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This paper addresses the morpho-phonological, syntactic and pragmatic properties of postverbal subject constructions in Awing. Analogous to other inversion constructions in Bantu literature (Marten & Van der Wal 2014), Awing has a construction in which the subject occurs immediately after the verb, resulting in a subject or sentence focus interpretation. However in Awing, crucially, a VSX clause cannot host a subject marker, but must contain a certain le morpheme in sentence-initial position. Following Baker (2003) and Collins (2004), I argue that the subject marker triggers movement of the subject from Spec/vP, explaining why it is banned in VSX clauses. I further claim that although the subject is interpreted as focus, it is not in a lower focus phrase (Belletti 2004), but rather trapped in Spec/vP. Awing postverbal subject constructions also exhibit verb doubling: VSVO. I argue that verb doubling is due to Case requirement: In canonical SVO clauses the subject marker and the verb value the nominative and accusative Cases, respectively. In VSVO constructions, on the contrary, the verb values both nominative and accusative Cases, thus forcing syntax to spell out two copies of the same verb.
Le centenaire de la publication du Cours de linguistique générale (1916) de Ferdinand de Saussure nous a invité à reconsidérer l’importance de cet ouvrage et le rôle de son auteur pour la fondation d’une linguistique intégrée dans une sémiologie. Il n’y a aucun doute que cet auteur fut extrêmement important pour le développement de la linguistique structurale en Europe et qu’avec son concept du signe linguistique il a fait œuvre de pionnier pour le tournant sémiologique. Mais l’accueil favorable d’une théorie dans le milieu scientifique ne s’explique pas seulement par sa qualité intérieure, mais par plusieurs conditions extérieures. Ces conditions seront analysées sur trois plans: (1) l’arrivée de la méthode des néogrammairiens à ses limites qui incitait alors à l’étude de l’unité du signifiant et du signifié; (2) la simplification et l’outrance de la pensée structurale dans le Cours, publié en 1916 par Charles Bally et Albert Sechehaye et (3) la préparation de la réception de la pensée sémiologique par plusieurs travaux parallèles.
There is an ongoing discussion in the literature whether the series of sentences ‘It’s not α that did P. α and β did P.’ is acceptable or not. Whereas the homogeneity approach in Büring & Križ 2013, Križ 2016, and Križ 2017 predicts these sentences to be unacceptable, the alternative-based approach predicts acceptability depending on the predicate being interpreted distributively or non- distributively (among others, Horn 1981, Velleman et al. 2012, Renans 2016a,b). We report on three experiments testing the predictions of both types of approaches. These studies provide empirical data that not only bears on these approaches, but also allows us to distinguish between different accounts of cleft exhaustivity that might otherwise make the same predictions. The results of the three studies reported here suggest that the acceptability of clefts depends on the interpretation of the predicate, thereby posing a serious challenge to the homogeneity approach, and contributing to the ongoing discussion on the semantics of it-clefts.
Connective-Lex
(2019)
In this paper, we present a tangible outcome of the TextLink network: a joint online database project displaying and linking existing and newly-created lexicons of discourse connectives in multiple languages. We discuss the definition and demarcation of the class of connectives that should be included in such a resource, and present the syntactic, semantic/pragmatic, and lexicographic information we collected. Further, the technical implementation of the database and the search functionality are presented. We discuss how the multilingual integration of several connective lexicons provides added value for linguistic researchers and other users interested in connectives, by allowing crosslinguistic comparison and a direct linking between discourse relational devices in different languages. Finally, we provide pointers for possible future extensions both in breadth (i.e., by adding lexicons for additional languages) and depth (by extending the information provided for each connective item and by strengthening the crosslinguistic links).
Predictive coding and its generalization to active inference offer a unified theory of brain function. The underlying predictive processing paradigmhas gained significant attention in artificial intelligence research for its representation learning and predictive capacity. Here, we suggest that it is possible to integrate human and artificial generative models with a predictive coding network that processes sensations simultaneously with the signature of predictive coding found in human neuroimaging data. We propose a recurrent hierarchical predictive coding model that predicts low-dimensional representations of stimuli, electroencephalogram and physiological signals with variational inference. We suggest that in a shared environment, such hybrid predictive coding networks learn to incorporate the human predictive model in order to reduce prediction error. We evaluate the model on a publicly available EEG dataset of subjects watching one-minute long video excerpts. Our initial results indicate that the model can be trained to predict visual properties such as the amount, distance and motion of human subjects in videos.
