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Middle voice verbs contrast with transitive active verbs in showing detransitivization. However, they also constitute a heterogeneous set syntactically and semantically, including anticausative, dispositional, inherent reflexive, and passive readings, with a syntax that seems more unergative or unaccusative depending on the reading and the language. Thus the category has defied attempts at a unified formal definition, leading some to suggest it is a family of constructions or a notional category. We present data on ber- middles in Indonesian and their allomorphs, which show all of the canonical types of middle voice readings but also several additional types not attested in other languages. These include some in which both of the corresponding active forms' arguments are expressed as direct arguments, where the subject of the active corresponds to the subject of the middle and the object is incorporated. Although this may seem to add additional reason to support a family of constructions analysis, we show that a single unified definition is possible. We propose that ber- suppresses one argument of the verb, but it is unspecified as to which is suppressed. Different independent argument realization possibilities of Indonesian conspire to sometimes suppress the subject and sometimes the object. Coupled with principles of implicit argument interpretation and lexical semantic and pragmatic factors, all of the middle readings of Indonesian arise from this one operation. Middles in other languages may in turn follow from the same analysis, but some of the available options may not arise owing to typological aspects of those languages, and a family of constructions analysis may even be necessary in those cases. Thus a syntactically and semantically unified analysis of middles is possible, albeit manifesting in different ways in different languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the interpretations of caused change-of-state predicates in Korean, and in particular non-culmination readings in which the result state inherent to the meaning of the predicate fails to obtain either fully (zero result) or partially. We argue that zero result readings require that the subject intended the coming about of the result state, while readings in which some result obtains (partially or completely) lack this entailment. Yet zero result interpretations are not reducible to 'try'-constructions since the former but not the latter require the direct causation. Furthermore, zero result readings arise only in active voice, a grammatical constraint not explicitly discussed for other languages. We argue that the full suite of possible readings arises from two factors: a sublexical modality over worlds conforming to the agent's intentions for zero result readings that arises from a special active voice inflection in Korean and a scalar semantics for change-of-state verbs that derives partial result readings as a type of degree achievement interpretation. An interaction of these two factors produce the range of possible readings for Korean change-of-state predicates. Finally, we discuss our account in relation to the Agent Control Hypothesis of Demirdache and Martin (2015) that agentivity properties of the subject are necessary for certain non-culmination readings, and suggest that Korean exemplifies the ACH provided that what counts as "control" includes intentionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hanford site is located in southeastern Washington State and stores more than 200,000 m (55 million gallons) of high-level radioactive waste resulting from the production and processing of plutonium. The waste is stored in large carbon steel tanks that were constructed between 1943 and 1986. The leak and structurally integrity of the more recently constructed double-shell tanks must be maintained until the waste can be removed from the tanks and encapsulated in glass logs for final disposal in a repository. There are a number of corrosion-related threats to the waste tanks, including stress-corrosion cracking, pitting corrosion, and corrosion at the liquid-air interface and in the vapor space. This article summarizes the corrosion management program at Hanford to mitigate these threats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard models of aspectual classes focus on event decompositional or featural distinctions. However, such classifications often over- or under-generate, and do not necessarily capture the temporal properties aspectual classifications are based on. I develop a predictive model of aspectual classes based on theories of scalar change, taking two independently motivated properties of scales as key: (a) how specific the predicate is about the theme's final state on the scale and (b) the scale's mereological complexity. The resultant classification accommodates the standard Vendler dynamic classes, plus additional classes that have proved difficult for prior approaches, and makes novel predictions about the relation of aspectual class and argument realization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many recent theories of causative/inchoative alternations adopt an anticausativization analysis, wherein the inchoative is derived from the causative via some operation that eliminates the causer argument from a verb's argument structure, provided the causer is semantically unspecified for agentivity (Levin and Rappaport Hovav ; Chierchia ; Koontz-Garboden ). We explore the properties of such an analysis for causative/inchoative alternations in Colloquial Sinhala, which are overtly indicated via a volitive/involitive stem contrast on the verb. We argue that the alternation arises from a causer suppression operation that deletes the causer syntactically but preserves it semantically, albeit formally marking it as unresolvable for agentivity. This prevents the verb from occurring in certain contexts requiring agentivity of a syntactically active argument, including the volitive stem, although such a reading may be derived pragmatically. The patient in turn shows a case alternation that we argue reflects two ways the suppressed causer can be interpreted-via reflexivization or existential binding. These data, we argue, support an anticausative analysis as elimination of causers unspecified for agentivity. They also expand the typology of ways agentivity is encoded and left unspecified, how causer elimination can occur, and what types of overt morphology can indicate the alternation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rappaport Hovav and Levin (2010) argue that verbs fall into (at least) two