Language and Linguistics - Volume 19, Issue 1, 2018

In recent years, the concept of unarticulated constitutes has generated a fierce debate both in the philosophy of language and in linguistic semantics and pragmatics. By unarticulated constituent is meant a propositional (or conceptual) constituent of a sentence that is communicated by the speaker in uttering that sentence, but is not linguistically represented in that uttered sentence. The main aim of this article is to provide a neo-Gricean pragmatic analysis of unarticulated constituents, showing that the current existing mechanism of neo-Gricean pragmatic theory can handle unarticulated constituents in a straightforward and elegant way. Second, I defend the neo-Gricean position that the pragmatic enrichment of unarticulated constituents is nothing but a neo-Gricean, pre-semantic conversational implicature. And third and finally, I briefly evaluate an alternative, formal syntactico-semantic analysis of unarticulated constituents.

This paper discusses some data of Arabic synthetic compounds in which regular plural inflection is included inside compounds. These data pose problems to Kiparsky’s (1982) level-ordering lexical morphology model and Li’s (1990) generalization on verb incorporation. I argue that such compounds are lexically formed based on some pieces of evidence. To support the analysis, I compare the compounds and the construct state constructions in Arabic and Hebrew. Then I show that the lexical analysis explains the morphological, syntactic properties, and the semantics of Arabic synthetic compounds. More specifically, I explain how the lexical analysis applies to theta-role assignment inside the compound and then discuss the number specification of the non-head in the compound of Arabic and English.

In Generative Lexicon Theory (glt) (Pustejovsky 1995), co-composition is one of the generative devices proposed to explain the cases of verbal polysemous behavior where more than one function application is allowed. The English baking verbs were used as examples to illustrate how their arguments co-specify the verb with qualia unification. Some studies (Blutner 2002; Carston 2002; Falkum 2007) stated that the information of pragmatics and world knowledge need to be considered as well. Therefore, this study would like to examine whether glt could be practiced in a real-world Natural Language Processing (nlp) application using collocations. We have conducted a fine-grained logical polysemy disambiguation task, taking the open-sourced Leiden Weibo Corpus as resource and computing with Support Vector Machine (svm) classifier. Within the classifier, we have taken collocated verbs under glt as main features. In addition, measure words and syntactic patterns are extracted as additional features for comparison. Our study investigates the logical polysemy of the Chinese verb kao ‘bake’. We find that glt could help in identifying logically polysemous cases; additional features would help the classifier achieve a higher performance.

Idiomatic expressions are generally manifested as lexically fixed. Yet some expressions allow lexical variations in their open slots and thus show certain degree of productivity in actual use. How young children acquire the productive use of idiomatic expressions, however, has rarely been addressed in current literature. The present study explores the developmental trajectory in learning idiom productivity by targeting the quadra-syllabic schematic idioms in Chinese. Results of two Graded Acceptability Judgment tests showed that acquisition of the selective productivity of schematic idioms may undergo an interactive process shaped by its token frequency, structural complexity, inherent semantic relation and the chunk effect of its open morphemes at different age levels. Findings in the studies are further discussed in relation to the emergentist model in idiom learning.

Proponents of the Linguistic Relativity Principle has maintained that the language we use modulates our thinking and that our thinking also shapes or determines how the language is parsed and understood. Existing research has provided compelling evidence for the above relativistic view in monolingual speakers. Recently, a growing number of studies have also started to investigate the relativistic view on language and thought in L2 learners. These L2 studies have yielded evidence regarding the cognitive constraint of an early-learned language (e.g. L1) on the later-learned language (e.g. L2). Despite this vigorous research effort, much remains unknown about whether the cognitive development in the later-learned language would modulate how the early-learned language is parsed (lower-level processing) and understood (higher-level processing). To fill the gap, this study drew on the self-paced reading experimental paradigm to study linguistic relativity effects on advanced L2 learners’ reading of L1 (Chinese) counterfactual statements – a concept encoded differently in these learners’ L1 and L2. The participants’ online response time and offline accuracy data were both the foci of the analyses; while the analyses of the response time data were suggestive of the participants’ initial lower-level parsing of the L1 counterfactual statements, the analyses of the accuracy data shed light on how the concept of counterfactuality is represented and understood in the L1. Throughout these analyses, this study intends to address the following questions: Does L2 acquisition impose any cognitive constraint on bilinguals’ lower-level L1 parsing and/or on their higher-level L1 processing? If so, in what way and to what extent? Furthermore, the study also intends to empirically establish whether the cognitive constraint as stipulated by the Linguistic Relativity Principle would be modulated by different onset age of learning the L2 (early vs. late). Findings of this study are discussed vis-à-vis the Linguistic Relativity Principle, L2 processing mechanism, and L2 literacy instruction.

One of the issues in the study of even is concerned with the ambiguous scope interpretations contributed by the focus adverb even. There have been two main camps: the lexical approach and the scope approach. Unlike English, which does not have distinct lexical items for even, Mandarin Chinese (Chinese hereafter) utilizes two constructions to express the notion of even: (1) The lian … dou ‘including … all’ construction, and (2) focus adverbs, such as shenzhi. This paper aims to demonstrate that the lian … dou construction expresses the typical implicatures in even sentences predicted by the scope theory. The seemingly deviant cases that have been argued for a lexical NPI even by Rooth, however, either are not construed in lian … dou sentences or are possibly rendered in shenzhi sentences provided by the pragmatic accommodation of existential presuppositions. In particular, dou syntactically marks focus scope and quantifies over a focus domain consisting of the focused phrase and its alternatives in presupposition. The results of this study thus shed further light on the general discussion of even in the sense that: on the one hand, the scope theory can make the right predictions, as evidenced by lian … dou; and, on the other hand, pragmatic scalar inference of the existential implicatures should be taken into consideration. Ultimately the expression of even manifests interfaces of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

There is a general view that pro-drop only occurs in languages with either a ‘rich’ inflectional system (Taraldsen 1978; Chomsky 1981; Jaeggli 1982; Suñer 1982), or in languages whose pronouns are agglutinating for case, number, or other nominal feature (Huang 1989; Neeleman & Szendrői 2005). The Vietnamese language fits neither of these categories. The explanation of the phenomenon of ellipsis of terms of address and reference (toa) in this paper is, therefore, not based on these morphological grounds. Rather, it is presented from a pragmatic perspective, which employs discourse analysis as its major methodology. The paper attempts to demonstrate the fact that although Vietnamese is not a pro-drop language in its traditional definition, ellipsis of toa in casual communication events among Vietnamese speakers is very common, and highly situational. In other words, these elliptic items in this case are referred to as references “in a form of situational (exophoric) presupposition” (Halliday & Hasan 1976: 145).