An important discussion in syntactic research revolves around the question whether the phenomena we observe are due to specific constraints on language structure or due to non-syntactic components of human cognition. A central topic in these discussions are so-called ‘island configurations’ (Ross 1967), i.e. unacceptable long-distance dependencies such as in (1b). (1)    a. Which Taylor Swift…

Indirect utterances, such as “The election outcome was interesting!” appear suboptimal from the point of view of efficient information transmission. However, we can still see the choice of indirect utterances as rational if we include social utility in the factors that determine utterance choice. We offer a Rational Speech Act model of indirect communication that captures…

While the scientific discourse has been primarily concerned with English and other Indo-European languages, little is known about the broader cross-linguistic picture with respect to presuppositions (PSPs). In general, the investigation into universals and parameters of variation, especially in the realm of pragmatics, still has a lot of field to cover (cf. von Fintel and…

Focus marking on a phrase like apple, as in (1), triggers the activation of contrastive alternatives to the expression in focus (e.g., expressions like pears, leeks, or cabbage; Braun & Tagliapietra, 2010). (1) Lily bought only an [APPLE]F at the farmer’s market.         → Lily did not buy any pears, leeks, cabbage… Priming studies…

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…