Boban Arsenijević

On the Absence of X-within-X Recursion in Human Grammar

We make these observations: (a) The direct embedding of a syntactic category X in itself (X-within-X) is surprisingly rare in human language, if it exists at all. (b) Indirect self-embedding (mediated by a sequence of other categories, and usually a phase boundary) systematically goes along with intensionality effects; the embedding and the embedded XP exhibit different behavior at the semantic interface. We argue that these constraints on recursion follow from the way in which single-cycle derivations organize semantic information in grammar.

Conjunct Agreement and Gender in South Slavic: From Theory to Experiments to Theory

Abstract:Agreement with coordinated subjects in Slavic languages has recently seen a rapid increase in theoretical and experimental approaches, contributing to a wider theoretical discussion on the locus of agreement in grammar (cf. Marušič, Nevins, and Saksida 2007; Bošković 2009; Marušič, Nevins, and Badecker 2015). This paper revisits the theoretical predictions proposed for conjunction agreement in a group of South Slavic languages, with a special focus on gender agreement. The paper is based on two experiments involving speakers of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) and Slovenian (Sln). Experiment 1 is an elicited production experiment investigating preverbal-conjunct agreement, while Experiment 2 investigates postverbal-conjunct agreement. The data provide experimental evidence discriminating between syntax proper and distributed-agreement models in terms of their ability to account for preverbal highest-conjunct agreement and present a theoretical mechanism for the distinction between default agreement (which has a fixed number and gender, independent of the value of each conjunct) and resolved agreement (which computes number and gender based on the values of each conjunct and must resolve potential conflicts). Focusing on the variability in the gender-agreement ratio across nine combinations, the experimental results for BCS and Sln morphosyntax challenge the notion of gender markedness that is generally posited for South Slavic languages.

Studies in the composition and decomposition of event predicates

1. Boban Arsenijevic, Berit Gehrke & Rafael Marin: Introduction: The (De)composition of Event Predicates .- 2. Anita Mittwoch: On the Criteria for Distinguishing Accomplishments from Activities, and Two Types of Aspectual Misfits .- 3. Beth Levin & Malka Rappaport Hovav: Lexicalized Meaning and Manner/Result Complementarity .- 4. Fabienne Martin: Oriented Adverbs and Object Experiencer Psych-verbs .- 5. M. Ryan Bochnak: Two Sources of Scalarity within the Verb Phrase .- 6. Jens Fleischhauer: Interaction of Telicity and Degree Gradation in Change of State Verbs .- 7. Kyle Rawlins: On Adverbs of (Space and) Time .- 8. Oliver Bott: The Processing Domain of Aspectual Information .- 9. Evie Malaia, Ronnie B. Wilbur & Christine Weber-Fox: Event End-Point Primes the Undergoer Argument: Neurobiological Bases of Event Structure Processing

On the Number-Gender (In)dependence in Agreement with Coordinated Subjects

This paper examines the availability of single-conjunct agreement in number and gender in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. Reported are the results of an experiment in which coordinated singulars are included, as well as disjunction and negative-concord conjunction, next to the typically examined conjoined plurals. The research shows that, contra the general assumptions in the literature (Marušič, Nevins, and Saksida 2007, Marušič, Nevins, and Badecker 2015, Bošković 2009) but in line with earlier research (Moskovljević 1983, Bojović 2003), single-conjunct agreement does occur with coordinated singulars, especially in gender, even if less frequently. This paper shows that (i) first-conjunct agreement in gender preverbally and even last-conjunct agreement postverbally are produced above error level, and that the availability of collective interpretations for the coordinated subject influences the acceptability of the different agreement patterns available, and (ii) number and gender agreement do not have to target the same constituent. The findings shed light on the relation between the features of number and gender with regard to the issues of their bundling and simultaneous agreement, where the experimental results suggest that, while number tends to agree in a pattern that fits either semantic agreement or agreement with the entire conjunction, gender prefers to target single members of coordination, the first or the last. We speculate that a degree of “attraction” obtains, whereby number may attract gender to agree with the entire conjunction or gender may attract number to agree with a single conjunct. The results are used to compare two analyses offered in the literature—Marušič, Nevins, and Saksida 2007/Marušič, Nevins, and Badecker 2015 and Bošković 2009—showing that our empirical findings are problematic for both, but give a certain advantage to Marušič and his co-authors.

