Volume 60, Issue 6

Data presented by Sakayan (Sakayan, Dora. 1993. On Armenian relative participles and their access to AH (Accessibility Hierarchy). In André Crochetière, Jean-Claude Boulanger and Conrad Ouellon (eds.), Proceedings of the XVth International Congress of Linguists , Université Laval, 1992, vol. 2, 361–364. Sainte-Foy, Québec: Université Laval Press) show that Modern Eastern Armenian appears to violate the Relativization Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan, Edward and Bernard Comrie. 1977. Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 8. 63–99), as participial relative clauses may be used to relativize certain oblique and genitive elements, but apparently not indirect objects. Stimuli were constructed to elicit relative clauses on all positions in the hierarchy to investigate whether participial relativization violates the hierarchy and shed light on the factors affecting relativization accessibility phenomena. Two different manifestations of the Accessibility Hierarchy (AH) were investigated: the distribution of participial relative clauses (RCs), and ‘non-target’ responses, in which the relativized element is expressed with a grammatical relation other than that which is targeted by the stimulus. The results show that the hierarchies for these two manifestations are significantly different. If the AH effects were a mechanical reflex of syntactic structure, we would not expect to find these differences. In fact, it appears that different factors are dominant in each case, notably role-reference association for non-target responses, and role prominence in terms of topicality and affectedness for participial relativization. The fact that participles are not normally used for indirect object (IO), while they may be used for some obliques and genitives, makes sense when the AH effects are analyzed as the combined operation of a number of factors, rather than a mechanical reflex of syntactic structure, and indeed, in colloquial language, participles may be used for IO under some circumstances, for example when it is the undisputed primary topic. Thus there is good evidence that non-syntactic factors are key to the operation of the AH in its various manifestations, and can account for this supposed violation.

The processing of multi-word units and complex words has been one of the main issues of psycholinguistic research in the last decades. However, there is still no mutual consent on how multi-word units, complex words, and their internal constituents are accessed in language processing. Current models of linguistic theory and language processing generally assume that there is no interconnection between the morphosyntactic information of a lexical unit and its phonetic realization. Recent studies challenge this assumption and suggest a relationship between the morphosyntactic, lexical, and pragmatic information of specific lexemes or morphemes and the phonetic signal. The present study adds to these current studies in psycholinguistics and morphophonetics by investigating the French preposition de ‘of’ as a constituent in different construction types. While de occurs regularly as a free lexeme in syntactic structures, it also appears as a bound constituent in lexicalized and grammaticalized constructions. First, this study presents an analysis of French de in eye-tracking data from a reading task with French native speakers. Second, this study presents a statistical analysis of acoustic durations of de from an experimental reading task. The results suggest that the constituent de shows certain peculiarities in its processing and acoustic realization as a constituent in a certain construction type. The results are discussed with regard to current theoretical approaches to the processing of multi-word units, n-grams, and complex words.

The article investigates the hypothesis that prominence phenomena on different levels of linguistic structure are systematically related to each other. More specifically, it is hypothesized that prominence relations in morphosyntax reflect, and contribute to, prominence management in discourse. This hypothesis is empirically based on the phenomenon of agentivity clines, i.e. the observation that the relevance of agentivity features such as volition or sentience is variable across different constructions. While some constructions, including German DO-clefts, show a strong preference for highly agentive verbs, other constructions, including German basic active constructions, have no particular requirements regarding the agentivity of the verb, except that at least one agentivity feature should be present. Our hypothesis predicts that this variable relevance of agentivity features is related to the discourse constraints on the felicitous use of a given construction, which in turn, of course, requires an explicit statement of such constraints. We propose an original account of the discourse constraints on DO-clefts in German using the ‘Question Under Discussion’ framework. Here, we hypothesize that DO-clefts render prominent one implicit question from a set of alternative questions available at a particular point in the developing discourse. This then yields a prominent question-answer pair that changes the thematic structure of the discourse. We conclude with some observations on the possibility of relating morphosyntactic prominence (high agentivity) to discourse prominence (making a Question Under Discussion prominent by way of clefting).

Western Austronesian languages have typologically rare but theoretically important voice systems that raise many questions about their learnability. While these languages have been featured prominently in the descriptive and typological literature, data on acquisition is sparse. In the current paper, we report on a variationist analysis of Tagalog child-directed speech using a newly collected corpus of caregiver-child interaction. We determined the constraints that condition voice use, voice selection, argument position, and thematic role assignment, thus providing the first quantitative analysis of verb argument structure variation in the language. We also examined whether children are sensitive to the constraints on variability. Our analyses showed that, despite the diversity of structures that children have to learn under Tagalog’s voice system, there are unique factors that strongly predict the speakers’ choice between the voice and word order alternations, with children’s choices related to structure alternations being similar to what is available in their input. The results thus suggest that input distributions provide many cues to the acquisition of the Tagalog voice system, making it eminently learnable despite its apparent complexity.

This article explores the relationship between affectedness and Differential Object Marking (DOM) of indefinite direct objects in Turkish and Uzbek. We argue that the distribution of DOM in the two Turkic languages is determined by the direct objects’ specificity and animacy as nominal semantic properties, and affectedness as a verbal semantic property associated with the direct object. We provide original empirical evidence from two forced-choice studies that investigate DOM along the parameters of animacy, affectedness, and telicity, and their interaction with each other. Our findings indicate that affectedness shapes the distribution of DOM in both Turkish and Uzbek, with an interesting variation in how it is instantiated and interacts with animacy. The findings do not confirm an impact of telicity as an independent factor driving overt case marking in the languages investigated. Rather, its influence on DOM stems from interaction with affectedness.

The debate over the relation between grammatically relevant (specifically, what we term event referential ) and idiosyncratic aspects of verb meaning has produced a considerable literature. Some authors, such as Levin and Rappaport Hovav, have appealed to figurative uses of verbs as a source of data when the analysis of their literal uses has been controversial, a move that has sometimes been criticized. However, the question of whether figurative uses of verbs preserve the event referential properties of their literal counterparts and are therefore a valid source of data has not, to our knowledge, been systematically explored. We offer two detailed cross-linguistic case studies of Spanish and English verbs to provide an argument that figurative verb uses indeed are a reliable source of evidence for identifying event referential components of meaning: In each case study we find clear evidence for the preservation of these components across uses, indicating that these aspects of meaning both constrain and facilitate figurative uses of verbs.

When an English word ending in a stop is adapted to Korean, a vowel is variably inserted after the final stop. Vowel insertion in this position is surprising because voiceless stops are permissible in coda position in Korean and it is not motivated by Korean native phonology. This study examines five factors that have been hypothesized to affect the likelihood of vowel insertion, i.e., tenseness of the pre-final vowel, voicing and place of the English final stop, word size and final stress. These possibilities were tested using a corpus of Korean loanwords whose source word ends in a stop. Patterns of vowel insertion were classified as no vowel insertion, vowel insertion, or optional vowel insertion, and analyzed using multinomial regression modeling. The results confirmed that all the relevant factors significantly increased the likelihood of vowel insertion and optional vowel insertion patterns relative to no vowel insertion patterns compared with the reference condition rates. These findings suggest that particular features indeed impact production patterns in loanword phonology. My Results support the need for further research into how other possible auditory factors such as stop release may shape speech perception in loanword adaptation.