations of natural linguistics and diagrammatic iconicity
Authors: Nöth Winfried
Published: March 2014

The paper examines the semiotic foundations of Natural Linguistics with special reference to diagrammatic iconicity. In accordance with C. S. Peirce’s semiotics, naturalness in language is described as a substratum of iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs. Diagrammatic iconicity in language is more than form-meaning isomorphism; it is a structure inherent in the verbal form itself irrespective of whether the diagram is used to represent anything at all. The rules of word formation, syntax, and the structures of discourse constitute verbal diagrams. The system of language is a diagrammatic rhematic legisign. A pure diagram is a relational form without reference to anything else. Diagrams that represent in connection with indexical reference are diagrammatic hypoicons. This is the kind of diagram which has been studied in Natural Linguistics so far. Diagrams in language are both cognitively necessary and rhetorically efficient since icons are superior to other signs when clearness of representation and coherence of argumentation is concerned.
Gender across languages
Authors: Hellinger Marlis , Bußmann Hadumod
Published: March 2014

1.Aims and scope of “Gender across languages”

2.Gender classes as a special case of noun classes

2.1Classifier languages

2.2Noun class languages

3.Categories of gender

3.1Grammatical gender

3.2Lexical gender

3.3Referential gender

3.4“False generics”: Generic masculines and male generics

3.5Social gender

4.Gender-related structures

4.1Word-formation

4.2Agreement

4.3Pronominalization

4.4Coordination

5.Gender-related messages

5.1Address terms

5.2Idiomatic expressions and proverbs

5.3Female and male discourse

6. Language change and language reform

7.Conclusion

Notes

References
Czech. Communicating gender in Czech
Authors: Čmejrková Svĕtla
Published: March 2014

1.Introduction

2.Gender in Czech

2.1Grammatical gender

2.2Lexical gender

2.3Epicene nouns

2.3.1Masculine epicenes

2.3.2Feminine epicenes

2.3.3Neuter epicenes

2.4Double gender nouns

2.5Nominalised adjectives

2.5.1Nominalised adjectives of the type dospívající (m/f) ‘adolescent’

2.5.2Nominalised adjectives of the type dospělý/dospělá (m/f) ‘adult’

2.6Word-formation

2.6.1The derivation of feminine personal nouns

2.6.2Compounding

3.Asymmetries and lexical gaps

4.Masculine generics

5.Achieving female visibility in Czech

6.Variability, language critique and language politics

7.Conclusion

Notes

References
Danish. Equal before the law – unequal in language
Authors: Gomard Kirsten , Kunoe Mette
Published: March 2014

1.Introduction

2.Structural properties of Danish

2.1Grammatical gender and agreement

2.2Pronouns

2.3The morphology of human nouns

2.3.1Derivation

2.3.2Compounding

3.The semantics of human nouns

3.1‘Woman’ and ‘man’

3.2Occupational titles

3.3Address forms

3.4Terms of abuse and slang words

3.5Idiomatic expressions

4.Proverbs

5.Language politics

5.1Alternatives to male-biased personal nouns

5.2Affirmative action?

5.3Pronominal splitting and neutralization

5.4Family names

5.5The press

6.Conclusion

Notes

References
Oriya. Linguistic and socio-cultural implications of gendered structures in Oriya
Authors: Sahoo Kalyanamalini
Published: March 2014

1.Introduction

2.Gender in Oriya

2.1Referential gender

2.2Gender marking

2.2.1Suffixation (derivation)

2.2.2Compounding

2.2.3Adjectival modification

2.3Lexical gender

3.Women and men in Oriya society

4.Address forms

4.1Kinship terms used as terms of address

4.2Address forms and identity

4.3Friendship terms

4.4Occupational/professional terms

4.5Honorific titles

4.6Terms of abuse and derogatory address forms

4.7Euphemisms used to refer to one’s spouse

5.Idiomatic expressions

6.Lexical asymmetries

7.Male generics

8.‘You’ in Oriya

9.Conclusion

Notes

References
Eastern Maroon Creole. Communicating gender in the Eastern Maroon Creole of Suriname
Authors: Migge Bettina
Published: March 2014

1.Introduction

2. Gender in the Eastern Maroon Creole (EMC)

2.1 Personal nouns with lexical gender: Kinship terms

2.2 Address forms

2.3 Formation of gender-marked personal nouns from non-personal words

2.4. Formation of gender-marked nouns from personal nouns

3. The interpretation of personal nouns in discourse

3.1 Gender-unmarked personal nouns

3.2 Words overtly marked as ‘male’

3.3 Words overtly marked as ‘female’

4. Conclusion

Notes

References
Separating “Focus Movement” from Focus
Authors: Horvath Julia
Published: March 2014