When linearity prevails over hierarchy in syntax

Significance Syntactic distance is standardly measured hierarchically only by counting the nodes in a tree-like structure. The dominance of hierarchy over the other logically possible measure of distance—e.g., counting words in a linear order—stems from a large body of research. We show a strong preference for the linear strategy in coordination structures in South Slavic languages, with a design comparing agreement controllers that can come either before or after their target. A large-scale study over six geographically and linguistically distinct varieties discovered remarkable uniformity in this preference. Variation discovered was mostly intraindividual, strongly suggesting that a language can entertain synchronous “multiple grammars,” the most striking of which is the one requiring direct reference to linear order. Hierarchical structure has been cherished as a grammatical universal. We use experimental methods to show where linear order is also a relevant syntactic relation. An identical methodology and design were used across six research sites on South Slavic languages. Experimental results show that in certain configurations, grammatical production can in fact favor linear order over hierarchical structure. However, these findings are limited to coordinate structures and distinct from the kind of production errors found with comparable configurations such as “attraction” errors. The results demonstrate that agreement morphology may be computed in a series of steps, one of which is partly independent from syntactic hierarchy.

The (De)composition of Event Predicates

This chapter offers an overview of the advancements made in the semantic theory of events and introduces its central notions and current issues to serve as background information relevant for the contributions included in the volume. It is structured around two main axes: compositional and decompositional approaches to the semantics of event predicates. We argue that, while composition and decomposition are at times treated as two competing ways to deal with the semantics of event predicates, they can actually be seen as two sides of the same coin, as essential parts of the subatomic semantics of event predicates. Along with these two axes, we address how adverbial modification served as modification for event semantics as well as its use as diagnostics for the structural complexity or for particular properties of eventualities, such as (a)telicity or scalarity.

Introduction: Agreement Phenomena in Slavic Languages

This special issue of the Journal of Slavic linguistics is dedicated to papers on agreement phenomena in Slavic languages. The studies presented in this issue were selected from the program of the Agreement Across Borders Conference 2015. The conference was held at the University of Zadar on 15–16 June 2015 as part of the project Coordinated Research of Experimental Morphosyntax of South Slavic Languages (EMSS) in collaboration with one of project partners, the Linguistics Department at the University of Zadar, Croatia. The topic of the conference was agreement as a grammatical phenomenon, covering a variety of languages (e.g., French, German, Greek, Neo-Aramaic, Polish, Russian, South Slavic), a number of categories (e.g., verbs, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals), features, (person, number, and gender), and using a wide range of methodological approaches, reaching from elicited production, speed-accuracy trade off, ERP, and corpus analyses. One of the priorities of the conference was to initiate a discussion of methodological issues in the research of agreement, referring both to theoretical linguistics as well as to experimental psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. The conference succeeded in crossing the traditional borders of research on agreement by bringing together linguists studying agreement and related phenomena theoretically and those with a particular focus on empirical and especially experimental work. Many contributions pointed to the great challenge in the study of morphosyntactic agreement that lies in the numerous observable instances of interand intraspeaker variation in agreement patterns. The conclusion from the meeting was that these can only be adequately accounted for on the basis of new and probably combined methods in empirical research into this phenomenon. The EMSS project is led by Andrew Nevins and coordinated by Jana Willer-Gold at University College London. It studies agreement patterns in language varieties of Slovenian (Sln) and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) with a uniform psycholinguistic methodology in six locations: two in Serbia (University of Niš and University of Novi Sad), two in Croatia (University of Zadar and University of Zagreb), one in Bosnia and Herzegovina (University of Sarajevo), and one in Slovenia (University of Nova Gorica). The project has

Regular and honorary membership: on two kinds of deverbal nouns in Serbo-Croatian

