I argue that Bošković's (2011c) generalization concerning the island-voiding effect of incorporation can be captured naturally within minimalist bare phrase structure if head movement (a) is a ...syntactic operation and (b) leaves no trace/copy. É. Kiss's (2008) "domain-flattening" phenomena are also expected under the proposed account. Further empirical consequences are discussed.
. The traditional ‘‘unified’’ approaches to extractability out of subjects and adjuncts in the form of Huang's (1982) Condition on Extraction Domains (CED) and Chomsky's (1986a)Barriers and its ...minimalist descendants face an empirical challenge presented by languages in which extraction out of subjects is possible but extraction out of adjuncts is not. The existence of such languages calls into question the unifying basis for the traditional accounts—namely, the complement/noncomplement distinction that was at the core of these accounts. In this paper I consider a possible extension of a recent minimalist account making use of the complement/noncomplement distinction—Nunes and Uriagereka (2000)—to the problematic languages and show that it also encounters conceptual and empirical problems. I then propose an ‘‘eclectic’’ minimalist approach to extraction domains in which extractability out of subjects and adjuncts are regulated by different mechanisms of grammar in a nonoverlapping manner.
Previous research established that young children are sensitive to prosodic cues discriminating between syntactic structures of otherwise similarly sounding sentences in a language unknown to them. ...In this study, we explore the role of working memory that children might deploy for the purpose of the sentence-level prosodic discrimination. Nine-year old Slovenian monolingual and bilingual children (N = 70) were tested on a same-different prosodic discrimination task in a language unknown to them (French) and on the working memory measures in the form of forward and backward digit span and non-word repetition tasks. The results suggest that both the storage and processing components of the working memory are involved in the prosodic discrimination task.
There exists a controversy in the literature and among the speakers of Slovenian concerning the grammaticality of wh-island and subject island constructions in this language. We conducted an ...acceptability rating study of wh-islands and subject islands in Slovenian, using the factorial definition of island. This definition provides for a possibility to isolate a true island effect while controlling for two complexity factors that potentially interfere in speakers’ evaluation of the relevant sentences: the
of the respective movement dependency and the presence of an
itself. We found that (i) Slovenian speakers do judge the wh-island sentences worse than the respective controls, but the observed degradation cannot be attributed to a true island effect; (ii) subject extraction out of a wh-island leads to a so called
whereby the acceptability is higher than expected even if the above two complexity factors are taken into consideration; and (iii) speakers are sensitive to the subject island effect, as predicted by the mainstream theories of syntactic locality. The results of our study contribute to establishing a solid empirical base for further theoretical investigations of the island effects and raise new questions about the role of processing factors in speakers’ evaluations of island constructions.
This article reports the results of an experimental study that examines the influence of bilingualism on the acquisition and use of the Maximize Presupposition principle in the context of speakers’ ...choices among propositional attitude predicates (equivalent to) know and think. We compared the performance of monolingual Slovenian- and Italian-speaking school children to that of age-matched early bilingual children speaking both languages. Our findings suggest that while all children demonstrate adherence to Maximize Presupposition in an adult-like manner, bilingualism may enhance performance in pragmatic tasks that bear on this principle, and therefore constitutes a potential advantage in the relevant area.
One of the most studied scales in the literature on scalar implicatures is the quantifier scale. While the truth of
is entailed by the truth of
,
is felicitous only when
is false. This opens the ...possibility that
would be felicitous if, e.g., almost all of the objects in the restriction of the quantifier have the property ascribed by the nuclear scope. This prediction from the standard theory of quantifier interpretation clashes with native speakers' intuitions. In Experiment 1 we report a questionnaire study on the perception of quantifier meanings in English, French, Slovenian, and German which points to a cross-linguistic variation with respect to the perception of numerical bounds of the existential quantifier. In Experiment 2, using a picture choice task, we further examine whether the numerical bound differences correlate with differences in pragmatic interpretations of the quantifier
in English and
in French and interpret the results as supporting our hypothesis that
and its cross-linguistic counterparts are subjected to different processes of pragmatic enrichment.
