The biolinguistic perspective regards the language faculty as an “organ of the body,” along with other cognitive systems. Adopting it, we expect to find three factors that interact to determine (I-) languages attained: genetic endowment (the topic of Universal Grammar), experience, and principles that are language- or even organism-independent. Research has naturally focused on I-languages and UG, the problems of descriptive and explanatory adequacy. The Principles-and-Parameters approach opened the possibility for serious investigation of the third factor, and the attempt to account for properties of language in terms of general considerations of computational efficiency, eliminating some of the technology postulated as specific to language and providing more principled explanation of linguistic phenomena

/pdf/three-factors-in-language-design-3ui5wze9cz.pdf

Three Factors in Language Design

This paper is devoted to the study of bare nominal arguments (i.e., determinerless NPs occurring in canonical argumental positions) from a crosslinguistic point of view. It is proposed that languages may vary in what they let their NPs denote. In some languages (like Chinese), NPs are argumental (names of kinds) and can thus occur freely without determiner in argument position; in others they are predicates (Romance), and this prevents NPs from occurring as arguments, unless the category D(eterminer) is projected. Finally, there are languages (like Germanic or Slavic) which allow both predicative and argumental NPs; these languages, being the ‘union’ of the previous two types, are expected to behave like Romance for certain aspects of their nominal system (the singular count portion) and like Chinese for others (the mass and plural portions). This hypothesis (the ‘Nominal Mapping Parameter’) is investigated not just through typological considerations, but also through a detailed contrastive analysis of bare arguments in Germanic (English) vs. Romance (Italian). Some general consequences of this view, which posits a limited variation in the mapping from syntax into semantics, for current theories of Universal Grammar and acquisition are considered.

/pdf/reference-to-kinds-across-language-4t96juuwlv.pdf

Reference to Kinds across Language

1. Introduction 2. A Preliminary Case for Conventional Implicatures 3. A Logic for Conventional Implicatures 4. Supplements 5. Expressive Content 6. The Supplement Relation: A Syntactic Analysis 7. A Look Outside Grice's Definition Appendix Bibliography

/pdf/the-logic-of-conventional-implicatures-1ywowc3e2k.pdf

The logic of conventional implicatures

Fragmentary utterances such as ‘short’ answers and subsentential XPs without linguistic antecedents are proposed to have fully sentential syntactic structures, subject to ellipsis. Ellipsis in these cases is preceded by A′-movement of the fragment to a clause-peripheral position; the combination of movement and ellipsis accounts for a wide range of connectivity and anti-connectivity effects in these structures. Fragment answers furthermore shed light on the nature of islands, and contrast with sluicing in triggering island effects; this is shown to follow from an articulated syntax and the PF theory of islands. Fragments without linguistic antecedents are argued to be compatible with an ellipsis analysis, and do not support direct interpretation approaches to these phenomena.

Fragments and ellipsis

One of the most astonishing features of human language is its capacity to convey information efficiently in context. Many theories provide informal accounts of communicative inference, yet there have been few successes in making precise, quantitative predictions about pragmatic reasoning. We examined judgments about simple referential communication games, modeling behavior in these games by assuming that speakers attempt to be informative and that listeners use Bayesian inference to recover speakers’ intended referents. Our model provides a close, parameter-free fit to human judgments, suggesting that the use of information-theoretic tools to predict pragmatic reasoning may lead to more effective formal models of communication.

/pdf/predicting-pragmatic-reasoning-in-language-games-2iech5yssd.pdf

Predicting pragmatic reasoning in language games.

Scalar implicature as a grammatical phenomenon

This paper argues that “covert” operations like Quantifier Raising (QR) can precede “overt” operations. Specifically we argue that there are overt operations that must take the output of QR as their input. If this argument is successful there are two interesting consequences for the theory of grammar. First, there cannot be a “covert” (i.e. post-spellout) component of the grammar. That is, what distinguishes operations that affect phonology from those that do not cannot be an arbitrary point in the derivation (“spellout”) before which the former apply and after which the latter do; all syntactic operations apply in the same component (henceforth ‘single component grammar’). Second, there must be some alternative means for distinguishing “overt” from “covert” operations. One such alternative, which we can call the ‘phonological theory of QR’, was suggested by Bobaljik (1995), Pesetsky (1998), Groat and O’Neil (1994). These authors proposed that the distinguishing property has to do with principles of the syntax-phonology interface. Assume that movement is a copying operation with phonology targeting one copy in a chain for pronunciation. The distinction between “overt” and “covert” movement, these authors suggest, is this: “overt” movements are the result of phonology targeting the head of a chain for

/pdf/extraposition-and-scope-a-case-for-overt-qr-24xaptg0bl.pdf

Extraposition and Scope: A case for overt QR*

This paper focuses on children’s interpretation of sentences containing negation and a quantifier (e.g., The detective didn’t find some guys). Recent studies suggest that, although children are capable of accessing inverse scope interpretations of such sentences, they resort to surface scope to a larger extent than adults. To account for children’s behavioral pattern, we propose a new factor at play in Truth Value Judgment tasks: the Question–Answer Requirement (QAR). According to the QAR, children (and adults) must interpret the target sentence that they evaluate as an answer to a question that is made salient by the discourse.

/pdf/the-question-answer-requirement-for-scope-assignment-2kbxc4df4o.pdf

The Question–Answer Requirement for scope assignment

Grice (1975) pointed out that the ignorance inferences normally drawn when disjunctive sentences are uttered are cancelled when it is presupposed that speakers are not going to provide all of the relevant information that they have available (e.g., in the context of a treasure hunt). This argues that ignorance inferences depend on the maxim of quantity for their derivation. Here it is argued that the situation with Scalar Implicatures is different. This is expected by the grammatical theory of Scalar Implicatures, but not by standard Gricean or neo-Gricean alternatives.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.7.5

 BibTeX info

/pdf/cancelling-the-maxim-of-quantity-another-challenge-for-a-3tsolrsmxt.pdf

Danny Fox

Papers

Scalar implicature as a grammatical phenomenon

Extraposition and Scope: A case for overt QR*

The Question–Answer Requirement for scope assignment

Cancelling the Maxim of Quantity: Another challenge for a Gricean theory of Scalar Implicatures

Is the best good enough