This paper revisits the case of “Focus-movement” as manifested in one of its best-studied instances, Hungarian, and assesses it in relation to views of Abar movement within Chomsky’s (1995, 2000) Minimalist Program. I examine whether the movement is due to a formal [Focus] feature, and provide detailed argumentation against this hypothesis. The paper motivates the proposal that the movement involves a distinct quantificational “Exhaustive Identification” (EI) operator, which interacts with Focus only indirectly. It claims that the [EI] operator feature projects a clausal functional head that drives the syntactic movement construed mistakenly in the literature to be Focus-driven movement. After a cross-linguistic exploration of Focus-related movements, the paper evaluates the implications for the tenability of purely interface-based treatments of Focus.
The syntax of valuation and the interpretability of features
Authors: Pesetsky David , Torrego Esther
Published: March 2014

We present a proposal about the nature of agreement processes and the syntax of its output, and demonstrate that this proposal not only advances the overall understanding of agreement, but also contributes to a simpler view of various syntactic phenomena. At the heart of our proposal is a conception of agreement that draws on various traditions that view it as “feature sharing”. We combine this conception with a proposal that valuation and interpretability of features are independent concepts. We specifically focus on the role of verbal tense morphology in specifying other properties of a sentence, and the comparable role played by wh-morphology in specifying clause type.We concentrate on the syntax of raising constructions and an analysis of sentential subjects.
Projecting argument structure: The grammar of hitting and breaking revisited
Authors: Erteschik-Shir Nomi , Rapoport Tova
Published: March 2014

This paper is concerned with one of the most basic syntactic questions: what are the properties of verbs that determine syntactic structure, aspectual interpretation and argument selection? We approach this issue through an examination of two different types of verbs of contact. We propose that the meanings of verbs are decomposed into atomic meaning components and that these meaning components project syntactic structure. From these meaning components and the structures they project we derive argument number and selection, theta-role and aspectual interpretation, and transitivity. This theory is strongly minimalist in that the various predicate meanings of a verb are derived from a single lexical representation, requiring neither functional projections nor movement.
The argument structure of the dative construction
Authors: Jayaseelan K.A.
Published: March 2014

It is argued that the ‘dative construction’ – i.e. the construction in which an Experiencer or Possessor argument is realized as a DP marked with dative Case, and the VP has the form ‘be NP’ – alternates with two ‘nominative constructions’ (i.e. constructions in which the Experiencer/Possessor argument has nominative Case): one in which the VP has the form ‘have NP,’ and another in which the VP has the form ‘be AdjP’. We try to account for the three-way realization of the same underlying Lexical Relational Structure (LRS) in terms of incorporation: when the dative Case incorporates into ‘be,’ we get ‘have’; and when a Noun incorporates into dative Case, we get an Adjective.
Syntactic categories and lexical argument structure
Authors: Amritavalli R.
Published: March 2014

Differences between languages in the syntactic categories they instantiate may lead to parametric variation, as syntactic categories constrain possible argument structures. The Dravidian language Kannada is argued to be typical of overt case-SOV languages in having only the categories N and V: P and A (argued to be N plus case) develop only as case weakens; as does the verb have (i.e. be plus case). We seek to explain thus the ubiquity of the dative experiencer in Kannada, and its vestigial presence in English; and the absence of have in Kannada. We also explain an observation that languages which have serial verb constructions lack PP structures, showing that English has serial verb constructions with imperfect and negative participles but not with perfect participles. This gap arises from the way case is incorporated into participles in English to form adjectives (and currently explained in terms of the category of these participles); in Kannada, verbal participles uniformly retain their case.
Argument structure and aspect: The case of two imperfectives in Malayalam
Authors: Babu M.T. Hany , Madhavan P.
Published: March 2014

We look at the two imperfective constructions in Malayalam and show how a rich v tier can account for differences between them. The -ukayaa^6 imperfective is actually a reduced (pseudo)cleft construction (following Mohanan and Mohanan’s 1999 analysis of aa^6 in non-equative constructions). The auxiliaryaa^6 is the focus marker. The reduced material is a tier of v , phonetically manifested as the cey ‘do’ in transitive/causative constructions and an eventivev ‘occur’ in unaccusatives (cf. Marantz 1997). The -unnu^z6 construction (the other imperfective) has neither eventive nor agentive v . The auxiliary u^z6 is an existential operator and it asserts the existence of an event. u^z6 heads the EventP (Harley 1995). Facts from adverb syntax also support the analysis of the-ukayaa^6 construction as focus.
2. Towards grammaticalization of clitic doubling: Clitic doubling in Macedonian and neighbouring languages
Authors: Mišeska Tomić Olga
Published: March 2014

