Volume 61, Issue 1

Indonesian has two noun-forming prefixes, PE- and PEN- , that often stand in a paradigmatic relation to verbal base words with the prefixes BER- and MEN- . The central question addressed in the present study is whether the form similarities between PEN- and MEN- make PEN- easier to learn compared to PE- . To address this question, we made use of a computational model, the ‘discriminative lexicon’ (DL) model. We trained this model on 2,517 word forms that were inflected or derived variants of 99 different base words. Of these word forms, 109 were nouns with PE- and 221 words were nouns with PEN- . Both the production and the comprehension networks of the model performed with high accuracy for both prefixes. However, the model was able to provide more precise predictions for PE- as compared to PEN- , implying that PE- should have a processing advantage compared to PEN- . There are two reasons for why PE- is learned more robustly than PEN- . First, PE- words tend to be longer and hence have more discriminative triphones. Second, due to cue competition with MEN- , the prefixal triphones of PEN- are less effective cues than those of PE- . A measure of functional load is proposed that helps clarify the relative importance of the triphones in the prefixes and those straddling the boundary between prefix and stem. Our results shed further light on the productivity paradox, role of junctural phonotactics, and (dis)functionality of affix substitution.

In different languages around the world, morphemes representing the (cooked form of) staple food or food in general tend to begin with a [+labial] phoneme followed by a [+low] phoneme (/pa-/, /ma-/, /fa-/, /wa-/, etc.). This article provides evidence for this phonological similarity by analyzing 66 sample languages’ morphemes representing the staple food within the society where each language is spoken. About a fourth of the morphemes referring to staple food begin with a [+labial] first phoneme followed by a [+low] second phoneme, which is a much higher proportion compared to another list of basic morphemes in the same 66 languages. I further argue that the motivation for this crosslinguistic tendency is the iconic association between the mouth-opening gesture and the concept of eating.

This article intends to provide insight into how speakers of English, Mandarin, and Serbian perceive spatio-temporal relations expressed by specific pairs of adverbials. In two studies participants were presented with simple sentences describing the metaphorical movement of events on the timeline (e.g., “The meeting was moved from the morning to the afternoon.”) and were asked to decide whether the event had been moved along the sagittal, vertical or transverse axis (forward/backward, up/down, left/right). The main aim of the first study, which was conducted with 104 native speakers of Serbian, was to explore the effects of axis-orientation and individual time units on participants’ preferences and response times. The target time units used were dates, hours, months, days of the week, and years. The results showed significant differences in response times between the transverse and sagittal axis conditions on the one hand (with shorter reaction times), and the vertical axis condition on the other. Moreover, the distribution of answers showed a high degree of inconsistency when it came to moving events to a previous point in time. The main aim of the second study was to identify potential differences in responses and response times to different orientations and time units between four experimental groups: native speakers of English with no second language, native speakers of English with knowledge of a second language, native speakers of Mandarin (with English as a second language), and native speakers of Serbian (also with English as a second language). The study was conducted with 126 participants. The design of the second study was largely parallel to that of the first, but it involved three trials and different time units (parts of the day, days of the week and months). The Mandarin speakers gave the quickest responses in the first two trials when deciding on the vertical axis. Moreover, reaction times were significantly shorter in the parts-of-the-day condition (e.g., “morning”, “afternoon”), across the three trials. In addition, Mandarin speakers showed an inverted trend in responses on the sagittal axis compared to the remaining three groups. While some of our results corroborate previous research on the topic, the study also provides novel empirical evidence on how Serbian speakers conceptualize time using spatial terms.

There is little consensus as to whether the use of implicit causal biases is driven exclusively by verb semantics or mediated by an interaction of verb semantics and other information sources. We tested whether the topic status of a subject modulates Korean speakers’ referential choices and processing in the interpretation of implicit consequentiality information. Results from two sentence-completion tasks (Experiment 1) showed more subject reference in participants’ continuations when the preceding subject was marked by the topic rather than the nominative marker, regardless of the directionality of the implicit consequentiality bias. In a self-paced reading task (Experiment 2), Korean speakers spent shorter reading times when the referent in the consequence clause was resolved as referring to the previous subject than when it referred to the previous object, although only in the topic-marked condition and not in the nominative-marked condition. Our results suggest that the implicit consequentiality effect remains consistent regardless of the subject’s topic status in the offline tasks, but the effect interacts with the topicality effect in real-time sentence processing. We discuss the implications of our findings for assumptions concerning the underlying mechanisms of referential resolution in discourse including causal bias verbs.

