Ashwini Deo

Typological variation in the ergative morphology of Indo-Aryan languages

Abstract While New Indo-Aryan languages are a common example of morphological ergativity, the range of variation in ergative marking and agreement among these languages has not been examined in detail. The goals of this article are twofold. We first present a typology of ergative marking and agreement in Indo-Aryan languages, demonstrating that a progressive loss of ergative marking has occurred to varying degrees in different systems. This process is manifested in two distinct strategies of markedness reduction: loss of overt subject marking in the nominal domain and loss of marked agreement in the verbal domain. Using the framework of Optimality Theory, we account for the typology in terms of universal subhierarchies of markedness. Extending the analysis to dialect variation in one language, Marathi, we show that the dialect typology parallels the crosslinguistic typology, but only within the range permitted by changes already present in the parent language (Old Marathi). Furthermore, the dialect typology includes additional hybrid case-agreement systems predicted by our analysis.

Typology in variation: A probabilistic approach to 'be' and 'n't' in the Survey of English Dialects

Variation within grammars is a reflection of variation between grammars. Subject agreement and synthetic negation for the verb be show extraordinary local variation in the Survey of English Dialects (Orton et al., 1962–71). Extracting partial grammars of individuals, we confirm leveling patterns across person, number, and negation (Ihalainen, 1991; Cheshire, Edwards & Whittle, 1993; Cheshire, 1996). We find that individual variation bears striking structural resemblances to invariant dialect paradigms, and also reflects typologically observed markedness properties (Aissen, 1999). In the framework of Stochastic Optimality Theory (Boersma & Hayes, 2001), variable outputs of individual speakers are expected to be constrained by the same typological and markedness generalizations found crosslinguistically. The stochastic evaluation of candidate outputs in individual grammars reranks individual constraints by perturbing their ranking values, with the potential for stable variation between two near-identical rankings. The stochastic learning mechanism is sensitive to variable frequencies encountered in the linguistic environment, whether in geographical or social space. In addition to relating individual and group dialectal variation to typological variation (Kortmann, 1999; Anderwald, 2003), the findings suggest that an individual grammar is sensitively tuned to frequencies in the linguistic environment, leading to isolated loci of variability in the grammar rather than complete alternations of paradigms. A characteristic of linguistic variation that has emerged in distinct fields of enquiry is that variation within a single grammar bears a close resemblance to variation across grammars. Sociolinguistic studies, for instance, have long observed that ‘variation within the speech of a single speaker derives from the variation which exists between speakers’ (Bell, 1984: 151). In the present study, individual patterns of variation in subject–verb agreement with affirmative and negative be extracted from the Survey of English Dialects ( SED , Orton et al., 1962–71) show striking structural resemblances to patterns of interdialectal, or categorical, variation.

The metrical organization of classical sanskrit verse

In generative metrics, a meter is taken to be an abstract periodic template with a set of constraints mapping linguistic material onto it. Such templates, constrained by periodicity and line length, are usually limited in number. The repertoire of Classical Sanskrit verse meters is characterized by three features which contradict each of the above properties - (a) templates constituted by arbitrary syllable sequences without any overtly discernible periodic repetition: APERIODICITY, (b) absolute faithfulness of linguistic material to a given metrical template: INVARIANCE, and (c) a vast number of templates, ranging between 600-700: RICH REPERTOIRE. In this paper, I claim that in spite of apparent incompatibility, Sanskrit meters are based on the same principles of temporal organization as other versification traditions, and can be accounted for without significant alterations to existing assumptions about metrical structure. I demonstrate that a majority of aperiodic meters are, in fact, surface instantiations of a small set of underlying quantity-based periodic templates and that aperiodicity emerges from the complex mappings of linguistic material to these templates. Further, I argue that the appearance of a rich repertoire is an effect of nomenclatural choices and poetic convention and not variation at the level of underlying structure.

Reanalyzing the Complement Coercion Effect through a Generalized Lexical Semantics for Aspectual Verbs

Coercion verbs have been taken to include not only aspectual verbs likebegin, start, andfinish but also psychological verbs such as enjoy, endure, andsavorand control verbs liketry andattempt . Their unifying property has been assumed to be that they select for eventive complements (e.g. John began/enjoyed reading the book /the meeting ). On this view, the composition of an entity-denoting expre ssion with any coercion verb obligatorily gives rise to a type-mismatch, w hich can only be resolved by “coercing” the entity-denoting expression into an event-denoting expres sion. The experimental literature has presupposed such an event-selecting lexical semantics for all coercion verbs and interpreted processing and neurological phenomena as being reflexes of entity-to-event type-shifti ng. Recent evidence on the processing properties of coercion ve rbs however shows that when distinct semantic subclasses of coercion verbs are isolated, out of t he two main subclasses (aspectual and psychological verbs), only aspectual verbs trigger the expected p rocessing profile (Katsika et al 2012, Utt., et al., Lai et al., 2014). Crucially, these results call into questi on the standard account for the increased processing cost observed and in doing so they also call into question the linguistic analysis that gives rise to such an account. To address this issue, we focus on aspectual verbs and provid e a new lexical semantic analysis of aspectual verbs. On this analysis, aspectual verbs lexical ly select for structured individuals – entities that can be construed as one-dimensional directed path structur es (K ifka 1998) in some ontological dimension. This analysis has wide empirical coverage: it accounts for t he full range of complements that aspectual verbs legitimately combine with in their transitive uses, a nd it does so without appealing to any coercive entity-to-event type-shifting operations. Finally, the a nalysis allows for a simpler, conceptually grounded interpretation of the observed processing cost as being a re sult of exhaustive lexical retrieval (on the verb) and ambiguity resolution (on the complement).

Complement Coercion as the Processing of Aspectual Verbs: Evidence from Self-Paced Reading and fMRI

The so-called coercion verbs have been taken to select for an event as their complement, and to coerce an entity-denoting complement into an event as a resolution to the predictable type mismatch. This process is reported to manifest as additional processing cost that unpredictably has been associated with more than one cortical recruitment locus. Recent work has challenged the traditional view showing that the processing effect is observed only for aspectual verbs (e.g., begin) but not psychological verbs (e.g., enjoy) (Katsika et al. 2012), and that contra the traditional assumption aspectual verbs not only select for events but also for entity-denoting complements (Pinango and Deo 2015 ). Here, we test the hypothesis that aspectual verbs require their complement to be conceptualized as a structured individual. These verbs encode a set of functions that allow the construal of the structured individual as an axis along a dimension (e.g. spatial, eventive) afforded by the complement. The processing cost associated with the composition of the “coercion configuration” (animate subject + aspectual verb + entity-denoting complement) emerges from (A) exhaustive retrieval of the verbs’ lexical functions and (B) resolution of dimension ambiguity. Results from a self-paced reading and an fMRI experiment confirm that processing aspectual-verb sentences is more costly than psychological-verb counterparts, and that consistently with previous findings, comprehension is associated with both a Wernicke’s area and a left inferior frontal cortex activation. Crucially, this activation pattern tracks the necessary exhaustive lexical retrieval of the functions at the verb (Wernicke’s area) and the subsequent ambiguity resolution of the dimension at the complement (LIFG) required for the interpretation of the aspectual-verb utterance.

Extracting semantic information without linguistic cues from generic sentences

A probabilistic approach is adopted to propose a novel solution to a perplexing puzzle from semantic theory involving the interpretation of generic sentences.