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Usage-based linguistics abounds with studies that use statistical classification models to analyze either textual corpus data or behavioral experimental data. Yet, before we can draw conclusions from statistical models of empirical data that we can feed back into cognitive linguistic theory, we need to assess whether the text-based models are cognitively plausible and whether the behavior- based models are linguistically accurate. In this paper, we review four case studies that evaluate statistical classification models of richly annotated linguistic data by explicitly comparing the performance of a corpus-based model to the behavior of native speakers. The data come from four different languages (Arabic, English, Estonian, and Russian) and pertain to both lexical as well as syntactic near-synonymy. We show that behavioral evidence is needed in order to fine tune and improve statistical models built on data from a corpus. We argue that methodological pluralism is the key for a cognitively realistic linguistic theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is abundant research that deals with diathesis alternations, such as the locative alternation (LA), because they can give us information about the interface between syntax and the lexicon. However, the literature dealing with the LA has frequently ignored the relation that exists between the crosslinguistically reduced set of prepositions that can occur in such construction. This paper postulates that the prepositions involved in the LA have either a locative or a possessive meaning, providing evidence from the comparison of Spanish and English, inter alia. These prepositions share a common underlying structure and are related by means of a simple derivation, following Freeze's (Language 68: 553-595, 1992) account of locative and possessive predication. This prepositional phrase will occupy the lower XP position in a construction with unaccusative properties D [V [XP]]], as developed in Zubizarreta & Oh (On the syntactic composition of manner and motion, linguistic inquiry monograph, MIT Press, 2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of ditransitivity is explored at the lexical, syntactic and surface levels. By focusing on several types of ditransitive sentences in Spanish it is revealed that there is a triple dissociation between these levels. First, it is shown that the availability of a ditransitive structure (syntactic level) for a certain verb does not depend on the verb being ditransitive (lexical level). Second, causative structures with dative arguments are shown to be ditransitive at the surface level, but not to have an underlying ditransitive structure. Finally, cases of unaccusative sentences with dative arguments are analysed as instances of ditransitive structures without lexical or surface ditransitivity. The paper argues that ditransitivity is at best a pre-theoretical, descriptive notion, and that ditransitive verbs in fact belong to Levin's (Papers from The Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 35: 223-247, 1999) non-core transitives: ditransitives are just transitives compatible with taking a relation between two individuals as complement. This analysis accounts for the intralinguistic and crosslinguistic variation in the expression of the relation, both in terms of type (two DPs related by a transitive preposition or an applicative head) and number of objects realized or omitted. Although the idea that there is no syntactic ditransitivity - that is, that no single verbal head can take two complements - has been implicit in most generative work of the last two decades, it has not been directly explored. This investigation leads to the conclusion that a syntactic property, binary branching, is at the basis of the impossibility of syntactic and lexical ditransitivity. Thus, this result suggests that syntax restricts not only possible structures but possible lexical meanings as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to assess motion events in Ilami Kurdish through Talmy's binary typology (1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and lexical descriptions: Vol. 3. Grammatical categories and the lexicon, 36-149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2000a. Toward a cognitive semantics. Vol. 1: Concept structuring system. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2000b. Toward a cognitive semantics. Vol. 2: Typology and process in concept structuring. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) according to which, languages could be classified as 'Satellite-framed' or 'Verb-framed'. Following Berman and Slobin's approach (1994. Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum) in using 'The Frog Story', which paved the way for evaluating numerous languages in terms of their motion verbs, we used this elicitation tool for gathering Kurdish data. Results reveal that Ilami tends towards Satellite-framed languages as the concept of Path is often expressed by the use of satellites. As far as analysis of Path in Kurdish is taken into account, this concept has been analyzed with the help of different criteria proposed by Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2008. Path salience in motion events. In Jiansheng Gu, Elena Lieven, Nancy Budwig, Susan Ervin Tripp, Keiko Nakamura & Şeyda Özçalışkan (eds.), Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language: Research in the tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin, 403-414. