Responding to Negative Assertions in Germanic: on Yes and No in English, Dutch and Swedish1 Sophie REPP — University of Cologne A
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Definiteness Determined by Syntax: a Case Study in Tagalog 1 Introduction
Definiteness determined by syntax: A case study in Tagalog1 James N. Collins Abstract Using Tagalog as a case study, this paper provides an analysis of a cross-linguistically well attested phenomenon, namely, cases in which a bare NP’s syntactic position is linked to its interpretation as definite or indefinite. Previous approaches to this phenomenon, including analyses of Tagalog, appeal to specialized interpretational rules, such as Diesing’s Mapping Hypothesis. I argue that the patterns fall out of general compositional principles so long as type-shifting operators are available to the gram- matical system. I begin by weighing in a long-standing issue for the semantic analysis of Tagalog: the interpretational distinction between genitive and nominative transitive patients. I show that bare NP patients are interpreted as definites if marked with nominative case and as narrow scope indefinites if marked with genitive case. Bare NPs are understood as basically predicative; their quantificational force is determined by their syntactic position. If they are syntactically local to the selecting verb, they are existentially quantified by the verb itself. If they occupy a derived position, such as the subject position, they must type-shift in order to avoid a type-mismatch, generating a definite interpretation. Thus the paper develops a theory of how the position of an NP is linked to its interpretation, as well as providing a compositional treatment of NP-interpretation in a language which lacks definite articles but demonstrates other morphosyntactic strategies for signaling (in)definiteness. 1 Introduction Not every language signals definiteness via articles. Several languages (such as Russian, Kazakh, Korean etc.) lack articles altogether. -
Logophoricity in Finnish
Open Linguistics 2018; 4: 630–656 Research Article Elsi Kaiser* Effects of perspective-taking on pronominal reference to humans and animals: Logophoricity in Finnish https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2018-0031 Received December 19, 2017; accepted August 28, 2018 Abstract: This paper investigates the logophoric pronoun system of Finnish, with a focus on reference to animals, to further our understanding of the linguistic representation of non-human animals, how perspective-taking is signaled linguistically, and how this relates to features such as [+/-HUMAN]. In contexts where animals are grammatically [-HUMAN] but conceptualized as the perspectival center (whose thoughts, speech or mental state is being reported), can they be referred to with logophoric pronouns? Colloquial Finnish is claimed to have a logophoric pronoun which has the same form as the human-referring pronoun of standard Finnish, hän (she/he). This allows us to test whether a pronoun that may at first blush seem featurally specified to seek [+HUMAN] referents can be used for [-HUMAN] referents when they are logophoric. I used corpus data to compare the claim that hän is logophoric in both standard and colloquial Finnish vs. the claim that the two registers have different logophoric systems. I argue for a unified system where hän is logophoric in both registers, and moreover can be used for logophoric [-HUMAN] referents in both colloquial and standard Finnish. Thus, on its logophoric use, hän does not require its referent to be [+HUMAN]. Keywords: Finnish, logophoric pronouns, logophoricity, anti-logophoricity, animacy, non-human animals, perspective-taking, corpus 1 Introduction A key aspect of being human is our ability to think and reason about our own mental states as well as those of others, and to recognize that others’ perspectives, knowledge or mental states are distinct from our own, an ability known as Theory of Mind (term due to Premack & Woodruff 1978). -
AUTHOR a Longitudinal Study of the Language Development Of
DOCUMENT RESUME ED 247 706 EC 170 061 AUTHOR Mohay, Heather TITLE A Longitudinal Study of the Language Development of Three Deaf Children of Hearing Parents. PUB DATE , Jun 81 NOTE 26p.,.; Paper presented at a Seminar on Early Intervention or Young Hearing-Impaired Children (Mt. Gravatt., Queensland, Australia, June 15-16,-1981). For the proceedings, see EC 170 057. PUB TYPE Reports' = Research/Technical (143) EDRS PRICE MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS. *Hearing.Impairments; Infants; *Language Acquisition; Longitudinal Studies; *Manual Communication; Sign Language; Young Children (F ABSTRACT A longitudinal study followed the language acquisition'of three deaf infants. Analysis of videotapes recorded in the child's home during informal play was performed in terms of communicative gestures. Results revealed that Ss used a very limited number of hand configurations, locations for signs, and hand and arm, movements. Analysis of the gestures showed that there was a great deal of similarity in the components used by the three Ss, Ss presented consistent patterns in their gestures. Although the single gesture utterance was the most common communicative form, all Ss did combine gestures to form two-gesture utterances. Speech was infrequently used, and all Ss had larger gestural than spoken lexitons at 30 months. It was possible for elements in two gesture utterances and word/gesture combinations to be produced simultaneously. The content of the utterances indicated that they were able to express the same semantic relationships as hearing children at a similar stage of language development. (CL) 9 *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. -
