The relevance of speaker characteristics is acknowledged in most analyses of slurs (such as ‘the n-word’) as they form a central component of the so-called appropriated uses (e.g. Bianchi 2014, Croom 2014, Rahman 2011). Approaches differ, however, in the role they ascribe to speaker characteristics beyond this particular use. In some approaches, the derogative meaning…

Task Demands Supersede Minimal Effort Heuristics in Incremental Comprehension: Polysemy and Distributivity in the Maze (joint work with Jack Duff and Amanda Rysling) The timing of representational commitment during incremental comprehension may differ across different tasks. Comparing the Maze task (Forster et al., 2009) to self-paced reading, we present data from four reading experiments demonstrating task-dependence in…

Oh, what predicates embed exclamatives! Tom Roberts & Kelsey Sasaki The semantic status of wh-exclamative clauses (What a furry wombat that is!) is highly debated. Though they contain a wh-word, their function is not to ask a question, but to express the speaker’s surprise at the high degree to which a particular property holds. This combination…

Ana Bosnic: The question of po – strengthening or weakening of a distributive marker? Serbian distributive marker po is commonly classified as a Distributive Share marker, that is, a marker that is associated with the argument that is being distributed (Choe 1987, Gil 1995). Recent research on Serbian po by Knežević (2015) suggested that the marker may…

Lisa Bylinina, Yasu Sudo and Stavroula Alexandropoulou Priming acceptability judgments of NPIs We report on a series of priming experiments whose results indicate that (i) acceptability judgments of the Negative Polarity Item (NPI) ‘any’ can be primed, but (ii) only unacceptable sentences of the same type, i.e., those that contain unlincensed ‘any’, trigger priming effects….

Memory plays an important role in the interpretation of so-called linguistic dependencies, such as pronouns, reflexives or subject-verb agreement. For instance, in the sentence “The key to the cabinets is rusty.”, the singular form of the verb “is” is dependent on the singular form of the subject “the key”. A theory of memory that has…

Priming scalar alternatives: The effects of negation and antonymy Radim Lacina, Stavroula Alexandropoulou, Eszter Ronai, and Nicole Gotzner Weak scalar words such as warm give rise to scalar implicatures that amount to the negation of the stronger term, i.e. warm but not hot. The notion of informationally stronger alternatives has played a crucial role in investigating this phenomenon,…

Hannah Seemann: Modal Particles and their Interaction with Discourse   Different languages offer a variety of features for a speaker to convey epistemic stance. In German, modal particles have these discourse-managing functions: e.g., ‘ja’ can indicate shared knowledge, ‘doch’ signals a contrast between epistemic states and material on the table and ‘wohl’ is used to…

Pim Mak Title: Using the Visual World Paradigm for the diagnosis of DLD in bilinguals Bilingual children are sometimes incorrectly diagnosed with DLD because during a certain phase of language acquisition they make errors in language production that are not distinguishable from those of children with DLD. Several studies (e.g. Mak et al., 2017) have…

Marieke Schouwstra: Language and iconicity in the lab: experience, learning, and interaction Iconicity can aid the learning of a new language, but the relationship between language and iconicity is complex and has many layers. In this talk I will discuss experimental work that aims to help us better understand this complex interconnectedness. First, I will…