classes: result verbs (e.g., break) and manner verbs (e.g., run). No verb encodes both manner and result simultaneously, a truth-conditional fact that Rappaport Hovav and Levin argue follows from how verb meanings are composed at the level of event structure. However, a key issue in verifying this claim is isolating truth-conditional diagnostics for manner and result. We develop and review a number of such diagnostics and show that there are verbs that encode both meanings together, counterexemplifying their truth-conditional complementarity. However, using evidence from scopal adverbs, we argue that when the meanings occur together, they are encoded in a single, undecomposable manner+result root at event structure. This fact validates complementarity as a fact about how many and what types of roots may occur in an event structure, though it also argues for a richer typology of roots than is typically assumed, including those encoding manner and result simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ffectedness-usually construed as a persistent change in or impingement of an event participant-has been implicated in argument realization, lexical aspect, transitivity, and various syntactic operations. However, it is rarely given a precise, independently-motivated definition. Rather, it is often defined intuitively or diacritically, or reduced to the properties it is meant to explain, especially lexical aspect. I propose a semantic analysis of affectedness as a relationship between a theme participant that undergoes a change and a scale participant that measures the change (following Beavers , and Kennedy and Levin ). I justify this analysis by re-examining the empirical diagnostics for affectedness, and argue that affectedness is not reducible to lexical aspect, but is tightly correlated with it in a way that motivates an analysis involving two interdependent participants. This model also provides a precise way of defining the pervasive notion of degrees of affectedness, as a hierarchy of monotonically weakening truth conditions about the result state of the theme on the scale. This hierarchy further captures important subset relations among predicates regarding affectedness diagnostics, and ultimately brings together many of the above phenomena under a single, unified approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I examine ditransitive verbs that can describe caused possession (e.g. give, throw, send) by looking at their lexical aspectual properties, a methodology that has proved fruitful for the exploration of (in)transitive verbs. I show that as a whole these ditransitives share a number of aspectual properties in common with (in)transitive verbs of change of state and motion, suggesting a single shared underlying analysis, which I outline in terms of the scalar analysis of change of Beavers (forthcoming b). However, a difficulty of such an analysis is that for many ditransitives, the putative result state (caused possession) is cancellable, which complicates how factors such as telicity are calculated on most models of aspect. To account for this, I show that all ditransitives nonetheless entail at least some non-cancellable result, though there is considerable micro-variation in what that result is. The result is an aspectually based classification of ditransitives quite similar to previously proposed classes of (in)transitives. I also show that the analysis I develop may shed some light on why certain classes of ditransitives only rarely participate in the dative alternation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents three experiments that investigate the relationship between gradient and binary judgments of grammaticality. In the first two experiments, two different groups of participants judged sentences by the method of magnitude estimation and by the method of speeded grammaticality judgments in a single session. The two experiments involved identical sentence materials but they differed in the order in which the two procedures were applied. The results show a high correlation between the magnitude estimation data and the speeded grammaticality judgments data, both within a session and across the two sessions. The third experiment was a questionnaire study in which participants judged the same sentences as either grammatical or ungrammatical without time pressure. This experiment yielded results quite similar to those of the other two experiments. Thus gradient and binary judgments both provide valuable and reliable sources for linguistic theory when assessed in an experimentally controlled way. We present a model based on Signal Detection Theory which specifies how gradient grammaticality scores are mapped to binary grammaticality judgments. Finally, we compare our experimental results to existing corpus data in order to inquire into the relationship between grammaticality and frequency of usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates two ways goals of motion events can be expressed in so-called 'verb-framed' languages (Talmy 2000), focusing on the Japanese postpositions -made and -ni. It is typically assamed that these postpositions are both goal-markers, but differ in the exact goal semantics they encode, giving rise to non-overlapping distributions. Based on a range of distributional differences, I argue instead that they are mare radically distinct than this: -made marks the endpoint of event participants (including but not limited to paths of motion I. while -ni is a dative case that marks the goal argument of motion verbs. This suggests that it is possible for two functionally distinct participant markers to converge and give the appearance of being alternate ways of realizing the 'same' participant. Furthermore, adpositions such as -made, an inherently non-motion-encoding resource, represent aim understudied strategy for marking goals across languages, something that has ramifications for how motion typologies are constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses arguments that in the colloquial variety of English, the pronominal expressions of the form possessive pronoun + ass. It argues that your ass is semantically noncompositional and concludes that your ass is a pronoun, but a pronoun of a peculiar type since it appears in both reflexive and nonreflexive contexts. It give further arguments that your ass is a pronoun. The article considers its binding properties from the perspective of the binding theory, which predicts the existence of such a pronoun. It argues that your ass's unusual behavior is due to its semantic and social functions and that it can be accommodated once these are taken into account.