Volume 54, Issue 6 -

Pronoun interpretation in English has been demonstrated to be sensitive to an interaction between grammatical and pragmatically driven factors. This study investigated the interpretation of pronouns in Japanese, which has both null and overt forms. Thirty-two native speakers of Japanese per experiment participated in passage completion studies with transfer-of-possession contexts (Experiment 1) or implicit causality contexts (Experiment 2), varying prompt type, aspect, and topic/nominative-marking of the previous subject. Two judges annotated reference and coherence relations in the completed passages. Japanese overt pronouns were revealed to pattern closely with English overt pronouns in their sensitivity to pragmatic factors, whereas null pronouns showed a mixed resilience to pragmatic factors. Topic-marking only showed marginal effects on reference in limited contexts. Despite different degrees of sensitivity to pragmatic factors, Japanese null and overt pronouns were both mostly subject-biased, casting doubt on the existence of a division of labor between the two forms. There was also an intrinsic link between reference and coherence relations throughout the experiments. We discuss the overall results in terms of language specificity and universality, the latter of which includes interactions between grammatical and pragmatic factors and the importance of discourse coherence in the interpretation of various pronouns across languages.

Bilingual speakers store cognates from related languages close together in their mental lexicon. In the case of minority languages, words from the dominant language often exert influence on their cognates in the minority language. In this article, we present a model describing that influence or force of attraction as a function of frequency and of (dis)similarity (representational distance). More specifically, it is claimed that the strength of the force of attraction of one word upon another is (among others) a function of their frequencies divided by their formal dissimilarity. The model is applied to the distribution of nouns derived from adjectives in Frisian, where the suffix -ens competes with -heid. Of these two suffixes, Frisian -heid is similar to Dutch -heid, whereas Frisian -ens does not have a similar counterpart in Dutch. The model predicts that Frisian derived nouns of which the adjectival bases are similar in form and meaning to Dutch will occur more often with -heid and less often with -ens. It also predicts that this effect will be stronger as the words involved are more frequent. Our findings make it possible to verify the model’s quantification of the influence of Dutch words on their cognates.

Gibson and Fedorenko (2013, The need for quantitative methods in syntax and semantics research, Language and Cognitive Processes 28(2), 88–124) have argued against the continued use of informally collected acceptability judgments as the primary methodology in theoretical syntax and semantics research. We provide further support for their position with data from Mandarin and Turkish-language judgment tasks which examined the acceptability of resumptive pronouns (RPs) in relative clauses. Based on previous studies which relied on informal judgments, we expected that RPs should be permitted in certain types of Mandarin relative clauses, but ungrammatical in comparable Turkish relative clauses. The results failed to replicate this contrast: RPs were more acceptable than expected in Turkish, and less acceptable than expected in Mandarin. Furthermore, the Mandarin Chinese experiment showed an unexpected gradient effect. We argue that these results challenge existing theoretical accounts, support the more widespread adoption of experimental tasks in theoretical linguistics and in second-language research, and consistently support the Filler-Gap Domain complexity ranking as proposed by Hawkins (2004, Efficiency and complexity in grammars , Oxford: Oxford University Press). We use the complexity ranking and its supporting evidence as a case study demonstrating that quantitative data, such as the evidence obtained from formal sentence judgment tasks, are indispensable in the defense or criticism of linguistic theories.

Code-blends in sign languages consist of simultaneously articulated manual signs and spoken language words. These “mouthings” (typically silent articulations) have been observed for many different sign languages. The present study aims to investigate the extent of such bimodal code-mixing in sign languages by investigating the frequency of mouthings produced by deaf users of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT), their co-occurrence with pointing signs, and whether any differences can be explained by sociolinguistic variables such as regional origin and age of the signer. We investigated over 10,000 mouth actions from 70 signers, and found that the mouth and the hands are equally active during signing. Moreover, around 80 % of all mouth actions are mouthings, while the remaining 20 % are unrelated to Dutch. We found frequency differences between individual signers and a small effect for level of education, but not for other sociolinguistic variables. Our results provide genuine evidence that mouthings form an inextricable component of signed interaction. Rather than displaying effects of competition between languages or spoken language suppression, NGT signers demonstrate the potential of the visual modality to conjoin parallel information streams.

This paper provides an analysis of transparent gerunds in Spanish, as in ¿Qué llegó [silbando qué ] Juan? ‘What arrived [whistling what ] Juan?’, using a decomposition of Aktionsart in a series of syntactic heads. A traditional analysis of these secondary predicates as adjuncts would undermine well-established syntactic principles restricting movement and extraction. We argue that these transparent gerunds should be analyzed as syntactic constituents merged as part of the syntactic projections associated with Aktionsart. More precisely, they qualify as RhemePs – assuming Ramchand’s First Phase Syntax system – thus allowing their arguments to be extracted. Well-attested differences between Spanish and English gerunds will be explained in our analysis by proposing that the Spanish gerund projects as PathP (given it carries a path preposition), whereas English gerunds are simply RhemeP (lacking any sort of preposition).

It is widely acknowledged that polarity sensitivity pertains to the lexical nature of NPI minimizers, phrases denoting a minimal quantity, extent or degree. This paper, however, proposes that so-called “negative polarity” of Mandarin Chinese minimizers ( yi -CL-N ‘one.CL+N’ and yidian -N ‘one.point N’) is not lexically determined, but is facilitated by utilizing the existing lian... dou ‘including... all’ EVEN construction. Specifically, total negation is decomposed into a scalar operator lian , which evokes a set of order ranked alternatives determined in context, and the maximizing/universal operator dou ‘all’ that quantifies over the contextual alternatives plus the focused minimizer, which is placed at the end of the scale. The scalar minimizer syntactically scopes over the negation to represent the logic of ∀¬. This paper further distinguishes minimizers from lexical NPI renhe ‘any’ with respect to (i) scoping out of the negation for the former, (ii) being irrelevant to the non-veridical licensing conditions that otherwise license any and NPI- renhe , (iii) a clausemate relation between dou and negation, and (iv) the lack of intervention effects of strong quantifiers between the minimizers and negation. The study lends further support to the claim that scalar EVEN is construed with minimizers. A comparison of Chinese minimizers with those in Hindi and Japanese has an implication for varieties of coding polarity ranging from purely lexical to syntactical means crosslinguistically.

Yiddish is a Germanic Jewish language that is natively spoken by adults and children in segregated Hasidic communities around the world. The current study investigates the system of noun plurals as spoken by Hasidic adults living in Antwerp, Belgium. In the absence of evidence-based detailed grammatical descriptions of Antwerp Hasidic Yiddish, the aims of this study were (a) to arrive at a description of the plural system and (b) to detect if phonological regularities govern the selection of plural suffixation and stem change. An experimental pluralization task containing 87 singular nouns was administered to 100 Yiddish-speaking adults. Findings show that the system of noun plurals in Antwerp Hasidic Yiddish consists of plural markers that do not exist in Standard Yiddish (e. g. bikh-bíkhers ‘book-s’), combinations of existing markers ( lip-lípenes ‘lip-s’) and loans from Dutch ( ay-áyeren ‘egg-s’) – the ambient language. Nevertheless, suffixes that already exist in Standard Yiddish occur in a higher frequency than those that are specific to Antwerp. In order to investigate which phonological regularities govern the selection of plural suffix and stem change several factors in the inflected singular form were taken into account. Our results reveal an intricate system of some strong phonological regularities, islands of subregularities and exceptions that appear to be lexically determined.