In the Balkan Slavic languages, whose dialects actually form a dialectal continuum, clitic doubling shows gradual variation along a vertical north-south axis and a horizontal east-west axis. On the north-south axis, there is variation with respect to the categories that can be clitic-doubled. On the east-west axis languages/dialects vary with respect to the conditions on clitic doubling, with almost total dependence on discourse factors in the easternmost dialects in the area and remarkable dependence on grammatical factors in the westernmost ones. In the majority of the Macedonian dialects discourse factors do not play any role and all definite direct objects and all specific indirect objects are clitic doubled. In Western Macedonia, the vertical north-south axis and the horizontal east-west axis along which clitic doubling variation in Balkan Slavic moves, intersect, so that in the Western Macedonian dialects, as well as in Standard Macedonian, which is based on the West-Central dialects, clitic doubling is obligatory with all definite direct and all specific indirect objects. In the case of indirect objects, the specificity effect does not always hold; even non-articled NPs, which are never specific, can sometimes be clitic doubled. Accordingly, in Western and Standard Macedonian the doubling clitic is becoming a mere case marker of the object it doubles. In Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian, two Romance Balkan languages which are in close contact with the Western Macedonian dialects, the conditions for clitic doubling are analogous to those in Macedonian. This fact leads to the conclusion that the grammaticalization of the doubling clitic is an areal phenomenon.
6. Clitic doubling from Ancient to Asia Minor Greek
Authors: Janse Mark
Published: March 2014

In Modern Greek, clitic doubling is a grammatical device that marks clitic doubled object NPs as topics. Clitic doubling involving the fronting of the clitic doubled NP is called topicalization or, if combined with a boundary pause, topic left-dislocation. Topic left-dislocation is obligatory in the presence of a preverbal focused NP. Clitic doubling involving the backing of the clitic doubled NP is called backgrounding or, if combined with a boundary pause, topic right-dislocation. Right-dislocated topics are interpreted as an afterthought. In Ancient Greek, clitic doubling was an occasional mnemotechnic device to clarify the referent of a left-dislocated topic usually separated by an intervening clause from the verb on which it depended. Topic right-dislocation existed in Ancient Greek as a device to clarify or specify the referent of a clitic pronoun. The grammaticalization of clitic doubling can be traced back to the use of hanging topics, in which case the doubling clitic was needed to specify the grammatical relation of the corresponding hanging topic as direct or indirect object. The construction was grammaticalized in the Medieval period, when clitic doubling positively marked clitic doubled NPs as topics. In Asia Minor Greek, clitic doubling serves exactly the same purposes as in Medieval and Standard Modern Greek. Turkish interference appears in the existence of a definite and an indefinite accusative to mark topic and focus respectively and possibly the preponderance of SOV as the unmarked order.
10. Clitic doubling, complex heads and interarboreal operations
Authors: Cornilescu Alexandra , Dobrovie-Sorin Carmen
Published: March 2014

Romanian, as well as certain varieties of Spanish (but not Iberian Spanish, French or Italian) allow the clitic doubling of direct objects (indirect objects will be left out here),1 a phenomenon that is subject to clear crosslinguistic differences: in Spanish, but not in Romanian, clitic doubling is blocked by contrastive Focus and quantificational features. Our analysis of this contrast will rely on the following theoretical ingredients: (i) (most cases of) Head-Movement will be analyzed in terms of Head to Head Merge (Dobrovie-Sorin 2000; Dobrovie-Sorin & Galves 2000); (ii) clitic placement will be analyzed as a Spec-Head agreement configuration with a null pronounpro sitting in the Spec of (the complex head containing) the clitic (revised version of Sportiche 1996); (iii) clitic doubling will be analyzed as resulting from an interarboreal operation (Bobaljik & Brown 1997) that merges a complex head Cl+Vv+T(ense) with the vP containing the clitic doubled dp; (iv) the contrasts between Romanian and (River Plate) Spanish will be analyzed as being due to the fact that in Spanish, Spec,CP is distinct from Spec,Cl+Vv+T, whereas in Romanian, comp is part of the complex functional head clustering around T, and correlatively, Spec,C is not distinct from, but rather a slot inside the Spec of the complex head Comp+Cl+Vv+T.
DP in Bantu and Romance
Authors: Carstens Vicki
Published: March 2014

The paper considers several aspects of Bantu and Romance DPs, including: (i) Noun Class and grammatical gender; (ii) apparently derivational properties of the two; (iii) ordering among nouns and their modifiers; and (iv) concord in DPs. Several conclusions are argued for. Firstly, Bantu Class is a gender system like that of Romance, with gender-specific Spell-Out of number features. Secondly, despite some surface evidence to the contrary, gender/Class is an uninterpretable feature, without derivational functions. Thirdly, DPs of the two languages share a common architecture; and fourth, in both families concord is the result of the Agree relation. Thus many properties of nouns and DPs are common to both language groups, as the hypothesis of UG leads us to expect.
Focus at the interface: Evidence from Romance and Bantu
Authors: Costa João , Kula Nancy C.
Published: March 2014