Serbo-Croatian deverbal nouns in -VV.je show a striking dichotomy along three apparently unrelated dimensions - productivity, semantic transparency and prosodic faithfulness to the base. Nominalisations from imperfective verbs display full productivity, semantic transparency, and a prosodic pattern attested in the paradigm of the verb. Those from perfective verbs are derived only from a subset of S-C perfective verbs, semantically non-transparent, and display a prosodic pattern unattested in the paradigm of the verb. We argue that this match across different dimensions has a role in delimiting the domain of the paradigm of the verbal lexeme, and, consequently, in delimiting the verbal domain. We show that a prosodic pattern different from all the patterns attested in the verbs paradigm marks that the morphological complex containing the stem of the verb is a new separate lexeme. Our analysis has consequences for the theory of paradigms. We employ Lexical Conservatism (Steriade 1997) to model different levels of relatedness in the lexicon, making clear predictions on how forms converge and diverge overtime. Our model derives a coconut-like architecture of the lexicon, whose soft core contains paradigmatic derivations, and the outer layers involve the domains of increasingly constrained productivity, idiosyncratic semantics and new prosodic shapes.

Rečenični fokus u engleskom i srpskom jeziku by Sabina Halupka-Rešetar (review)

Sabina Halupka-Resetar. Recnicni fokus u engleskom i srpskom jeziku. Faculty of Philosophy, Novi Sad, Serbia, 2011. 1. Introduction While information structure and discourse functions have been at the center of attention of functional and cognitive linguists since the earliest days of these approaches, these domains had to fight their way into more formal schools of grammar, especially generative syntactic frameworks. Recent publications show that they have fully succeeded, as very strong arguments have been provided for the views that the relevant notions do figure as syntactic features, and moreover that such features enter the syntactic generation already at the zero level--the Numeration (see especially Aboh 2010). Even approaches that dispense with information structure in narrow syntax still treat it syntactically at its interface with phonology and/or semantics (see, e.g., Neeleman et al. 2009). The book under review takes on the challenging task of presenting two intersecting oppositions: an empirical one between the structural effects of information structure in what is traditionally labeled a configurational versus a non-/discourse-configurational language and one that is rather methodological, between a functionalist discourse-centered theoretical paradigm and one that is formal and syntax-centered. More precisely, it investigates the syntax of focus in English and Serbian from the perspectives of the functional Prague school and of the generative Minimalist Program. These oppositions are assessed in parallel, each of them receiving its own descriptive and theoretical treatment, and contrastive and comparative perspectives are only taken sporadically, where they are particularly feasible for the discussion of the respective issues. Finally, a hybrid model is presented, analyzing the relevant data with a combined inventory of methodological tools and architectural views of grammar. The book is based on research that led to the authors doctoral dissertation. Its practical disadvantage with respect to the potential readership is that it is written in Serbian. This review is an attempt to at least partially compensate, by summarizing and discussing the contributions that it makes. The book is organized into six chapters. Alongside those aimed at introducing the problem and concluding the discussion (chapters 1 and 6, respectively), they include one that discusses the two types of approaches targeted (chapter 2), a chapter that presents the empirical situation and contours of the theoretical picture in each of the two languages (chapter 3), another one that makes a critical appraisal of the theoretical approaches discussed, pointing out their main problems and advantages (chapter 4), and finally a chapter that presents an original framework. This last combines the advantages of both the functional and the formal syntactic views of information structure and applies them to the two languages (chapter 5). There are also five appendices, which contain the questionnaires and other material used in the research experiments constituting the empirical basis of the book. The following section of this review describes the contents of the book, chapter by chapter. This is followed by a section that critically assesses these contents. 2. Contents of the Book The author explicitly announces in the Introduction chapter that she is a generative linguist. However, the presentation of several different functional approaches to the issues of information structuring that follows in chapter 2 is not only highly objective but also manifests a high level of understanding. It is along some dimensions even more exhaustive than the presentation of the generative syntactic theories. An overview of the treatment of information structure related issues before the 20th century is used to set the ground for a detailed overview of the Prague school, which is followed by a section presenting the views of Hallidays Systemic Grammar. …