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Highlights: [•] How do adults solve privative ambiguities and interpret “the only one”? [•] Do adults always minimally commit themselves to the weaker interpretation? [•] We show that context takes precedence over truth conditional considerations. [•] We propose a Principle of Maximal Exploitation: if context is provided, use it. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Prosody has a large impact on language processing. We contrast two views of how prosody and intonation might exert their effects. On a ‘prosodic packaging’ approach, prosodic boundaries structure the linguistic input into perceptual and memory units, with the consequence that material in earlier packages is less accessible for linguistic processing than material in the current package. This approach claims that such lessened accessibility holds true for the comprehension of all constructions, regardless of the particular kind of linguistic dependency that needs to be established using the earlier constituent. A ‘specialized role’ approach, in contrast, attributes to prosodic boundaries a role in making grouping decisions when building hierarchical structure, but attributes to pitch accents the major role in determining the accessibility of a constituent. The results of four listening studies with replacive sentences (Diane thought Patrick was entertaining, not Louise) support the predictions of the specialized role hypothesis over the prosodic packaging approach. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Buli is an Oti-Volta tone language spoken in Northern Ghana. This paper outlines the basic features of its tonal system and explores whether and in which way pitch respectively phonemic tone is approached as a means to indicate the pragmatic category of focus. Pursued are cases with focus-related surface tone changes as well as cases where pitch could help to disambiguate between broad and narrow foci. It is argued that focus is not consistently encoded by pitch or tone. Parallel findings for the closely related languages Kɔnni and Dagbani suggest that the apparent lack of significant prosodic focus signals in Buli might pertain to a larger group of tonal languages of the Gur family. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The Japanese existential construction can be used either to assert the presence of some entity in a certain location or to indicate that something is an integral part of another. It has been noted, however, that the part–whole reading seems to disappear when the nominative NP precedes the locative PP. Contrary to the existing analyses which make appeal to some constraint on movement to derive this disambiguation effect, this paper presents an information structural account. The analysis is empirically supported by the lack of disambiguation in embedded contexts and the significant role of contextual information that encourages the ‘missing’ part–whole interpretation to re-emerge. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The status of words like either, both and neither, here referred to as ‘correlative adverbs’ or ‘correlatives’, is controversial. Using relevant data from Germanic languages. I shall show that the analyses of Schwarz (1999) and Larson (1985) are inadequate. Instead, I will suggest an analysis based on the assumptions in Hendriks (2001a,b, 2002): that correlatives are focus particles. Their syntactic position is discussed with the hypothesis that focus particles are adverbs, and I suggest. inspired by the adverb hierarchies of Cinque (1997), that there is a designated Correlative Phrase position. My analysis includes overt and covert movement, which explains some correlations between different interpretations of scope and syntactic positions, as discussed also by Larson (1985) and Bayer (1996). My analysis not only gives an account of this kind of scope ambiguity, but also accounts for the fact that each correlative is associated with only one conjunction; that with phrasal coordination, the correlative can be displaced from the conjunction phrase; and that with sentential coordination, the correlative can be part of the first conjunct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a theory of the meaning-form relation based on ranked and violable constraints [A. Prince, P. Smolensky, 1993. Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and University of Colorado, Boulder], using the English genitive construction as a testing ground. Our main thesis is that partially ordered optimality-theoretic grammars allow us to relate four apparently independent empirical phenomena: (i) categorical grammaticality contrasts; (ii) variation and preferences in expression; (iii) ambiguity and preferences in interpretation; (iv) lexical organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this introductory article is to provide a background to the articles contained in this special issue of Lingua that centers around variation in form, variation in meaning, and markedness. Theoretical and empirical considerations are brought together in this special issue in which the linguistic disciplines that are covered diverge. The different contributions deal with language processing, first language acquisition, language contact, functional-typology and generative morphology and syntax. Several papers in this special issue argue in favour of an Optimality Theoretic analysis of the data under discussion. This is not a coincidence, given that Optimality Theory is claimed to be a formal theory of markedness (cf. Gilbers and De Hoop, 1998, Lingua, 104, 1 for an introduction to OT). In Section 1, we present two hypotheses dealing with the relation between variation in form and variation in meaning. We discuss several dimensions along which markedness of forms and meanings can be measured in Section 2. In the final section we discuss the possibility that the concept of bidirectional optimization accounts for markedness as well as variation in form versus variation in meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the view of syntactic movement as driven by the need to attract and check formal features (Chomsky, 1995), what appears to be “movement” reduces to Generalized Pied-Piping (GPP), an operation that carries along the features of the category that contains the attracted feature. This study addresses the question of whether GPP is constrained by minimality just as the core feature-checking operation Attract is constrained by the Minimal Link Condition. Phenomena where A-movement and A′-movement interact are shown to suggest that GPP is immune to such a constraint. Thus, the asymmetry with respect to feature-minimality in movement relations in general (i.e., a certain feature cannot cross over another feature of the same type while others can) is captured by the operational asymmetry between Attract and GPP, which is naturally understood if we think of CHL as a derivational system. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]