Word order variation in Romance and Bantu has been related to information structure portrayed in the different discourse functions of the sentential elements involved. Based on the distribution of new information focus in Romance and Bantu, this paper argues that discourse functions need not be directly encoded in syntax. The position defended here is that syntax generates all possible structures which are filtered out at the interface with the phonological component. The prosodic phrasing of these structures is what indicates focused constituents occurring in positions of prominence. The paramount significance of prosody for the determination of focus is particularly illustrated in those cases both in Romance and Bantu where, for syntactic reasons, change in word order is restricted but prosodic effects still accompany focus. The proposed interface approach to focus accounts for the variation in focus strategies and the intimate relation of focus to prosody which is attested in Romance and Bantu. Crucially, the evidence from Romance and Bantu is complementary. The Romance data provide the necessary syntactic evidence for not positing a designated focus position in the syntactic hierarchy for focus, whereas the Bantu data show that prosodic effects may emerge in varying ways, providing evidence for not linking a single syntactic position to a given prosodic effect. The paper in this respect highlights the similarities and differences of the role of prosody in indicating focus in stress versus tone languages.
The null subject parameter and correlating properties: The case of Creole languages
Authors: Nicolis Marco
Published: March 2014

The existence of correlations between the positive setting of the Null Subject

Parameter and other grammatical properties has recently been called into

question (see Newmeyer (2005)). In this paper, I show that the proref →pro-ref

correlation appears to be exceptionless and that it follows directly from the theory

of pro–drop in Rizzi (1986a). Rizzi (1982) proposes that the availability of Free

Inversion is what allows for the lack of that–t effects in pro–drop languages;

this, I further show, is empirically untenable. I present data from several Creole

languages that suggest that the lack of that–t effects in these languages is related

to the availability of null expletive pro. I take the latter to be a sufficient, but not

necessary, condition for the lack of that–t effects. I finally discuss the implication

of this finding for the parametric model.
Non-configurationality: Free word order and argument drop in Turkish
Authors: Öztürk Balkız
Published: March 2014

This paper investigates free word order and argument drop in Turkish as the two

properties typically associated with non-configurationality. We will argue that

these properties follow from the lack of case-driven Agree in Turkish phrase

structure. That is, the case feature in Turkish is not located on the functional

heads T and v, but is available within the thematic domain. In languages like

English, on the other hand, given that case is provided by hierarchically ordered

functional projections, i.e., TP > vP, arguments forming case-chains with these

functional heads get represented within a hierarchical configuration. Lack of such

chain formation in Turkish is what creates the flat structure effect, which in turn

facilitates free word order and argument drop.
Active lexicon
Authors: Horvath Julia , Siloni Tal
Published: March 2014

The behavior of two distinct classes of unaccusatives, semantic drift, and idioms provide new evidence that adjectival passives must be derived in the lexicon from the corresponding transitive alternate, whereas verbal passives must be formed post-lexically. Verbal passives are argued to be inserted as two-place predicates, their entire derivation being post-lexical. The set of so-called adjectival passives is split into two distinct subtypes: adjectival decausatives, and adjectival passives. Each of these is argued to be derived in the lexicon, by a distinct operation, involving reduction and saturation of the external role of the input, respectively. The findings support two important currently controversial theoretical assumptions: (a) the lexicon is an active (operational) component, and (b) the external -role is part of the verbal lexical entry, thus accessible to lexical operations. On widely held approaches inserting the external argument via a functional head little-v or discarding the active role of the lexicon, the systematic phenomena presented in the paper would be completely unexpected.
Definiteness agreement with PP modifiers
Authors: Danon Gabi
Published: March 2014

DP complements of prepositions in Modern Hebrew often bear morphosyntactic definiteness marking that is triggered by the definiteness value of the noun modified by the PP. Although reminiscent of definiteness agreement with attributive APs, the agreement observed with PPs is not always obligatory. This article argues that what distinguishes modifiers that display obligatory definiteness agreement is that they denote properties. I propose that the morphosyntactic definiteness feature of property-denoting modifiers is uninterpretable and therefore it must be checked by agreement. Checking is made possible by the fact that pps in Hebrew have the structure of a construct state, where definiteness features spread from an embedded DP to a higher projection.
2. On the nature of the approximative expression NUM-odd
Authors: Dooley Sheila Ann , de Haan Ferdinand
Published: March 2014

In this paper, the morphology, syntax, semantics, and diachrony of expressions liketwenty-odd are described, based on the results of a corpus study which considers data from the British National Corpus, the Oxford English Dictionary, and Google. The -odd suffix appears most frequently with twenty, and in collocations with temporal nominals such as years, days, etc. Distributionally it appears to be a derivational suffix on numerals, occurring inside additional suffixation such as ordinal -th. It originated from the use of odd to denote a surplus or remainder, which usage has existed for several hundred years. It is distinct from other English approximatives, and approximatives in other languages, in that -odd expresses an indeterminate range above the cardinality of the modified numeral, but not below it, while other approximative expressions (like about) include the possibility that the actual number might be either above or below the reference number.
4. Current challenges to the Lexicalist Hypothesis: An overview and a critique
Authors: Newmeyer Frederick J.
Published: March 2014

