Browsing by Author "Onea, Edgar"

Sign languages use the horizontal plane of the signing space to introduce discourse referents at particular referential loci (R-loci). R-loci could be viewed as abstract referential indices also known from spoken language grammar. However, in sign languages the spatial relations between R-loci appear to be exploited in establishing anaphoric relations between discourse referents, thus reducing ambiguities. In this article, we propose a feature-driven space geometry that captures a variety of ways in which anaphoric relationships can be established, and we conservatively extend classical Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) to incorporate geometric peculiarities of R-loci that can be used as constraints on anaphora resolution, meanwhile holding on to the intuition that R-loci, just like referential indices, have no semantic interpretation of their own. Our theory ameliorates the listing problem and captures part-whole behavior of anaphora in sign languages.

How quickly do children and adults interpret scalar lexical items in speech processing? The current study examined interpretation of the scalar terms some vs. all in contexts where either the stronger ( some = not all ) or the weaker interpretation was permissible ( some allows all ). Children and adults showed increased negative deflections in brain activity following the word some in some -infelicitous versus some -felicitous contexts. This effect was found as early as 100 ms across central electrode sites (in children), and 300–500 ms across left frontal, fronto-central, and centro-parietal electrode sites (in children and adults). These results strongly suggest that young children (aged between 3 and 4 years) as well as adults quickly have access to the contextually appropriate interpretation of scalar terms.

The languages of the world exhibit a range of formal phenomena (e.g. accenting, syntactic reordering and morphological marking) that are commonly linked to the information-structural notion of focus. Crucially, there does not seem to be a one-to-one mapping between particular formal features (focus marking devices) and focus, neither from a cross-linguistic perspective, nor within individual languages. This raises the question of what is actually being expressed if we say that a constituent is focused in a particular language, and whether, or to what extent, the same semantic or pragmatic content is formally expressed by focus-marking across languages. This special issue addresses the question of focus and its grammatical realization from a number of theoretical and empirical perspectives. In this introductory article we elaborate on this question by making an explicit proposal about what we take to be the correct way of thinking about the information-structural category of focus and its formal realization. In the first part, we introduce a unified semantico-pragmatic perspective on focus in terms of alternatives and possible worlds. In the second part, we present a cursory cross-linguistic overview of focus marking strategies as found in the languages of the world. Finally, in the third part, we discuss the connection between the notion of focus, different pragmatic uses of focus and different focus marking strategies employed in the grammars of natural languages. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Abstract In this article, we shall contribute to the theory of narrative closure. In pre-theoretical terms, a narrative features closure if it has an ending. We start by giving a general introduction into the closure phenomenon. Next, we offer a reconstruction of Noël Carroll’s (2007. Narrative closure. Philosophical Studies 135. 1–15) erotetic account of narrative closure, according to which a narrative exhibits closure (roughly) if readers have a “feeling of finality” which in turn is based on the judgment that the presiding macro questions posed by the plot of the narrative get answered. We then discuss a number of questions raised by Carroll’s account, namely whether a definition of “narrative closure” based on his account is either too inclusive or too exclusive; whether narrative closure is a property of narratives or of plots; whether narrative closure comes in grades; whether “narrative closure” is a restrictive notion; and whether “narrative closure” should be ascribed online (incrementally) or on the basis of all-things-considered ex post interpretations. Our answers to these questions are couched in terms of refined definitions, for this allows us to keep track of the progress and facilitates comparisons between the different proposals developed. Finally, we offer a definition of “narrative closure” that summarizes our amendments to Carroll’s theory.

Sign languages use the horizontal plane to refer to discourse referents introduced at referential locations. However, the question remains whether the assignment of discourse referents follows a particular default pattern as recently proposed such that two new discourse referents are respectively assigned to the right (ipsilateral) and left (contralateral) side of (right handed) signers. The present event-related potential study on German Sign Language investigates the hypothesis that signers assign distinct and contrastive referential locations to discourse referents even in the absence of overt localization. By using a semantic mismatch-design, we constructed sentence sets where the second sentence was either consistent or inconsistent with the used pronoun. Semantic mismatch conditions evoked an N400, whereas a contralateral index sign engendered a Phonological Mismatch Negativity. The current study provides supporting evidence that signers are sensitive to the mismatch and make use of a default pattern to assign distinct and contrastive referential locations to discourse referents.

It is well known that in German (and many other languages) clauses headed by a conditional complementizer can appear as (apparent) arguments of some verbs, including preference predicates and factive verbs. In most of the recent literature, indirect analyses are advocated according to which in such cases the clauses headed by wenn ('if') are adverbial clauses with a conditional interpretation and not real argument-clauses of the embedding verb. I argue in this paper that an argument-analysis is more advantageous for a systematic group of cases. I will propose a slight modification of the semantics of the standard conditional complementizer which will allow to capture its natural distribution between the two other main argument complementizers: dass ('that') and ob ('whether'). The paper strongly focuses on German but also discusses some distributional facts from other European languages such as English, French, Romanian and Hungarian.

One of the big questions about indefinites is why they can escape scope islands (Fodor and Sag, in Linguist Philos 5:355-398, 1982). In the recent approach of Brasoveanu and Farkas (Linguist Philos 34(1):1-55, 2011) scopal relations with syntactically dominating quantifiers are hard wired into the semantic definition of the existential quantifier, which immediately explains why the semantic scope of indefinites may exceed their syntactic scope. In this paper, I argue for the revival of an alternative approach which places the explanatory burden on the idea that indefinites are essentially referential expressions, similar to definites, and not plain existential quantifiers. I propose one fully explicit variant of such theories and argue that it comes with a number of conceptual and empirical advantages over competing theories.