By analyzing an understudied type of comparative, namely, subcomparatives with surface-phrasal standards of comparison, this article offers an answer to three long-debated questions regarding the internal structure and semantic composition of comparative constructions in opposition to traditional assumptions and reductionist analyses. First I offer syntactic tests evidencing the non-clausal status of the standard in these subcomparatives in Basque, Spanish and English. Second, regarding the question of the linkage type between the compared elements (either a dependence relation or a coordination relation), I present previous and novel syntactic evidence showing that phrasal subcomparatives invariably behave like common phrasal coordinates. Therefore, I defend an architecture of these comparatives involving a phrasal coordinate structure and offer a transparent mapping between the surface syntax and semantic interpretation of these constructions. Third, subcomparatives involve the obligatory omission of a measure modifier from the standard. This process known as comparative subdeletion cannot be explained as the result of wh -movement within a clause, given the non-clausal status of the standard. Alternatively, comparative subdeletion is defined not as an ad hoc deletion rule but rather as the result of an obligatory deletion operation independently attested in common coordinate structures.

Although often used as diagnostic tools in discourse studies, irregular wh -questions in English, which take the form of what/how about … ? and what/how if … ? , have not received sufficient attention in terms of their semantic and syntactic properties. This article investigates irregular wh -questions from semantic and syntactic perspectives. Semantically, there is a topic-comment relationship between the wh- word and the rest of the sentence. Syntactically, an irregular wh -question neither displays an explicit matrix subject-predicate structure nor involves a fronted auxiliary. This article pursues three objectives. First, a descriptive overview of irregular wh -questions is provided, which shows that the complement of about in irregular wh -questions can belong to various syntactic categories. Second, the topic-comment structure of irregular wh -questions is compared with that of the topic-comment structure in declarative sentences, which reveals some semantic properties of irregular wh -questions. Third, a formal account of irregular wh -questions is formulated in the framework of Dynamic Syntax, which captures the interaction of the semantic and syntactic properties of the components of an irregular wh -question. Additionally, the present dynamic account of irregular wh -questions is contrasted with an existing dynamic account of the hanging topic construction in English, which highlights some merits of the current account.

North American languages have figured prominently in discussions about parts of speech. This paper examines more closely the evidence for morphological parts of speech in one Northern Iroquoian language, Oneida, and asks what semantic properties underlie its parts of speech. We make two claims. First, inflected parts of speech in Oneida are semantically transparent in that a part of speech can be determined solely on the basis of well-established semantic distinctions. Oneida parts of speech are, in this respect, canonical, in Canonical Typology’s sense. Second, Oneida morphological parts of speech are organized along two orthogonal dimensions, an ontological dimension, i.e., the sort of entity that members of the category describe, and a semantic type dimension, i.e., the kind of semantic relation conveyed by members of the category. We show that Oneida inflection is sometimes sensitive to distinctions along the ontological semantic dimension, sometimes to distinctions along the semantic type dimension, and sometimes a single inflectional process is sensitive to distinctions along both dimensions at the same time. We then show that our bi-dimensional semantic classification of stems accounts for the mixed properties of kinship terms, i.e., which “noun”-like and which “verb”-like properties they have.

We analyze two constructions expressing the negation of a causal relation in contemporary European Portuguese, nem por isso (lit. ‘not for this [reason]’) and não porque…mas porque (‘not because…but rather because’). We propose that the PA/SN distinction, established for adversative connectives (e.g., Spanish pero and German aber as PA, Spanish sino and German sondern as SN), can be extended to the domain of causality and provides insight on the properties of these two causal constructions. We show that their sensitivity to different types of conversational implicature as well as their interaction with negation are reminiscent of the distinction between restrictive and exclusive adversatives. Our investigation, which is the first semantic-pragmatic analysis of negated causality in European Portuguese, allows us to formulate historical predictions concerning the relation between types of negated causality and the possible development of adversative markers. Our findings provide synchronic evidence for a diachronic semantic path from negated causality to adversative meaning that has been posited for several Romance languages (e.g., Italian però , Spanish pero ). Specifically, using contemporary corpus data, we show that the properties of nem por isso provide insight into the bridging contexts for semantic change from causal to adversative meanings. In addition, we identify a type of negated causality that fits within strategies of corrective contrast not exclusive to the domain of causal relations.

The crosslinguistic investigation of child language has revealed the frequent co-occurrence of certain values of Aktionsart, aspect and tense. Specifically, dynamic-atelic predicates are likely to be observed with unbounded values of aspect in the non-past tense and dynamic-telic predicates with bounded aspect and past tense morphology. This observation has motivated theories of language acquisition that incorporate the semantic structure of predicates in relation to clause structure. Pier Marco Bertinetto and colleagues have claimed that inferences regarding the role of predicate structure in the acquisition process have been erroneously derived from “lumping” together stative and activity predicates. Furthermore, without acknowledging the prior theory of “typological bootstrapping”, they present their presumably unique theory of information processing to explain their Italian and German child language data. The purpose of this reply is to show that the stative-activity “lumping” assertion is a “straw man” argument, and a theory of morphological information processing is both well-known and compatible with semantically based theories of acquisition.