In this chapter, arguments against several variants of the modern syntax-based analyses of deverbal nominalizations are presented, and the classic lexicalist approach deriving from Chomsky’s 1970 Remarks on nominalization is defended. The modern approaches of Alexiadou (2001), Fu, Roeper and Borer (2001), Harley and Noyer (1998), which revive in various forms the sentential Generative Semantics analyses of event nominals, are each considered and rejected in turn. In such approaches, argument-structure nominals contain some amount of verbal structure as a proper subpart. Yet, all such nominals exhibit surface syntactic patterns that resemble exactly those of nonderived nominals. The absence of verb-phrase syntax within nominalizations is a fundamental generalization about such nominals, and is very problematic for analyses which propose such substructure.
5. On the homogeneity of syntax: How similar do coordinates and subordinates look to the comprehension system?
Authors: Cowart Wayne , Agupova Tatiana
Published: March 2014

Our goal here is to explore an unusual approach to the long-standing problem of coordination in natural language — the problem of accommodating subordinate and coordinate structures within a consistent and empirically sound syntax. In what follows we’ll offer a brief overview of the problem and identify a central assumption about the syntax of coordinates (the Homogeneity Thesis) that seems to be very widely shared by investigators working on coordination regardless of their theoretical orientation. We will then review some recent experimental results that seem to clash with certain implications of the Homogeneity Thesis. Though the evidence reviewed here is far from definitive, we argue that serious consideration of alternatives to the Homogeneity Thesis is in order.
8. Frequency effects in children's syntactic and morphological development
Authors: McKee Cecile , McDaniel Dana
Published: March 2014

We have long loved Langendoen (1970) — a paper on the theoretical justification of “transformations, their effects on the structure of sentences, and the conditions under which they are optional or obligatory” (p. 102). In that paper, Langendoen argued that acceptability and grammaticality are “partially independent [and] partially dependent notions” (p. 103). We are struck by the implications of this contrast for language learning. If the learner’s grammar is a set of probabilistic patterns and not (also or instead) a set of grammatical rules, one might expect high frequency elements to be ‘grammatical’ and low frequency elements to be ‘ungrammatical.’ In other words, grammaticality and acceptability should be similar if frequency is the determining factor. But Langendoen (1970) hypothesized that grammatical competence contributes to grammaticality while processing factors contribute to acceptability. Our research shows clearer effects of frequency on the latter than the on former and thus relates to Langendoen’s observation.

This chapter explores the role of frequency in children’s syntactic and morphophonological development. One study compares relative clauses involving different extraction sites, which constructions vary considerably in their frequency of occurrence. Children’s production of these relatives suggests that frequency affects sentence planning, but their judgments of the same relatives are out of synchrony with the frequency rates. The other study presented here concerns the a and an forms of the indefinite article, which distinction is acquired relatively late even though the forms occur frequently. These studies show that frequency cannot be the whole story. We conclude that children’s mastery of a system of rules proceeds — at least to some extent — independently of frequency patterns in the input.
13. Sherwin Cody's school of English
Authors: Battistella Edwin
Published: March 2014

In this chapter Sherwin Cody’s well-known correspondence course is analyzed within a historical context and according to the norms of the early part of the 20th century. Details of the course are summarized, and several notable examples are given concerning the prescriptive rules for pronunciation, practical grammar, and grammatical correctness. The course itself and aspects of the successful marketing campaign are discussed. Cody’s prescriptivist and descriptivist approaches are evaluated according to early 20th-century society; it is argued that Cody’s course was influenced by several, sometimes opposing, factors. The views of language experts of the day, including educators and linguists, are taken into account.
C-agreement or something close to it
Authors: Putnam Michael T. , van Koppen Marjo
Published: March 2014

In this paper we sketch out an account for an until now undiscussed phenomenon in generative syntax, namely the so-called “alls-construction” in Midwestern American English. In this construction, an s-ending is added to all under certain circumstances. We compare and contrast this construction with complementizer agreement in West Germanic. The alls-construction is similar to complementizer agreement in that the s-ending on all, just like the inflection on the complementizer in West Germanic, is sensitive to the agreement features on the embedded subject. Contrasted with complementizer agreement, however, the alls-construction does not allow inflectional morphology to appear on any other constituent than all. Furthermore, inflection on all is only possible when all is introducing an all-pseudo-cleft. We will mainly focus on the construction internal restrictions of the inflection on all. Based on Van Craenenbroeck & Van Koppen (2002), we assert that the alls-construction in Midwestern American English is in structure quite similar to complementizer agreement in West Germanic. We come back to the external restriction on the alls-construction in the final section, where we briefly discuss some issues concerning the pseudo-cleft status of the alls-construction.
Uncharted territory?
Authors: Zwart C. Jan-Wouter
Published: March 2014

