Kriszta Szendrői

Radical Pro Drop and the Morphology of Pronouns

We propose a new generalization governing the crosslinguistic distribution of radical pro drop (the type of pro drop found in Chinese). It occurs only in languages whose pronouns are agglutinating for case, number, or some other nominal feature. Other types of languages cannot omit pronouns freely, although they may have agreement-based pro drop. This generalization can for the most part be derived from three assumptions. (a) Spell-out rules for pronouns may target nonterminal categories. (b) Pro drop is zero spell-out (i.e., deletion) of regular pronouns. (c) Competition between spell-out rules is governed by the Elsewhere Principle. A full derivation relies on an acquisitional strategy motivated by the absence of negative evidence. We test our proposal using data from a sample of twenty languages and The World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath et al. 2005).

Focus and the interaction between syntax and pragmatics

A well-formed sentence satisfies all the syntactic, semantic, morphological and phonological principles of the grammar. If it does, the utterance is an expression of the given language. This does not imply, however, that the utterance of such a sentence can be used appropriately in any discourse context. Discourse is organized by information packaging devices, such as topic, focus etc. If the information structure of a particular expression does not match the information packaging required by the context, the expression is infelicitous in that context, albeit grammatically wellformed. For instance, the utterance in (1b) is not felicitous in the context of (1a), even though it is a well-formed expression of English.

Polydefinites in Greek: Ellipsis, close apposition and expletive determiners

Greek polydefinites are cases of adjectival modification where the adjective features its own definite determiner. We propose an account of the phenomenon that treats it as an instance of close apposition. Like close appositives, polydefinites in Greek instantiate multiple definite determiners, display a freedom in word order, and involve a restrictive interpretation. We propose that close apposition in Greek forms a complex DP out of two DPs which are in a sisterhood relationship through identification of the Referential roles within the DPs. This operation, semantically tantamount to set intersection, is constrained to apply only when the resulting set is not co-extensive with either initial set. This ensures the restrictive interpretation of one DP over the other. The fact that in polydefinites, it is always the DP containing the adjective that obligatorily satisfies the constraint has to do with the presence of noun ellipsis within that DP: (noun) ellipsis is known to come with a disanaphora requirement. We show that noun ellipsis is also responsible for the distribution of adjectives and adjective interpretations, as well as those discourse effects of polydefinites that have been thought of as the result of a DP-internal Focus projection. Finally, we make a proposal for the encoding of definiteness in Greek, consonant both with the existence of polydefinites in the language and with the prerequisite for set intersection among DPs: the overtly realized Greek definite determiner does not itself contribute an iota operator but preserves the denotation at the DP level. Our proposal thus deals not only with the multiple occurrence of definite determiners in a construction that picks out a single discourse referent, but also with the compositionality problem that such a situation gives rise to. In the final part we tie the cross-linguistic (un)availability of expletive determiners of the Greek type to the (un)availability of morphologically realized case.

A flexible approach to the mapping of intonational phrases

We propose that for the syntax–prosody mapping of clauses and intonational phrases, the notion of ‘clause’ should be determined in a flexible manner, making reference to the highest position to which the verbal material (i.e. the verb itself, the inflection, an auxiliary or a question particle) is overtly moved or inserted, together with the material in its specifier. This contrasts with rigid approaches, which assume that mapping is based on particular functional heads. We provide support for this proposal with data from the Bantu language Basaa and the Finno-Ugric language Hungarian, showing that a left-peripheral constituent may be prosodically outside the core intonational phrase even though its syntactic position is relatively low, as long as the verb is even lower, and, conversely, that a constituent may be phrased inside the core intonational phrase even if it is in a syntactically high position, as long as the verb is also high.

Acquisition of prosodic focus marking by English, French, and German three-, four-, five- and six-year-olds

Previous research on young childrens knowledge of prosodic focus marking has revealed an apparent paradox, with comprehension appearing to lag behind production. Comprehension of prosodic focus is difficult to study experimentally due to its subtle and ambiguous contribution to pragmatic meaning. We designed a novel comprehension task, which revealed that three- to six-year-old children show adult-like comprehension of the prosodic marking of subject and object focus. Our findings thus support the view that production does not precede comprehension in the acquisition of focus. We tested participants speaking English, German, and French. All three languages allow prosodic subject and object focus marking, but use additional syntactic marking to varying degrees (English: dispreferred; German: possible; French preferred). French participants produced fewer subject marked responses than English participants. We found no other cross-linguistic differences. Participants interpreted prosodic focus marking similarly and in an adult-like fashion in all three languages.

Early Association of Prosodic Focus with alleen 'only': Evidence from Eye Movements in the Visual-World Paradigm.

In three visual-world eye tracking studies, we investigated the processing of sentences containing the focus-sensitive operator alleen ‘only’ and different pitch accents, such as the Dutch Ik heb alleen SELDERIJ aan de brandweerman gegeven ‘I only gave CELERY to the fireman’ versus Ik heb alleen selderij aan de BRANDWEERMAN gegeven ‘I only gave celery to the FIREMAN’. Dutch, like English, allows accent shift to express different focus possibilities. Participants judged whether these utterances match different pictures: in Experiment 1 the Early Stress utterance matched the picture, in Experiment 2 both the Early and Late Stress utterance did, and in Experiment 3 neither did. We found that eye-gaze patterns start to diverge across the conditions already as the indirect object is being heard. Our data also indicate that participants perform anticipatory eye-movements based on the presence of prosodic focus during auditory sentence processing. Our investigation is the first to report the effect of varied prosodic accent placement on different arguments in sentences with a semantic operator, alleen ‘only’, on the time course of looks in the visual world paradigm. Using an operator in the visual world paradigm allowed us to confirm that prosodic focus information immediately gets integrated into the semantic parse of the proposition. Our study thus provides further evidence for fast, incremental prosodic focus processing in natural language.

When Determiners Abound: Implications for the Encoding of Definiteness

This chapter discusses the encoding of definiteness in Modern Greek. Modern Greek has a definite article, which at first sight seems to be performing the regular function of a definite determiner, in terms of contributing semantic definiteness. Definite noun phrases in Modern Greek obligatorily require the definite article. The chapter briefly presents the properties of the polydefinite construction. It turns to the implications of the analysis for the encoding of definiteness in the language. The chapter also argues that the semantic effects usually associated with definite determiners (e.g. existence and uniqueness assertion/ presupposition) are not achieved in Modern Greek through the overtly realized definite article(s). The Modern Greek definite determiner never makes a semantic contribution in terms of definiteness. Finally, the chapter addresses two potential problems for the proposed view of definiteness in Modern Greek. Keywords: definite article; definite determiner; Modern Greek; polydefinite construction; semantic contribution; semantic definiteness