Experimental Comparisons of Presuppositions and Implicatures

Abstract:
A core tenet in the theoretical study of linguistic meaning is that the overall meaning conveyed by an utterance is a conglomerate of different types of inferences, such as entailments, presuppositions, and implicatures. These are commonly assumed to differ, among other things, in their source (e.g., conventional vs. general reasoning) and status (e.g., defeasible or not). While the distinctions in this realm have...

The representation of degree in American Sign Language

At the right edge: coda segmentism and coda weight

Abstract: It is widely assumed that the sonority of segments plays an important role in the overall profiling of the syllable, as well  as in the organization of its subparts. In this talk, I will address the effects of sonority at the right edge of the syllable, standardly referred to as the coda. There are at least two perspectives on the effects of sonority at the right margin, both relying  on the sonority scale. First, as proposed in Clements (1990), the inventory of segments in the coda universally...

Architectural consequences of distinguishing two kinds of Superiority

The Rise and Fall of the L-Shaped Morphome: Diachronic and Experimental Studies

Abstract: It has been suggested that the Romance first person singular indicative forms a base of derivation for the subjunctive paradigm, even though the latter shares no morphosyntactic features with the former (Maiden, 2004). The existence of such patterns has been taken to be an argument for autonomous morphology and the existence of unnatural ‘morphomes’, in the sense of Aronoff (1994). Experimental investigations with native speakers of Portuguese, Italian, and...

Initial Vowel Length in Lulamogi: Cyclity or Globality?

Over the past several decades there has been recurrent skepticism concerning cyclic derivations in phonology, one of the most central tenets of traditional generative and lexical phonology and morphology. Some of the proposed cyclic analyses have been argued not to require cyclicity, or to represent lexical relations that are not totally productive (as in certain cases in English). For those surviving cases, a major strategy within optimality...

Family of Questions:  Nuclear or Extended?

On the origin of si as an interrogative particle in Old Spanish

Luwian `Indeterminate' Relative Clauses and their Prehistory

Abstract

Complicating the Reconstruction of the Indo-European Metrical System

Epistemic adjectives: Lexical semantics meets the psychology of reasoning

Epistemic adjectives – those expressing (un)certainty, such as 'possible', 'likely', 'certain' – are vague and admit of degree modification, like many non-modal adjectives. Recently a number of authors have observed that their modification behavior and the inferences that they license problematize received theories of epistemic modality in a number of ways (e.g., Yalcin 2010; Lassiter 2010, 2014). These authors have conclude that (at least some) epistemic adjectives should be treated as degree expressions...