This article discusses the consequences of a strictly derivational approach—where syntactic relations are construed dynamically as the derivation proceeds—to the analysis of key areas of Germanic syntax. It discusses the nature of syntactic positions from a non-cartographic point of view. Evidence supporting a non-cartographic approach is found in word order transitivity failures in various domains (the left periphery, the order of adverbs, the adjective-noun construction). The implications of a non-cartographic approach are discussed in four key areas of Germanic syntax (the fine structure of the left periphery, topicalization/focalization, subject placement and object placement).
Bootstrapping verb movement and the clausal architecture of German (and other languages)
Authors: Fanselow Gisbert
Published: March 2014

In the mainstream analysis of verb second clauses, the finite verb moves to Comp or one of the various heads present in the cartographic approach to CP. We show that such analyses are not satisfactory empirically, and cannot even be formulated within minimalist syntax. Verb movement – and head movement in general – should rather be analysed in terms of a ‘bootstrapping’ movement, in which the displaced head reprojects in its landing site.
The new impersonal as a true passive
Authors: Jónsson Jóhannes Gísli
Published: March 2014

This paper discusses a new impersonal construction in Icelandic. This construction has passive morphology but differs from canonical passives of transitive verbs in that the DP complement of the passive participle stays in situ and displays object properties. Contra Maling & Sigurjónsdóttir (2002), I argue that this is a true passive, not an active construction with a thematic null subject. As illustrated in the paper, there are some clear similarities between canonical passives and new impersonals that support a passive analysis of the latter construction but no clear differences to justify an active analysis.
Chapter 3. Movement and resumption in null possessor constructions in Brazilian Portuguese
Authors: Floripi Simone , Nunes Jairo
Published: March 2014

In this paper we examine null possessor constructions in Brazilian Portuguese, which display an anaphoric behavior in some contexts but a pronominal behavior in others. We show that in absence of islands separating a null possessor from its antecedent, null possessors display properties of obligatory control and, following Hornstein (2001), we analyze these instances of null possessors as traces of movement to θ-positions. Assuming with Hornstein (2001, 2007) that movement is derivationally more economical than pronominalization, we then argue that null possessors exhibit a pronominal behavior only when they sit in a position from which a licit A-movement operation cannot be launched.
Chapter 7. The comitative-copular basis of possessive-existential constructions in Brazilian Portuguese
Authors: Ornelas de Avelar Juanito
Published: March 2014

This paper shows that some properties of possessive and existential sentences in Brazilian Portuguese can be properly explained if the possessive-existential verb ter ‘have’ is derived by the combination of the features associated with estar ‘be’ and the features corresponding to the comitative preposition com ‘with’. I will concentrate on the following facts: (i) the thematic parallelism betweenter- and estar com-clauses in possessive and existential domains; (ii) the restrict interpretation of null possessors in ter-constructions; and (iii) the emergence of ter as an existential verb in Brazilian Portuguese, but not in European Portuguese.
Chapter 8. Topicalization of verbal projections in Brazilian Portuguese
Authors: Bastos-Gee Ana C.
Published: March 2014

In this paper, I examine verbal constituents in the left periphery in Brazilian Portuguese and argue that they should be analyzed as topics. I identify three types of topicalization of verbal projections depending on whether the derivation involves movement or base-generation and whether the movement involves a verb or a full vP. In addition to providing a semantic and pragmatic characterization of these three types, I also discuss why the constructions derived by movement surface with two copies of the verb phonetically realized with different inflections (an infinitival and a finite form).
Chapter 9. Preposition contraction and morphological sideward movement in Brazilian Portuguese
Authors: Nunes Jairo , Ximenes Cristina
Published: March 2014

In this paper we discuss data from Brazilian Portuguese which arguably involve one instance of a preposition in the syntactic component but end up surfacing with two instances, yielding what at first sight looks like PP coordination. We argue that the copying of the preposition takes place in the morphological component and is triggered by the Parallelism Requirement on coordinated structures. More specifically, we propose that if morphological merger affects a preposition and an adjacent determiner that is part of a coordinated structure, all conjuncts must undergo similar morphological merger. If the syntactic structure has only one preposition, the morphological component then copies the preposition and merges the copies with all the conjuncts so that the Parallelism Requirement can be satisfied.
The numeration in Survive-minimalism
Authors: Stroik Thomas
Published: March 2014

This paper argues that the computational system of Human Language requires a Numeration; however, the Numeration must be compiled throughout a syntactic derivation and not selected prior to the derivation. The consequence of having a derivationally built Numeration is that the Numeration becomes the domain for both the Merge and Remerge operations, thereby obviating the need for the Internal Merge operation. Furthermore, having a derivationally built Numeration makes it possible to design a crash-proof syntax along the lines developed in Stroik’s (2009) Survive-minimalism.
Musings on the left periphery in West Germanic
Authors: Chocano Gema
Published: March 2014