What’s Symmetrical?
(2019)
This chapter investigates teacher management of learner turns in an American second-grade classroom during a read-aloud activity. A read-aloud is a whole-group instructional activity which involves a teacher read-ing aloud a book to a cohort of students as they listen (Tainio & Slotte, 2017). Using ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA) and drawing on the concepts of alignment and affi liation (Steensig, 2012; Stivers, 2008; Stivers et al., 2011), we investigate how embodied practices such as gaze, facial expressions, body positioning and gestures in addition to verbal practices are used by the teacher separately and together to respond to learner turns in ways that keep the learners aff ectively engaged and, at the same time, ensure the orderly progression of the lesson. Our analysis shows that teacher cooperative management of learners’ turns involves: (1) orient-ing to them as affi liative tokens in order to neutralize their disaligning force while still treating learners as cooperative participants in the activity; and (2) managing turns not only according to their sequential positions and the actions they project but, just as importantly, to the larger instructional proj-ect being accomplished. The study contributes to the re-specifi cation of the everyday grounds of teaching in order to broaden understandings of the specialized nature of such work (Macbeth, 2014).
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar is a constraint-based theory. It uses features and values to model linguistic objects. Values may be complex, e. g. consist of feature values pairs themselves. The paper shows that such feature value pairs together with identity of values and relations between feature values are sufficient to develop a complete linguistic theory including all linguistic levels of description. The paper explains the goals of researchers working in the framework and the way they deal with data and motivate their analyses. The framework is explained with respect to an example sentence that involves the following phenomena: valence, constituent structure, adjunction/modification, raising, case assignment, nonlocal dependencies, relative clauses.
This study is concerned with repair practices that a teacher and students employ to restore intersubjectivity when faced with interactional problems in a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classroom. Adopting a conversation analytic (CA) approach, it examines the interactional treatment of students’ verbal and embodied trouble displays in a video-recorded, teacher-fronted geography lesson held in English at a German high school. At the same time, it explores to what extent the repair practices employed are fitted to this specific interactional context. The analysis shows that students’ verbal trouble displays often result in extensive repair sequences, whereas students’ embodied trouble displays are usually met with teacher self-repair in the transition space. In this way, the latter are resolved much earlier and more quickly. The study further reveals practices like reformulation and translation to be especially useful for repairing interactional problems in classrooms in which a foreign language is used as the medium of instruction. The findings may be of interest for prospective as well as practicing teachers in that they provide relevant insights into how interactional trouble can be successfully managed in (CLIL) classroom interaction.
Vagueness
(2019)
Though vague phenomena have been studied extensively for many decades, it is only in recent years that researchers sought the support of quantitative data. This chapter highlights and discusses the insights that experimental methods brought to the study of vagueness. One area focused on are ‘borderline contradictions’, that is, sentences like ‘She is neither tall nor not tall’ that are contradictory when analysed in classical logic, but are actually acceptable as descriptions of borderline cases. The flourishing of theories and experimental studies that borderline contradictions have led to are examined closely. Beyond this illustrative case, an overview of recent studies that concern the classification of types of vagueness, the use of numbers, rounding, number modification, and the general pragmatic status of vagueness is provided.
Metaphor and metonymy are likely the most common forms of non-literal language. As metaphor and metonymy differ conceptually and in how easy they are to comprehend, it seems likely that they also differ in their degree of non-literalness. They frequently occur in idioms which are foremost non-literal, fixed expressions. Given that non-literalness seems to be the defining criterion of what constitutes an idiom, it is striking that no study so far has focused specifically on differing non-literalness in idioms. It is unclear whether and how metaphoric and metonymic structures and their properties are perceived in idioms, given that the comprehension of idioms is driven by a number of other properties that are connected. This study divides idioms according to their metonymic or metaphoric structure and lets participants rate their non-literalness, familiarity, and transparency. It focuses on non-literalness as key property, finds it strongly connected to transparency, and to be the one key factor in predicting idiom type. Specifically, it reveals that metonymies are generally perceived as rather or even extremely literal, while metaphors are generally perceived as highly non-literal.