Minimal Pronouns, Logophoricity and Long-Distance Reflexivisation in Avar
Minimal pronouns, logophoricity and long-distance reflexivisation in Avar* Pavel Rudnev Revised version; 28th January 2015 Abstract This paper discusses two morphologically related anaphoric pronouns inAvar (Avar-Andic, Nakh-Daghestanian) and proposes that one of them should be treated as a minimal pronoun that receives its interpretation from a λ-operator situated on a phasal head whereas the other is a logophoric pro- noun denoting the author of the reported event. Keywords: reflexivity, logophoricity, binding, syntax, semantics, Avar 1 Introduction This paper has two aims. One is to make a descriptive contribution to the crosslin- guistic study of long-distance anaphoric dependencies by presenting an overview of the properties of two kinds of reflexive pronoun in Avar, a Nakh-Daghestanian language spoken natively by about 700,000 people mostly living in the North East Caucasian republic of Daghestan in the Russian Federation. The other goal is to highlight the relevance of the newly introduced data from an understudied lan- guage to the theoretical debate on the nature of reflexivity, long-distance anaphora and logophoricity. The issue at the heart of this paper is the unusual character of theanaphoric system in Avar, which is tripartite. (1) is intended as just a preview with more *The present material was presented at the Utrecht workshop The World of Reflexives in August 2011. I am grateful to the workshop’s audience and participants for their questions and comments. I am indebted to Eric Reuland and an anonymous reviewer for providing valuable feedback on the first draft, as well as to Yakov Testelets for numerous discussions of anaphora-related issues inAvar spanning several years. -
Definiteness and Determinacy
Linguistics and Philosophy manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Definiteness and Determinacy Elizabeth Coppock · David Beaver the date of receipt and acceptance should be inserted later Abstract This paper distinguishes between definiteness and determinacy. Defi- niteness is seen as a morphological category which, in English, marks a (weak) uniqueness presupposition, while determinacy consists in denoting an individual. Definite descriptions are argued to be fundamentally predicative, presupposing uniqueness but not existence, and to acquire existential import through general type-shifting operations that apply not only to definites, but also indefinites and possessives. Through these shifts, argumental definite descriptions may become either determinate (and thus denote an individual) or indeterminate (functioning as an existential quantifier). The latter option is observed in examples like `Anna didn't give the only invited talk at the conference', which, on its indeterminate reading, implies that there is nothing in the extension of `only invited talk at the conference'. The paper also offers a resolution of the issue of whether posses- sives are inherently indefinite or definite, suggesting that, like indefinites, they do not mark definiteness lexically, but like definites, they typically yield determinate readings due to a general preference for the shifting operation that produces them. Keywords definiteness · descriptions · possessives · predicates · type-shifting We thank Dag Haug, Reinhard Muskens, Luca Crniˇc,Cleo Condoravdi, Lucas -
File Change Semantics and the Familiarity Theory of Definiteness Irene Heim
9 File Change Semantics and the Familiarity Theory of Definiteness Irene Heim 1 Introduction What is the difference in meaning between definite noun phrases and indefinite ones? Traditional grammarians, in particular Christophersen and Jespersen, worked on this question and came up with an answer that nowadays finds little favor with semanticists trained in twentieth century logic. It amounts to the following, in a nutshell: (1) A definite is used to refer to something that is already familiar at the current stage of the conversation. An indefinite is used to introduce a new referent. This has been labeled the ``familiarity theory of definiteness.'' 1 When confronted with (1), the logically minded semanticist will notice immediately that it presumes something very objectionable: that definites and indefinites are referring expressions. For only if there is a referent at all can there be any question of its familiarity or novelty. Advocates of (1) cannot happily admit that there are non- referring uses of definites or indefinites (or both), because that would be tantamount to admitting that their theory leaves the definite-indefinite-contrast in a significant subset of NP uses unaccounted for. But the existence of nonreferential uses of definite and indefinite NPs can hardly be denied, and I will take it for granted without repeating the familiar arguments. 2 Just think of examples like (2) and (3). (2) Every cat ate its food. (3) John didn't see a cat. (2) has a reading where ``its'', a personal pronoun, i.e. a type of definite NP, functions as a so-called ``bound variable pronoun'' and doesn't refer to any particular cat. -
Two-Word Utterances Chomsky's Influence
