The Underspecification Of Past Participles

Are the past participial forms that occur in passive and perfect periphrases substantially identical or should they rather be distinguished into accidentally homophonous passive and perfect(ive) participles? This book discusses the long-standing mystery of past participial (non-)identity on the basis of a broad range of synchronic data from Germanic and Romance, eventually focussing on German and English as these draw the most relevant distinctions (e.g. auxiliary alternation, a passive auxiliary that is not BE). Together with some contrastive insights from Slavic as well as the diachrony of passive and perfect periphrases, this clearly points to an identity-view. The novel approach that is laid out suggests that past participles conflate diathetic and aspectual properties. The former cause the suppression of an external argument, whereas the latter impose event-structure sensitive perfectivity, which only induces the completion of a situation if the underlying eventuality denotes a simple change of state. An approach along these lines sheds light on the intricate properties of past participles and the auxiliaries they occur with, the determinants of auxiliary selection as well as the interplay of argument and event structure.

Abstracts Wegner, Dennis, Härtl, Holden, Schlechtweg, Marcel: Optionality and the recovery of temporal information in German verb clusters. While the clause-final placement of finite elements is usually quite rigid in German embedded clauses, verbal clusters mark an exception in that they allow finite temporal auxiliaries to be placed linearly before the verbal elements they embed. The prescriptive rules of Standard German suggest that there is optionality with respect to the two ordering possibilities at least in future clauses. However, previous studies have shown that this also holds for perfect clauses with lassen ('let'). Based on two experimental studies focussing on verbal clusters with continuative lassen ('let') and perception verbs, which supposedly have similar properties, the present paper aims at investigating a) whether there really is proper optionality with respect to placing the finite auxiliary in a cluster-initial or clause-final position, and b) whether preposing the temporal auxiliary induces advantages for the processing of temporal information. Pafel, Jürgen: Konditionale und minimale Differenz. Counterfactuals invite us to imagine a course of the world in which certain state-of-affairs obtain which might be contrary to fact, but which is otherwise identical to the real course of the world. They invite us to imagine a minimal different course of the world. Minimal difference is an essential ingredient of many, perhaps most, semantic accounts of counterfactuals. They differ in the way they conceptualize minimal difference. I present a definition of 'minimal different course of the world' after discussing many scenarios in detail, with respect to which certain counterfactuals are supposed to be true or false. Minimal difference means that, as for a 'counterfactual' course of the world, everything is as it actually is except that (i) the counterfactual's antecedent is true and (ii) state-of-affair obtain which are possible in virtue of (i) and the regularities of the world. With this background, the truth condition of a counterfactual can be stated as follows: It is true if the consequent is true in every course of the world in which the antecedent is true, and which is minimal different from the actual course of the world. This kind of truth condition is argued to be adequate for singular indicative conditionals too. Various problems concerning this extension are discussed. A closer look at the pragmatics of counterfactuals exhibits a variety of different 'implications', whose status is partially unclear. Finally, I discuss the prospects of extending the minimal-difference semantics of conditionals to causals. Bauer, Anastasia: Rezension: Vadim Kimmelman (2019): Information structure in sign languages. Evidence from Russian Sign Language and Sign Language of the Netherlands. Berlin: De Gruyter and Ishara Press. Krstic, Vladimir: Rezension: Meibauer, Jörg (ed.) (2019): The Oxford handbook of lying. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsiknakis, Antonios: Rezension: Sonja Müller (2019): Die Syntax-Pragmatik-Schnittstelle. Ein Studienbuch. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto. Klaus, Müllner: Informationen und Hinweise.

The book offers a syntactic and semantic perspective on the nominalization system in both English and Romanian. The three main types of deverbal nominalizations analysed here are complex event nominalizations (CENs), simple event nominals (SENs) and result nominals (RNs), according to the well-known distinction made by Grimshaw (1990). The hypothesis furthered in the present book is that in both languages deverbal nominalizations form a squish (see Ross 1972), i.e. an implicational hierarchy which is built on two dimensions, a syntactic dimension, i.e., the presence or absence of a complete VP, including some functional structure (AspP), and a semantic dimension, i.e., whether or not the nominalization expresses an event (see Wood 2020). Thus, all the properties of CENs, SENs and RNs described in the literature (Grimshaw 1990, Alexiadou 2001, Borer 2011, a.o.) are accounted for on the basis of these two dimensions and are illustrated on a vast corpus of authentic English and Romanian examples gathered from dictionaries and online corpora such as Corpusul computațional de referință pentru limba română contemporană (CoRoLa), the British National Corpus (BNC) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).

Syncretism - where a single form serves two or more morphosyntactic functions - is a persistent problem at the syntax-morphology interface. It results from a 'mismatch' whereby the syntax of a language makes a particular distinction but the morphology does not. This pioneering book provides a full-length study of inflectional syncretism, presenting a typology of its occurrence across a wide range of languages. The implications of syncretism for the syntax-morphology interface have long been recognised: it argues either for an enriched model of feature structure (thereby preserving a direct link between function and form), or for the independence of morphological structure from syntactic structure. This book presents a compelling argument for the autonomy of morphology and the resulting analysis is illustrated in a series of formal case studies within Network Morphology. It will be welcomed by all linguists interested in the relation between words and the larger units of which they are a part.

This volume is the first dedicated to the growing field of theory and research on second language processing and parsing. The fourteen papers in this volume offer cutting-edge research using a number of different languages (e.g., Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, French, German, English) and structures (e.g., relative clauses, wh-gaps, gender, number) to examine various issues in second language processing: first language influence, whether or not non-natives can achieve native-like processing, the roles of context and prosody, the effects of working memory, and others. The researchers include both established scholars and newer voices, all offering important insights into the factors that affect processing and parsing in a second language.

Recent years have seen much new research on the interface between artificial intelligence and law, looking at issues such as automated legal reasoning. This collection of papers represents the state of the art in this fascinating and highly topical field.

Although the notion of procedural meaning is found in areas such as discourse markers, reference, tense, modality and intonation, until now there has been no single volume entirely devoted to it. Over 25 years, since the initial proposal by Blakemore, a number of refinements have been suggested, yet some criticisms have also been raised. The role and status of the conceptual / procedural distinction within a theory of human communication and the nature of procedural encoding were in need of reassessment in the light of current research in linguistic theory, cognitive science, experimental pragmatics and language acquisition. The papers collected here serve this general purpose from different standpoints. Some of them consider the topic from the angle of its theoretical foundations and put forth original proposals aimed at clarifying the most controversial issues. Others take a more data-driven orientation and offer novel analyses illustrating how encoded instructions work and how much can be gained from approaching certain linguistic phenomena in procedural terms. The contributions in this volume represent an inflection point in the delimitation and understanding of the notion of procedural meaning and open new paths for future research.

Spontaneous speech errors provide valuable evidence not only for the processes that mediate between a communicative intention and the articulation of an utterance but also for the types of grammatical entities that are manipulated during production. This study proposes an analysis of speech errors that is informed by grammar theory. In particular, it is shown how characteristic properties of erroneous German utterances can be accounted for within Distributed Morphology (DM). The investigation focuses on two groups of errors: Errors that result from the manipulation of semantic and morphosyntactic features, and errors which appear to involve the application of a post-error repair strategy. It is argued that a production model which incorporates DM allows for a straightforward account of the attested, sometimes complex, error patterns. DM mechanisms, for instance, render unnecessary the assumption of repair processes. Besides providing an account for the attested error patterns, the theory also helps us in explaining why certain errors do not occur. In this sense, DM makes for a psychologically real model of grammar.