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Abstract: Habilitation Thesis (Habilschrift)
Keywords: alternatives, implicatures, syntax
Published in RUNG: 13.01.2025; Views: 352; Downloads: 0
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Abstract: Brown, Fanselow, Hall and Kliegl (2021) suggest that the syntactic satiation effect arises irrespective of sentence type, for those sentences whose acceptability status falls in the mid-zone range of a discrete Likert scale. They further propose to treat it as a ‘mere exposure’ effect, but it remains unclear why repeated exposure only targets the stimuli in the mid-zone area. In this note, I argue that mid-scale ratings form a region of highest uncertainty as reflected in maximum variance in speakers’ ratings compared to the other regions of the scale. Satiation may consequently be seen as an exposure effect targeting the most unstable or ‘volatile’ portion of the judgments.
Keywords: acceptability, satiation, experimental syntax, psycholinguistics
Published in RUNG: 17.12.2024; Views: 614; Downloads: 3
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Abstract: In this article, we claim that syntactic objects undergoing ellipsis can be targeted by both narrow syntactic and PF operations. We base this conclusion on experimental evidence from the interaction between single conjunct agreement and verb-echo answers in South Slavic, which we show to be derived via verb-stranding VP ellipsis. Adopting the view that Vocabulary Insertion replaces Q-variables on lexical heads (Halle 1991) and ellipsis is a syntactic operation which deletes Q-variables (Saab 2022), we demonstrate that constituents properly included in the ellipsis site can undergo Internal Merge in the narrow syntax, and can participate in PF processes from the derived position. The interaction between ellipsis, Internal Merge and Agree-Copy that accounts for these patterns of data follows naturally within the Distributed Ellipsis approach.
Keywords: ellipsis, agreement, South Slavic, syntax, verb
Published in RUNG: 19.07.2024; Views: 1459; Downloads: 17
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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: 1800; Downloads: 6
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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: 2061; Downloads: 8
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