Helen de Hoop

Optimality theoretic semantics

The aim of this article is to elucidate the processes that characterize natural language interpretation. The basic hypothesis is that natural language interpretation can be characterized as an optimization problem. This innovative view on interpretation is shown to account for the crucial role of contextual information while avoiding certain well-known problems associated withcompositionality. This will become particularly clear in the context of incomplete expressions. Our approach takes as a point of departure total freedom ofinterpretation in combination with the parallel application of soft constraints on possible interpretations. These constraints can be contextual, intonational or syntactic in nature. The integration of pragmatic andsyntactic/semantic information in a system of ranked constraints is proposed to correctly derive the optimal interpretations in cases of nominal anaphorization, determiner quantification and elliptical comparatives.

Children's Optimal Interpretations of Indefinite Subjects and Objects

We find a general, language-independent pattern in child language acquisition in which there is a clear difference between subject and object noun phrases. On one hand, indefinite objects tend to be interpreted nonreferentially, independently of word order and across experiments and languages. On the other hand, indefinite subjects tend to be interpreted referentially in most contexts, even in contexts where adults would favor a nonreferential reading. In this article we offer an explanation for this pattern within the framework of bidirectional Optimality Theory. This explanation focuses on clarifying in what sense childrens interpretations deviate from the adult interpretations and clarifying the nature of the linguistic knowledge that the 4-year-old child will need to acquire to become a competent, adultlike speaker and hearer of her language.

Differential Case-Marking in Hindi

Publisher Summary This chapter describes how a model of case marking based on the two functions of case should be augmented with the notion of argument strength and shows how this extended approach derives split-case marking in the subject and object positions in Hindi. Hindi presents a serious problem for an analysis along the lines of the distinguishing function of case when it comes to differential subject marking. Differential subject marking in transitive clauses is restricted by the verb class and aspect in the sense that agents of perfective highly transitive predicates are assigned the ergative case. For the class of highly transitive predicates, there seems to be a general principle of preserving the relative distance between the subject and the object such that case marking appears when the object becomes more agent-like.

A semantic reanalysis of the partitive constraint

Abstract In this article a semantic reanalysis of the Partitive Constraint is given that is based on a distinction between determiners that quantify over entities and determiners that quantify over sets of entities. This leads to a straightforward analysis of problems that arose within earlier analyses of the Partitive Constraint. The reformulated Partitive Constraint simply states that NPs that are allowed in partitives must be entity-denoting if the upstairs determiner quantifies over entities, and set-denoting if the upstairs determiner quantifies over sets. NPs that denote restricted sets of entities satisfy the Partitive Constraint. That explains the presence of a modifying phrase in certain cases where the embedded NP is headed by a weak determiner. All in all, I will argue that the Partitive Constraint can and must be maintained as a semantic condition, and cannot be reduced to some kind of pragmatic principle.

Animacy information in human sentence processing: an incremental optimization of interpretation approach

To formalize and analyze the role of animacy information in on-line sentence comprehension, results of several on-line studies are compared and analyzed according to a new model of incremental optimization of interpretation. This model makes use of violable ranked constraints. To analyze the use of animacy information a set of four constraints is needed, namely Case, Selection, Precedence, and Prominence. It is shown that the pattern of constraint violations of these four constraints provide sufficient information to reflect the on-line effects of language comprehension studies in which animacy information played a crucial role. More specifically, the evaluation of sentences in which either case information or animacy information in combination with the selection restrictions of the verb were used, showed that the model can account for the ambiguity resolution with both sorts of information. The model was also successfully applied to the on-line processing of a more complex object relative structure in English.

Contrast in Discourse : Guest Editors' Introduction

Contrast is a discourse relation that involves a comparison between two situations that are similar in one way, but different in another. In this special issue on the relation of Contrast in discourse the following questions are explored. How is Contrast marked (by the speaker) and how is it identified (by the hearer)? What is the discourse function of establishing Contrast? How do we account for the similarities as well as the differences between different types of linguistic tools and what cross-linguistic variation do we find? The present article serves as a brief introduction to the studies presented in this special issue on Contrast. 1 INTERPRETATION OF CONTRAST IN DISCOURSE Consider the following fragment (boldface is ours): (1) The buildings are all two and three stories running half a block deep with brick and glass fronts. Most were built together, a few have narrow alleys between them. Many are still boarded up, a couple were burned out years ago. (John Grisham, The Rainmaker) In (1), the incomplete noun phrases introduced by the determiners in boldface are anaphorically linked to the discourse topic the buildings. There is yet another meaning effect here. The pairs of predicates in the second and third sentence are interpreted contrastively. The interpretation that emerges is that buildings are either built together or have narrow alleys between them, and they are either still boarded up, or burned out years ago. Where does this reading come from? Contrast is defined in Mann & Thompson (1988) as a multinuclear rhetorical relation with no more than two nuclei such that Journal of Semantics, Vol. 21, No. 2, c

The Interplay Between the Speaker's and the Hearer's Perspective

The neutralization of contrasts in form or meaning that is sometimes observed in language production and comprehension is at odds with the classical view that language is a systematic one-to-one pairing of forms and meanings. This special issue is concerned with patterns of forms and meanings in language. The papers in this special issue arose from a series of workshops that were organized to explore variants of bidirectional Optimality Theory and Game Theory as models of the interplay between the speaker’s and the hearer’s perspective.

How the brain processes violations of the grammatical norm: An fMRI study

Native speakers of Dutch do not always adhere to prescriptive grammar rules in their daily speech. These grammatical norm violations can elicit emotional reactions in language purists, mostly high-educated people, who claim that for them these constructions are truly ungrammatical. However, linguists generally assume that grammatical norm violations are in fact truly grammatical, especially when they occur frequently in a language. In an fMRI study we investigated the processing of grammatical norm violations in the brains of language purists, and compared them with truly grammatical and truly ungrammatical sentences. Grammatical norm violations were found to be unique in that their processing resembled not only the processing of truly grammatical sentences (in left medial Superior Frontal Gyrus and Angular Gyrus), but also that of truly ungrammatical sentences (in Inferior Frontal Gyrus), despite what theories of grammar would usually lead us to believe.

Guest Edito's Introduction

Optimality Theory (OT) was developed in the 1990s by Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky as a general theory of language and grammar. Crucial for OT is Smolenskys idea of identifying a connectionist notion of wellformedness (Harmony) with linguistic well-formedness. In OT a grammar consists of a set of well-formedness constraints. These constraints apply to representations of linguistic structures simultaneously. Moreover, they are soft, which means violable and potentially conflicting. At least an important subpart of these constraints is assumed to be shared by all languages. Individual languages rank these universal constraints differently in such a way that higher-ranked constraints have total dominance over lowerranked constraints. Possible output candidates for each underlying form are evaluated by means of these constraint rankings. The output that best satisfies the constraints is the optimal candidate and will be realized.