Volume 6
2010
The co-editors of the sixth volume are Tabea IHSANE and Christopher LAENZLINGER.
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Maria Vender (maria.vender@gmail.com) & Denis Delfitto(denis.delfitto@univr.it)
In this paper, we present the results of an experimental protocol suggesting the existence of a close relationship between developmental dyslexia, the interpretation of negative sentences and Verbal Working Memory. Recent studies conducted on developmental dyslexia have demonstrated that it is strictly related to a deficit affecting the verbal component of Working Memory. Moreover, research on negation has revealed that negative sentences are more difficult to interpret than their affirmative counterparts. According to the Two-Step Simulation Hypothesis (Kaup et al. 2007), negative sentences require the construction and comparison of two representations, concerning respectively the expected and the asserted state of affairs: an operation remarkably demanding in terms of working memory resources. Significantly, the results of our experimental protocol, testing the comprehension of both active and passive negative sentences, have revealed that dyslexics show a very poor performance when they are asked to interpret negative sentences, whereas age-matched typically developing children accomplish the task almost effortlessly. These results are particularly interesting for two reasons: on the one hand, they corroborate the Two-Step Simulation Hypothesis, claiming that negative sentences are difficult to process, and, on the other hand, they provide new evidence to the hypothesis according to which dyslexia is related to a Verbal Working Memory deficit.
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Jacques Moeschler (Jacques.Moeschler@unige.ch)
In this paper, the question of the scope of negation is addressed, from a semantic and a pragmatic point of view. As we know, negation syntactically scopes over a predicate, generally the Verb, and this scope could either correspond or not to the pragmatic interpretation. When negation pragmatically scopes over a predicate, its use is descriptive (narrow scope, internal negation), whereas it is metalinguistic (wide scope, external negation) when it scopes over the whole proposition. This paper addresses the issue of semantic scope of negation, and the way pragmatic uses can be derived from their logical forms. It argues for a semantic wide scope of negation, with a pragmatic derivation for both descriptive and metalinguistic uses.
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Christopher Laenzlinger (Christopher.Laenzlinger@unige.ch)
The present work of comparative syntactic analysis focuses on fourteen languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, English, Swedish, German, Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Tatar, Japanese and Hungarian). A structural and transformational analysis based on the distribution of adverbs within the clause and adjectives within the noun phrase shows that there are three parallel domains. The lowest one is the thematic domain (vP/nP), which is completely vacated by the arguments. The Mittelfeld is the hierarchized domain of modifiers (adverbs/adjectives) and the domain of Case, PPs and agreement. The latter is dispersed in the middle of the clause in function of the Information Structure expressed. Within the noun phrase, the domain of DP/PP-adjuncts is situated higher than that of Case- and P-related arguments/complements, which is located above the domain of adjectives. Finally, the CP/DP layer is the domain of focalization, topicalization, quantification, etc. The transformations that apply to the clause and the noun phrase are very similar, namely: (i) movement of the verb/noun as remnant vP/nP, (ii) obligatory movement of the arguments to Case/PPs and agreement positions, (iii) extended pied-piped movement involving the noun/verb plus other constituents and (iv) movement of arguments and modifiers to the left periphery.
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Tanja Samardzic (Tanja.Samardzic@unige.ch), Lonneke van der Plas (Lonneke.vanderPlas@unige.ch), Goljihan Kashaeva (Goljihan.Kashaeva@unige.ch) & Paola Merlo (Paola.Merlo@unige.ch)
In this article, we examine the domain and the nature of cross-linguistic variation of the predicate-argument structure between English and French in an experimental and data-driven approach. We identify varying predicates by hand annotation of a corpus of 1000 French sentences with predicate-argument structure using a framework that has been developed for English. On the basis of a qualitative analysis of the identified varying predicates, we classify the predicates in four groups defined by the degree of cross-linguistic divergence in the predicates. We show that these two languages do not differ substantially in the inventory and the nature of verbal predicates, even though certain general grammatical properties may result in some variation at this level of representation. We argue that the proposed comparative study can provide a basis for identifying the level of specificity of representation needed for developing a framework for multilingual annotation of predicate-argument structure.
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Gregory Campbell Ellison (Gregory.Ellison@unige.ch)
Many current works assume that English has a two-tense paradigm, consisting only of past and non-past forms, and deem the auxiliary will to be a modal element. Using the cartographic approach to syntax, this article seeks to demonstrate that the traditional and more intuitive view that the language does in fact have legitimate future tense is correct, suggesting that what complicates the analysis is that will encodes features of both tense and modality. It goes on to offer an account of the futurate construction (in which present tense morphology is interpreted with future orientation) that is a syntactically rooted alternate to the commonly assumed pragmatic explanation. Finally, with this insight in mind, a theoretically uncomplicated account for mysterious sequence-of-tense observations in future-oriented English temporal adverbial clauses is proposed.
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Anamaria Benţea (Anamaria.Bentea@unige.ch)
This paper argues for a head raising analysis of restrictive relative clauses in Romanian, by focusing on subject and direct object relatives. After a general presentation of the main morphological and syntactic characteristics of this type of structures in Romanian, I will focus on their syntactic analysis, by adopting the head raising analysis to relative clauses as developed in Kayne (1994), Bianchi (1999, 2000) and de Vries (2002), couched within the cartographic approach to the structure of the CP (Rizzi 1997).
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Joanna Blochowiak (Joanna.Blochowiak@unige.ch)
This paper investigates some formal properties of the connective because. In particular, the property of factivity and different embedding contexts (negation, probably, believe) serve to differentiate between the genuine causal because and the inferential one. As a result, the analysis of because under wide scope negation allows me (i) to demonstrate that, contrary to traditional assumptions, the propositions linked by because are not always factive and (ii) to postulate the existence of another kind of because, namely the conjectural one. Moreover, the interaction of modal operators with because reveals the effect of switch from the causal reading to the inferential one when the main clause is modified by probably or believe.
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Lorenza Russo (Lorenza.Russo@unige.ch)
In this paper we discuss different types of problems that clitic pronouns can represent for a machine translation (MT) system, in order to highlight the necessity of automatic processing of this particular linguistic phenomenon. In particular, we focus on French clitic pronouns, for automatic translation from French to English. In some cases, we will refer to Italian clitics as well, from a comparative point of view, since they have a syntactic behavior quite similar to French clitics but also display a few differences. It is our aim to discuss difficult cases that often pose considerable difficulties in an MT system and which in our opinion need to be treated in order to produce both grammatically and syntactically correct translations.
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