Volume 50, Issue 5

Studies have established that clitic doubling in various languages is sensitive to a number of semantic features of the doubled objects. In the same spirit, an open question has been what specific distributional properties characterize clitic doubling in Albanian. The only generalization emerging from this literature maintains that while clitic doubling is obligatory with dative objects, it is dependent on the focus/topichood status of the accusative objects, with topical accusative objects always clitic doubled and the focused ones non-clitic-doubled. This article provides two experiments, a grammaticality judgment and an elicitation production conducted, that are designed to provide empirical support for the above observations as well as investigate whether the absence of clitic doubling is sensitive to two different types of foci, i.e., rheme and kontrast, present in natural language. The results are in agreement with the observations in the literature. They also refine these observations in that no significant systematic relation is found between (non)clitic doubling and the two interpretative categories of rheme and kontrast. Additionally, these two notions are not found to differentially realize through the syntax of clitic doubling in Albanian.

This article delineates the internal structure of mensural classifiers in Mandarin Chinese by arguing that each mensural classifier in Mandarin Chinese contains a silent semantic primitive SCALE, which can be modified by a restricted set of gradable adjectives. Viewing this silent scalar element as a grammatical object explains away a set of puzzles in Chinese linguistics, including the restricted use of adjectives before mensural classifiers, the seemingly free distributional patterns of verbal measure phrases, and the number indeterminacy in the verb reduplication construction.

This article argues that the primary function of nominal classifiers which have a strong semantic basis is to mediate selectional restrictions. Nominal classifiers do part of the work usually done by selectional restrictions; selecting the relevant sense of the verb and narrowing down the range of possible arguments. In the Australian language Mawng (Iwaidjan, Australia), gender agreement in the verb provides good evidence for the role of nominal classification in mediating selectional restrictions. Mawng verb agreement distinguishes five genders and plays a key role in selecting the relevant sense of the verb. In fact, sometimes gender agreement does not match the gender of the corresponding argument but instead reflects the gender agreement usually found with the relevant verb sense. Typological work on nominal classification systems has focused on their morphosyntax and their reference tracking function. However, nominal classification systems with a strong semantic basis play an important role in constructing meaning by mediating the semantic interactions between verbs and nouns. Reference tracking is often portrayed as the primary function of nominal classification universally. However, in addition to tracking existing referents, nominal classification can be important in creating new referents and modifying existing referents.

This paper presents an off-line study consisting of five questionnaires in which we observed interpretational preferences for ambiguous intra-sentential pronouns in parallel structures in German and French. We tested the influence of information structural factors, in particular, we compared the effects of topicalizing versus focusing potential antecedents of the ambiguous pronoun. Results replicated a baseline difference between the two languages: a subject preference in German and an object preference in French (Hemforth et al. 2010). We argue that the object preference in French is due to the fact that speakers take into account an alternative nonambiguous construction. In addition, we found that in both languages, topicalization enhances, but focusing reduces the accessibility of antecedents for pronouns in the same sentence. This stands in contrast with previous results showing an equal accessibility of focused and topicalized referents for pronouns in subsequent sentences (Cowles et al. 2007). We explain this difference with the different function of focus within and across sentences.

Discontinuous noun phrases have posed a long-standing challenge for syntactic analysis. While there exists increasing evidence that discontinuous NPs are associated with specific information structure constellations crosslinguistically, Australian languages continue to be presented in the literature as radically non-configurational, with unlimited freedom of word order. We argue for Jaminjung, an Australian language of the Mirndi family, that once true NP discontinuity is carefully distinguished from other, superficially similar constructions, it is in fact highly constrained and can be described in terms of very specific information structure categories. The first of these, contrastive argument focus on an NP containing a given element, is widely attested crosslinguistically. The second, sentence focus, has only rarely been associated with noun phrase discontinuity in the literature. We show that the two types can be distinguished on prosodic grounds. Our account of both types challenges some previous analyses which rely on different information structure values for the parts of the discontinuous NP. The findings underscore the importance of taking into account prosodic information and discourse context in the syntactic analysis of spoken language.