In this article we re-assess the recent analysis of interrogative Slifting (e.g., Who is a Martian, do you think?) proposed in Haddican et al. (2014). In this analysis, the two component clauses have ...an indirect syntactic relation to each other, and the semantic and pragmatic relationship between the “slift” question and the main clause is conceived around the notion of evidentiality. We advance an alternative proposal whereby interrogative Slifting can be construed more on a par with wh-scope marking questions attested in languages like German or Hindi. Placing interrogative Slifting alongside wh-scope marking, a more familiar and better-studied construction type, avoids certain empirical difficulties of the original analysis and paves a way toward a uniform treatment of its syntactic, semantic and interface properties.
This article has two major foci. The first concerns the 'cartography' of structural placement of wh-adjuncts how and why, a somewhat elusive and murky issue in modern syntactic research. The ...non-trivial character of this issue becomes clear once it is realized that each of these items encodes more than one lexical entry in some languages, and, furthermore, different lexical entries display different syntactic distribution. One goal is then to characterize the syntactic distribution of how and why controlling for their different cross-linguistic varieties. Once the "cartographical" issue is clarified, a number of novel questions arise concerning the mode of licensing of different varieties of how and why. This brings us to the second, theoretical, focus of the paper: a proper mechanism for licensing wh-in situ, and, in a broader sense, wh-items lower than CP. On the basis of diverse cross-linguistic material, we provide a number of arguments strengthening the Unselective Binding approach to licensing wh-in situ and show how potential challenges can be met in a revealing and explanatory manner.
"The volume is a collection of 12 papers which focus on empirical and theoretical issues associated with syntactic phenomena falling under the rubric of Relativized Minimality (Rizzi 1990) or, in ...more recent terms, Minimal Link Condition (MLC, Chomsky 1995). The bulk of the papers are based on the ideas presented at the Workshop ""Minimal Link Effects in Minimalist and Optimality Theoretic Syntax"" which took place at the University of Potsdam on March 21-22, 2002. All contributors are prominent specialists in the topic of syntactic Minimality. The empirical phenomena brought to bear on Minimality/MLC in the present volume include, but not limited to: * Superiority effects in multiple wh-questions, including those with 'D-linked' wh-phrase(s) (Müller, Haida, Haider) * Stylistic Fronting in Germanic and Romance (Fisher, Poole) * Transitive sentences in Hindi-type ergative languages (Stepanov) * Word order 'freezing' effects in double-nominative constructions in Korean (Lee) * Double object constructions in Greek (Anagnostoupoulou) * Remnant constituent displacement in German and Japanese (Hale and Legendre) Nine of the proposed accounts are couched in the Minimalist framework (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2001), three in the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). Thematically, the contributions divide into three groups addressing the following major questions: How can apparent violations of syntactic Minimality/MLC be accounted for? (Haida, Stepanov, Poole, Fisher, Anagnostopoulou) What is the status of MLC? Is it a primitive or a theorem in the grammar? (Müller, Fanselow, Lechner, Vogel, Lee, Haider) Can Minimality phenomena shed decisive evidence in favor of a derivational (Minimalist type) or a representational (Optimality theory like) framework? (Hale and Legendre, Haider)"
Osrednji cilj sodobnih psiholingvističnih raziskav sprotnega branja stavkov je odkrivanje, katere so glavne kognitivne omejitve pri uporabi skladenjskega znanja za dosego razumevanja. Ugotovljeno je ...bilo, da je lažje procesirati oziralne odvisnike, pri katerih je oziralno jedro povezano s skladenjskim mestom osebka, težje pa tiste, pri katerih je oziralno jedro povezano s skladenjskim mestom predmeta – hkrati pa je procesiranje sredinsko vstavljenih struktur težje od procesiranja desno vstavljenih. Obe razliki se očitno razkrijeta z metodo samotempiranega branja, pri katerem udeleženec na računalniškem zaslonu s pritiskanjem na tipko bere stavke besedo za besedo. S to študijo so razlike v procesiranju glede na vrsto in glede na mesto vstavljanja oziralnega odvisnika prvič obravnavane tudi v slovenščini.
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