Two-Word Utterances When does language begin? In the middle 1960s, under the influence of Chomsky’s vision of linguistics, the first child language researchers assumed that language begins when words (or morphemes) are combined. (The reading by Halliday has some illustrative citations concerning this narrow focus on “structure.”) So our story begins with what is colloquially known as the “two-word stage.” The transition to 2-word utterances has been called “perhaps, the single most disputed issue in the study of language development” (Bloom, 1998). A few descriptive points: Typically children start to combine words when they are between 18 and 24 months of age. Around 30 months their utterances become more complex, as they add additional words and also affixes and other grammatical morphemes. These first word-combinations show a number of characteristics. First, they are systematically simpler than adult speech. For instance, function words are generally not used. Notice that the omission of inflections, such as -s, -ing, -ed, shows that the child is being systematic rather than copying. If they were simply imitating what they heard, there is no particular reason why these grammatical elements would be omitted. Conjunctions (and), articles (the, a), and prepositions (with) are omitted too. But is this because they require extra processing, which the child is not yet capable of? Or do they as yet convey nothing to the child—can she find no use for them? Second, as utterances become more complex and inflections are added, we find the famous “over-regularization”—which again shows, of course, that children are systematic, not simply copying what they here. -
The Utterance, and Otherbasic Units for Second Language Discourse Analysis
The Utterance, and OtherBasic Units for Second Language Discourse Analysis GRAHAM CROOKES University of Hawaii-Manoa Theselection ofa base unitisan importantdecision in theprocess ofdiscourse analysis. A number of different units form the bases of discourse analysis systems designed for dealing with structural characteristics ofsecondlanguage discourse. Thispaperreviews the moreprominentofsuch unitsand provides arguments infavourofthe selection ofone inparticular-the utterance. INTRODUCTION Discourse analysis has been an accepted part of the methodology of second language (SL) research for some time (see, for example, Chaudron 1988: 40-5; Hatch 1978; Hatch and Long 1980; Larsen-Freeman 1980), and its procedures are becoming increasingly familiar and even to some extent standardized. As is well-known, an important preliminary stage in the discourse analysis of speech is the identification of units relevant to the investigation within the body of text to be analysed, or the complete separation of the corpus into those basic units. In carrying out this stage of the analysis, the varying needs of second language discourse analysis have caused investigators to make use ofall of the traditional grammatical units of analysis (morpheme, word, clause, etc.), as well as other structural or interactional features of the discourse (for example, turns), in addition to a variety of other units defined in terms of their functions (for example, moves). These units have formed the bases of a number of different analytic systems, which canmainly beclassified as either structural orfunctional (Chaudron 1988), developed to address differing research objectives. In carrying out structural discourse analyses of oral text, researchers have been confronted with the fact that most grammars are based on a unit that is not defined for speech, but is based on the written mode of language-that is, the sentence. -
Stochastic Language Generation in Dialogue Using Factored Language Models
Stochastic Language Generation in Dialogue Using Factored Language Models Franc¸ois Mairesse∗ University of Cambridge ∗∗ Steve Young University of Cambridge Most previous work on trainable language generation has focused on two paradigms: (a) using a statistical model to rank a set of pre-generated utterances, or (b) using statistics to determine the generation decisions of an existing generator. Both approaches rely on the existence of a hand- crafted generation component, which is likely to limit their scalability to new domains. The first contribution of this article is to present BAGEL, a fully data-driven generation method that treats the language generation task as a search for the most likely sequence of semantic concepts and realization phrases, according to Factored Language Models (FLMs). As domain utterances are not readily available for most natural language generation tasks, a large creative effort is required to produce the data necessary to represent human linguistic variation for nontrivial domains. This article is based on the assumption that learning to produce paraphrases can be facilitated by collecting data from a large sample of untrained annotators using crowdsourcing—rather than a few domain experts—by relying on a coarse meaning representation. A second contribution of this article is to use crowdsourced data to show how dialogue naturalness can be improved by learning to vary the output utterances generated for a given semantic input. Two data- driven methods for generating paraphrases in dialogue are presented: (a) by sampling from the n-best list of realizations produced by BAGEL’s FLM reranker; and (b) by learning a structured perceptron predicting whether candidate realizations are valid paraphrases. -