An analysis of German Left Dislocation is proposed which combines the findings in recent work on the construction with a theoretical model of syntactic derivation that dispenses with the existence of the EPP-feature. The findings at stake are basically those in Frey (2000, 2004a), where it is shown that the topical character of left-dislocated structures is the result of movement of the D-pronoun to a middle-field, and not a pre-field, topic projection. The theoretical model adopted is ‘Survive Minimalism’ (Stroik, 2009; Putnam, 2007; Putnam and Stroik, in progress). The core of the proposal is that ‘Merge’ of both the D-pronoun and the left-dislocated XP with C is triggered by the presence of a [+REF] feature on the three heads, as in Stroik’s (2009) account of English wh-constructions with a pair-list reading.
From local blocking to Cyclic Agree
Authors: Mathieu Eric
Published: March 2014

This paper shows that, rather than being necessary for argumenthood or referentiality, determiners in Old French were optional, but used in relation to discourse properties such as focus/emphasis on the one hand, and in relation to phonological/metric requirements on the other. The choice between the use of a bare noun and the use of a noun with a determiner was not free, but created a one-to-one mapping between form and function. This one-to-one mapping between form and function disappeared once the insertion of determiners became obligatory. It is shown that the compulsory insertion of determiners in modern French is connected to an alternation in the morphology of nominals and that it is driven by the operation Cyclic Agree.
A theory of expressive reading
Authors: Kuiken Don
Published: March 2014

Whether justified by the “affective fallacy” or the “death of the subject,” challenges to expressivist theories of literary reading have been persuasive. What seems lacking is theory that respects the fragility of felt meanings and the vitality found in their uncovering. Addressing this lack requires articulation of how feeling expression unfolds over time, has the character of disclosure, and simultaneously brings feelings and their intentional objects to presence. Without detracting from expressive disclosure, it is also critical to acknowledge the limits of expressibility – and that expressive reading gestures toward the mood of that which cannot be brought to presence.
Two levels of foregrounding in literary narratives
Authors: Shen Yeshayahu
Published: March 2014

Discourse analysts and linguists have used the term “foregrounding” to refer to “… new information, in contrast to elements in the sentence which form the background against which the new elements are to be understood …” (van Peer & Hakemulder (2005). These foregrounded / backgrounded elements are linguistically marked by various “foregrounding / backgrounding markers”, used conventionally in standard language use. A few literary examples are analyzed which make deviatory use of those “foregrounding / backgrounding markers” (e.g., by marking central events in the story by “backgrounding markers”), yielding a “higher order foregrounding effect”, which corresponds to the notion of foregrounding as used by literary theorists. In this article, the relation between these two notions and levels of “foregrounding” is discussed.
Narrative empathy and inter-group relations
Authors: László János , Smogyvary Ildiko
Published: March 2014

In this study we assumed that the relation between readers’ and characters’ group identity would influence narrative empathy and thereby the impact of a short story. We used three social psychological models (infrahumanization, mentalization and linguistic inter-group bias) to test our assumptions. Methodologically, we used a narrative recall paradigm based on the assumption that narrative recall carries also the experiential aspects of the text processing and thereby enables a fine grained analysis of meaning construction. We also measured liking of the story as an impact variable and the strength of national identification as a moderator variable. Results only partly supported our assumptions. Whereas empathy and liking are strongly correlated, Hungarian subjects overall did not feel more empathy with the characters of the Hungarian story version, did not like more this story, did not assign more secondary emotions to the Hungarian characters, and did not describe positive behavior of the Hungarian characters more abstractly then happened in the case of the “Slovak story” version.
Computationally Discriminating Literary from Non-Literary Texts
Authors: Louwerse Max M. , Benesh Nick , Zhang Bin
Published: March 2014

Three computational linguistic methods are presented to discriminate literary from non-literary texts. In the first study, a hierarchical clustering technique of results obtained from Latent Semantic Analysis showed a clustering of literary versus non-literary texts. The second study used the frequencies of shared bigrams across the text, resulting in a 100% correct classification of literary versus non-literary texts. The third study used unigrams yielding a 94% correct classification into literary versus non-literary texts. The final two studies using a larger sample of texts showed that the high classification performance cannot be attributed to specific texts. These findings provide evidence that distinguishing literature from non-literature can be done with high accuracy and with relatively simple computational linguistic techniques.
The laws governing the history of poetry
Authors: Martindale Colin
Published: March 2014

Poetry and the other arts by definition require the production of novel artifacts. Someone who merely copies a poem or plays a piece of music is not thought of as a poet or composer. Even if this were not the case, we habituate to the repetition of the same thing and want something new. The pressure for novelty may be a major consideration or a nuisance for poets, but it has exerted a constant pressure since poetry was first written whereas other pressures have come and gone. When we consider how novel ideas are produced, we see that the pressure for novelty dictates not only that poetry will change across time but that it will change in a very specific direction. A theory describing how entropy must increase in poetry and that sorts of contents and styles must be found in the history of any poetic tradition is described. A content analysis of samples of British poetry by 170 poets born between 1290 and 1949 is described. Support for all of the theoretical predictions was found.
The Apology of Popular Fiction: Everyday Uses of Literature in Poland
Authors: Maryl Maciej
Published: March 2014

