1. Placement and ordering of the (en)cliticsFranc Marušič, Petra Mišmaš, Rok Žaucer, 2024, independent scientific component part or a chapter in a monograph Keywords: clitics, enclitics, Slavic, syntax, Slovenian, Slovak, Czech, Bulgarian, Macedonian, BCMS, Polish, clitic cluster, stress Published in RUNG: 31.05.2024; Views: 235; Downloads: 1 Link to file This document has many files! More... |
2. Sentence comprehension test for Russian : a tool to assess syntactic competenceDaria Chernova, Artem Novozhilov, Natalia Slioussar, 2023, review article Abstract: Although all healthy adults have advanced syntactic processing abilities in their native language, psycholinguistic studies report extensive variation among them. However, very few tests were developed to assess this variation, presumably, because when adult native speakers focus on syntactic processing, not being distracted by other tasks, they usually reach ceiling performance. We developed a Sentence Comprehension Test for the Russian language aimed to fill this gap. The test captures variation among participants and does not show ceiling effects. The Sentence Comprehension Test includes 60 unambiguous grammatically complex sentences and 40 control sentences that are of the same length, but are syntactically simpler. Every sentence is accompanied by a comprehension question targeting potential syntactic processing problems and interpretation errors associated with them. Grammatically complex sentences were selected on the basis of the previous literature and then tested in a pilot study. As a result, six constructions that trigger the largest number of errors were identified. For these constructions, we also analyzed which ones are associated with the longest word-by-word reading times, question answering times and the highest error rates. These differences point to different sources of syntactic processing difficulties and can be relied upon in subsequent studies. We conducted two experiments to validate the final version of the test. Getting similar results in two independent experiments, as well as in two presentation modes (reading and listening modes are compared in Experiment 2) confirms its reliability. In Experiment 1, we also showed that the results of the test correlate with the scores in the verbal working memory span test. Keywords: syntax, comprehension, Russian language, psycholinguistics Published in RUNG: 05.04.2024; Views: 621; Downloads: 3 Full text (1,03 MB) This document has many files! More... |
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4. On Karttunen’s "The syntax and semantics of questions"Elena Guerzoni, 2022, independent scientific component part or a chapter in a monograph Abstract: Karttunen’s article on the syntax and semantics of questions is a milestone in the truth-conditional compositional semantics of interrogatives and of verbs that embed them. It is the first comprehensive study of the mapping between the syntax and the interpretation of the three different types of questions (polar, constituent and alternative questions) and presents the first semantic analysis of question-embedding verbs (QEVs henceforth) that assumes the same intensions for matrix and embedded interrogatives. This analysis continues to vastly inspire the ongoing research on the properties of questions and QEVs. This chapter illustrates Karttunen’s theory focusing on those formal details that have been the most influential in subsequent literature. In doing so, however, I will take the liberty to suggest a less than literal rendition of these details, in an attempt to make the discussion more accessible to today’s reader. The main departure that I make here from Karttunen’s 1977 is in the formal framework. Whereas Karttunen adopts Montague’s PTQ, here I will expose his ideas in Heim and Kratzer‘s type driven semantics. Keywords: interrogatives, questions, syntax-semantics interface, compositionality, wh-movement Published in RUNG: 20.02.2024; Views: 501; Downloads: 4 Link to file This document has many files! More... |
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7. Experimental syntax and Slavic languagesArthur Stepanov, 2021, independent scientific component part or a chapter in a monograph Abstract: The chapter reviews a number of empirical domains that recently came into the focus of research in Slavic experimental syntax, including island phenomena, syntactic Superiority effects, various types of agreement, word order, and scope interaction, among others. This research mostly relies on sentence acceptability experiments applied across larger pools of participants, but the chapter also reviews selected studies using related experimental methods (e.g. elicited production and sentence–picture verification). The chapter concludes by identifying a number of conceptual issues in syntactic theory, for which we believe Slavic experimental syntax has a potential to make a particularly strong contribution. Keywords: experimental syntax, Slavic language, syntactic island, unaccusativity, information structure, superiority effect, case matching, agreement, numeral phrase Published in RUNG: 20.12.2021; Views: 2134; Downloads: 15 Link to full text This document has many files! More... |
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9. Adjective ordering and extralinguistic cognitionFranc Marušič, Petra Mišmaš, Rok Žaucer, Luka Komidar, Gregor Sočan, 2021, published scientific conference contribution abstract Keywords: adjectives, general cognition, experimental syntax, cognitive foundations, syntax Published in RUNG: 14.05.2021; Views: 2239; Downloads: 57 Link to full text This document has many files! More... |
10. Measuring free word order: Some empirical and modeling perspectivesArthur Stepanov, invited lecture at foreign university Abstract: Languages manifesting flexibility of word order (within the sentence's compositional meaning) have always presented a challenge for modern theories of syntax requiring any deviation from the canonical word order to be grammatically motivated. Parasyntactic motivations such as information structural or stylistic requirements may account for some portion of this flexibility, but not all of it. In addition, native speakers do not necessarily accept canonical and non-canonical word orders to an equal extent. In fact, the latter typically receive lower acceptability scores than the former, albeit above the subjective threshold for what would count as "ungrammatical". Some of the combinatorially possible word orders are not acceptable at all. In this experimental study we scrutinize different word order sequences in a free word order language (Serbo-Croatian) and attempt to isolate independent displacement factors responsible for various elements of the sentence appearing away from their canonical structural positions. We explore differential and cumulative effects of these independent factors to predict speakers' acceptability scores. Keywords: Free word order, experimental syntax, Serbo-Croatian, sentence acceptability task Published in RUNG: 11.02.2021; Views: 2696; Downloads: 0 This document has many files! More... |