30. Tense Aspect Mood 615
30. Tense Aspect Mood 615 Richards, Ivor Armstrong 1936 The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rockwell, Patricia 2007 Vocal features of conversational sarcasm: A comparison of methods. Journal of Psycho- linguistic Research 36: 361−369. Rosenblum, Doron 5. March 2004 Smart he is not. http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/smart-he-is-not- 1.115908. Searle, John 1979 Expression and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seddiq, Mirriam N. A. Why I don’t want to talk to you. http://notguiltynoway.com/2004/09/why-i-dont-want- to-talk-to-you.html. Singh, Onkar 17. December 2002 Parliament attack convicts fight in court. http://www.rediff.com/news/ 2002/dec/17parl2.htm [Accessed 24 July 2013]. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson 1986/1995 Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Voegele, Jason N. A. http://www.jvoegele.com/literarysf/cyberpunk.html Voyer, Daniel and Cheryl Techentin 2010 Subjective acoustic features of sarcasm: Lower, slower, and more. Metaphor and Symbol 25: 1−16. Ward, Gregory 1983 A pragmatic analysis of epitomization. Papers in Linguistics 17: 145−161. Ward, Gregory and Betty J. Birner 2006 Information structure. In: B. Aarts and A. McMahon (eds.), Handbook of English Lin- guistics, 291−317. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Rachel Giora, Tel Aviv, (Israel) 30. Tense Aspect Mood 1. Introduction 2. Metaphor: EVENTS ARE (PHYSICAL) OBJECTS 3. Polysemy, construal, profiling, and coercion 4. Interactions of tense, aspect, and mood 5. Conclusion 6. References 1. Introduction In the framework of cognitive linguistics we approach the grammatical categories of tense, aspect, and mood from the perspective of general cognitive strategies. -
Minimal Pronouns1
1 Minimal Pronouns1 Fake Indexicals as Windows into the Properties of Bound Variable Pronouns Angelika Kratzer University of Massachusetts at Amherst June 2006 Abstract The paper challenges the widely accepted belief that the relation between a bound variable pronoun and its antecedent is not necessarily submitted to locality constraints. It argues that the locality constraints for bound variable pronouns that are not explicitly marked as such are often hard to detect because of (a) alternative strategies that produce the illusion of true bound variable interpretations and (b) language specific spell-out noise that obscures the presence of agreement chains. To identify and control for those interfering factors, the paper focuses on ‘fake indexicals’, 1st or 2nd person pronouns with bound variable interpretations. Following up on Kratzer (1998), I argue that (non-logophoric) fake indexicals are born with an incomplete set of features and acquire the remaining features via chains of local agreement relations established in the syntax. If fake indexicals are born with an incomplete set of features, we need a principled account of what those features are. The paper derives such an account from a semantic theory of pronominal features that is in line with contemporary typological work on possible pronominal paradigms. Keywords: agreement, bound variable pronouns, fake indexicals, meaning of pronominal features, pronominal ambiguity, typologogy of pronouns. 1 . I received much appreciated feedback from audiences in Paris (CSSP, September 2005), at UC Santa Cruz (November 2005), the University of Saarbrücken (workshop on DPs and QPs, December 2005), the University of Tokyo (SALT XIII, March 2006), and the University of Tromsø (workshop on decomposition, May 2006). -
Annotation of Utterances for Conversational Nonverbal Behaviors
Annotation of Utterances for Conversational Nonverbal Behaviors Allison Funkhouser CMU-RI-TR-16-25 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Science in Robotics May 2016 Masters Committee: Reid Simmons, Chair Illah Nourbakhsh Heather Knight Abstract Nonverbal behaviors play an important role in communication for both humans and social robots. However, hiring trained roboticists and animators to individually animate every possible piece of dialogue is time consuming and does not scale well. This has motivated previous researchers to develop automated systems for inserting appropriate nonverbal behaviors into utterances based only on the text of the dialogue. Yet this automated strategy also has drawbacks, because there is basic semantic information that humans can easily identify that is not yet accurately captured by a purely automated system. Identifying the dominant emotion of a sentence, locating words that should be emphasized by beat gestures, and inferring the next speaker in a turn-taking scenario are all examples of data that would be useful when animating an utterance but which are difficult to determine automatically. This work proposes a middle ground between hand-tuned animation and a purely text-based system. Instead, untrained human workers label relevant semantic information for an utterance. These labeled sentences are then used by an automated system to produce fully animated dialogue. In this way, the relevant human-identifiable context of a scenario is preserved without requiring workers to have deep expertise of the intricacies of nonverbal behavior. Because the semantic information is independent of the robotic platform, workers are also not required to have access to a simulation or physical robot.