Popular fiction is expelled from literary canons and is usually treated as a form of ludic or emotional relaxation and an escape from daily problems (Nell 1988; Radway 1984). Drawing on the results of my study on Polish readers, I claim that reading popular fiction, as an everyday-life activity, is much more than a simple leisurely activity, and plays a vital role in the way readers cope with their surrounding environment. Employing the framework of phenomenological sociology I argue that reading popular fiction can be described in terms of a rational action undertaken in order to achieve specific pragmatic goals, such as emotional tuning or search for subjectively important information.
On the Prosody/Lexicon Interface in Learning Word Order
Authors: Penner Zvi , Wymann Karin , Weissenborn Jürgen
Published: March 2014

Recent literature in developmental psycholinguistics has emphasized the role of prosodic bootstrapping in discovering syntactic constituents and word order regularities in early grammar.1 One of the puzzles this theoretical paradigm leaves open is the “perception (or comprehension) prior to production” maxim.2 In many cases a puzzling discrepancy between the child’s perceptive capacity and speech production is observed which goes beyond the well-known phenomenon of “truncated grammatical morphemes”. It is, for instance, by no means clear why children are capable of establishing trochees as a prosodic unit for the purpose of speech segmentation at the age of 7 months, but fail to establish the trochaic template until late in the second year at the level of production.3

The present paper addresses the problem of “perception prior to production”. It focuses on the relationship between access to prosodic information in the input for the purpose of discovering the rule of object placement in early German and the application of the same rule in speech production. A careful, computer-aided evaluation of the data from both normally developing and language impaired children reveals a surprising mismatching between the syntactic and the prosodic data. While all children target-consistently apply the OV rule of object placement at the syntactic level from early on, they all fail to apply the prosodic rule of relative prominence within the same phrases in speech production.

Assuming the Rhythmic Activation Principle of Nespor et al. (1996) and Guasti et al. (this volume), we will argue that this data reflect a genuine discrepancy between perception and production. We will claim that this discrepancy is not simply amenable to a performance-motivated lag, but rather follows in a predictable way from learnability constraints such as the “Avoid Irreversible Wrong Decisions” maxim.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 introduces the learning algorithm, focusing on the prosody/syntax mapping account of Nespor et al. (1996) and Guasti et al. (this volume). Section 2 is an analysis of the earliest object verb constructions in German. The data base consists of 7 corpora (3 normally developing children and 4 language impaired children). Section 3 proposes an account of the discrepancy between syntax and prosody in speech production in terms of learnability constraints.
The production of SE and SELF anaphors in Spanish and Dutch children
Authors: Baauw Sergio , Kuipers Marieke , Ruigendijk Esther , Cuetos Fernando
Published: March 2014

Both Dutch zich and Spanish se are considered Simple Expression or SE anaphors. The present study shows that, in spite of this classification, Spanish children perform much more adultlike on se than Dutch children do on zich. We argue that this developmental difference supports a different analysis of zich as a pronominal element, as opposed to se, which is best analyzed as a reflexive-marker.We also found that Spanish children perform highly non-adultlike on the complex anaphor sí mismo and other strong reflexives, unlike Dutch children who performed highly adultlike on zichzelf. We claimthat Spanish children’s difficulties with strong reflexives are for the most part the result of their limited ability to construct integrated discourses.
On the acquisition of ambiguous Valency-Marking Morphemes
Authors: Barrière Isabelle , Lorch Marjorie Perlman
Published: March 2014

A modified version of the Maturation Hypothesis that considers the maturation of chains, the impact of ambiguity on acquisition and the use of overt and systematic morphological cues by children is shown to account for the acquisition findings reported on English, Hebrew, Inuktitut, Kiche, Russian and Sesotho. The Barriere Version of the Maturation hypothesis enables us to predict: (a) the order of acquisition of different SE-constructions (including reflexive, reciprocal, anticausative and middle-passive), (b) the order of acquisition of SE and related (short and long) passive constructions and (c) the manifestations of the overgeneralization of argument structure alternation by French-speaking children. These predictions are born out by the analysis of speech production and experimental data collected on 200 children.
A cross-sectional study on the use of “be” in early Italian
Authors: Caprin Claudia , Guasti Maria Teresa
Published: March 2014

This work aims at studying the acquisition of copula and the auxiliary BE in Italian children. It will be shown that from the earliest stages the copula and the auxiliary BE are omitted at different rate, suggesting that children distinguish between the two grammatical categories. Moreover, on the basis of an analysis of ambiguous contexts (adjectival or verbal passives), it will be claimed that earliest passive are verbal and not adjectival passives. The data come from the spontaneous productions of 59 children (ranging in age from 22 to 35 months) involved in a cross-sectional study on language acquisition.