Volume 55, Issue 6 -

This paper claims that crosslinguistic tendencies of number marking asymmetries can be explained with reference to usage frequency: The kinds of nouns which, across languages, tend to show singulative coding (with special marking of the uniplex member of a pair), rather than the more usual plurative coding (with special marking of the multiplex member), are also the kinds of nouns which tend to occur more frequently in multiplex use. We provide crosslinguistic coding evidence from a range of languages from different families and areas, and crosslinguistic corpus evidence from five languages, using large written corpora. Thus, the crosslinguistic pattern of singulative vs. plurative coding is a special instance of the tendency to devote more marking to rarer forms, and can be explained by the grammatical form-frequency correspondence principle.

This paper describes the morphosyntactic behavior of different semantic types of property words in a balanced sample of 36 Oceanic languages. After a brief general introduction to the functional typology of property words, I first discuss diversity in Oceanic property word classes from a family-internal perspective. In the second part of the paper, Oceanic property words are placed in a world-wide typological perspective. Specifically, I test their behavior with regard to two implicational universals proposed in the literature, concerning the relation between the encoding of predicative property words, the presence of grammatical tense, and locus of marking at the clause level. In typological studies, the Oceanic language family has been claimed to display verbal predicative property words, to lack tense, and to be head- or zero-marking, with marginal exceptions. This paper shows that, even though such an overall profile can be discerned, Oceanic property words exhibit more variation than is acknowledged in crosslinguistic research. Moreover, my findings for property word classes are fitted into a larger picture of lexical categorization in Oceanic languages.

The paper discusses hedges such as that I know of in The train is not late, that I know of , which form a hitherto undocumented polarity sensitive construction that can be found in a number of European languages. Internally, they resist negation, in ways reminiscent of parenthetical as -clauses, and other parenthetical constructions. On the basis of a small corpus of English and Dutch occurrences of the hedge construction, I outline the distributional properties and internal structure. A number of restrictions are uncovered regarding the subject of the hedge clause (in particular: universally quantified and indefinite subjects are ruled out, second person subjects are limited to questions), which point to a strong pragmatic effect of point of view, but still require further study. The polarity sensitive status of the hedge is derived from the interaction of strong verbs ( know, be aware of , etc.) and the pragmatic requirement of hedges that they tone down a statement. Together, these require that the hedge be within the scope of negation.

The present paper deals with the description and characterization of the melodic patterns of absolute interrogative utterances in northern German spontaneous speech from an intonation and semantic-pragmatic point of view. This research has been carried out based on 246 absolute questions from spontaneous speech settings by multiple speakers of different gender, age, and education by applying the Melodic Analysis of Speech (MAS) method developed by Cantero (2002, Teoría y análisis de la entonación . Barcelona: Ediciones de la Universidad de Barcelona.). As a result, we found five intonation patterns for absolute questions in German: falling final inflection, rising final inflection, rising-falling final inflection, high nucleus final inflection and rising body and final inflection . The first three have been previously defined by researchers using the ToBI method, while the fourth and fifth patterns had not, to date, been described in this context. In addition to defining the melodic features of each one in spontaneous speech, we have also contributed to providing the different pragmatic meanings discovered in the various contexts in which each pattern appears.

The initial hypothesis examined in this paper is that Hungarian preschoolers assign to sentences containing two numerical quantifiers and a distributivity marker the same isomorphic distributive interpretation as Hungarian adults do. This hypothesis is partially refuted by Experiment 1, a truth value judgement task, and Experiment 2, a forced choice task, which show that children can access distributive readings, however, they tend to accept both isomorphic and inverse scope. Experiment 3, an act-out task, demonstrates that if there are no strong pragmatic cues to enforce a distributive interpretation, children’s primary interpretation is the collective reading. This leads us to the formulation of a new hypothesis: if the default reading of a doubly quantified sentence for preschoolers is the collective interpretation, in line with scope economy, then a distributive reading always represents the revision of the collective interpretation. This is confirmed by Experiment 4, showing that inverse answers have an increased reaction time. The new hypothesis can explain the lack of isomorphism in children’s interpretation of distributive scope as follows: since the distributive reading is dissociated from the linear flow of speech, the linear order of the two quantifiers does not necessarily determine scope order; children can base relative scope on the hierarchy of grammatical functions, on pragmatic cues, etc.

Comprehension of transitive sentences relies on different kinds of information, like word order, case marking, and animacy contrasts between arguments. When no formal cues like case marking or number congruency are available, a contrast in animacy helps the parser to decide which argument is the grammatical subject and which the object. Processing costs are enhanced when neither formal cues nor animacy contrasts are available in a transitive sentence. We present an ERP study on the comprehension of grammatical transitive German sentences, manipulating animacy contrasts between subjects and objects as well as the verbal case marking pattern. Our study shows strong object animacy effects even in the absence of violations, and in addition suggests that this effect of object animacy is modulated by the verbal case marking pattern.