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum) and typologically compared with other languages too. It seems that in addition to the oral nature of Ilami and its contact with Persian language, 'the syntactic sensitivity of satellites' as a new motivation, also affects the amount of details accompanying the Path concept in this dialect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of the present paper is the process of morphological reanalysis which extensively affected the Old English minor paradigms, contributing to their subsequent complete restructuring. The development is manifested in a marked inclination of the nouns considered minor (i.e. unproductive) to adopt the inflectional endings of the expansive types (such as a-stems, ōō-stems or n-stems). The tendency can be particularly well seen in the formations containing the original u-stems, which constituted a separate group in Germanic, known in the standard historical grammars as the u-declension. The available textual material proves that members of this relatively small group of nouns tend to fluctuate between the inherited and innovative paradigmatic patterns, testifying thus to a growing instability of this declensional type. The fluctuation between the two competing types can be seen in forms of the nominative/accusative plural of the masculine paradigm, where alongside the expected - a ending, forms in - as, extended from the productive a-paradigm, are attested ( suna ~ sunas, wuda ~ wudas). Similarly, the inherited genitive and dative singular ending - a regularly alternates with the innovative - es and - e markers ( felda ~ feldes [[gen.]], felda ~ felde [[dat.]]). Traces of this progressing tendency can also be detected in feminine stems, where the competition takes place between the inherited inflection and the expanding strong feminine inflection ( ōō-stems). Aimed at presenting a systematic account of the newly emerging tendency, this investigation will seek to determine the extent and the pattern of dissemination of the productive inflectional endings in the original u-stems. Due attention will be paid to the niceties of the process of gradual reorganisation of the u-stem paradigm, its consequences in the later inflectional system of English, as well as its theoretical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses two types of verbal alternation in Brazilian Portuguese that have the same profiled syntactic structure, but differ in their semantic representations and in their lexical syntactic structures. The first case is O dentista extraiu o dente do João 'The dentist extracted John's tooth', alternating with O João extraiu o dente 'João extracted his tooth'. We can interpret the alternate sentence as meaning that João had someone extract his tooth. The second case is Alguém quebrou o braço do João 'Someone broke John's arm', alternating with João quebrou o braço 'João broke his arm'. We can interpret the alternate sentence as João being the possessor of the arm that suffers the break. Based on a more finegrained approach of thematic roles, and based on a semantic representation of the events encoded by these verbs, I show here that these two forms have different interpretations due to different lexical semantic properties. Besides, these lexical semantic differences, encoded in the root elements of the verbs, are responsible for projecting distinct lexical syntactic structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary linguistics the debate about the status and character of morphology is as recurrent as it is many-sided. Succinctly put, whereas some authors disperse morphological facts over the main grammatical components, others treat morphology as a subcomponent of the lexicon whose units interact in a regular and systematic way with phonology, syntax and semantics. I contend that it is this lexical status -- which has been characterized as interfacial -- that gives morphology its shape and character. This paper reviews the different ways the lexiconmorphology is conceived, and located within the grammar, by some of the most representative models put forward in recent years, and goes through the properties that are taken to define a linguistic component. In order to illustrate the interaction of phonology, semantics and syntax that takes place whenever lexicon-morphology is involved, a brief discussion is included of a case of word-formation that clearly reveals the interface nature of morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study compares compositional processes involved in syntax on the one hand and word formation on the other hand within the Generative Lexicon framework. It first shows how semantic types incorporated in a structured lexical entry are acted on by different compositional mechanisms in predicates headed by verbs and in modification constructions, and then analyzes non-evaluative suffixation in Spanish in order to determine how the head suffix interacts with the meaning of the base word. It is concluded that different parts of the lexical entry of the selected component (syntactic argument or morphological base) can be accessed in both phrase construction and word formation, but the mechanisms underlying complex syntactic and morphological structures differ in significant ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an introduction to Nanosyntax – an approach to the syntax/lexicon interaction originating from work by Michal Starke. I present some of the motivation for allowing lexical items to replace whole phrases rather than only terminal elements, present the basic principles taken to govern the lexicalization procedure and show how syncretism patterns are handled in Nanosyntax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expression of standard negation by means of manual and/or non-manual markers has been described for a considerable number of sign languages. Typological comparisons have revealed an intriguing dichotomy: while some sign languages require a manual negative element in negative clauses (manual-dominant sign languages), in others negation can be realized by a non-manual marker alone (in particular a headshake; non-manual-dominant sign languages). We are here adding data from Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) to the picture, and we demonstrate that NGT belongs to the latter group. Still, detailed comparison suggests that NGT patterns differently from other non-manual-dominant sign languages, thereby improving our understanding of the typological variation in this domain. A novel contribution of the present study is that it is based on naturalistic corpus data, showing more variation than often found in elicitation and grammaticality judgment studies of sign languages, but also presenting new problems of interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Duality of Patterning, one of Hockett's (1960) proposed design features unique to human language, refers in part to the arrangements of a relatively small stock of distinguishable meaningless sounds which are combined to create a potentially infinite set of morphemes. Literature regarding the emergence of this design feature is less abundant than that exploring other levels of structure as focus is more often given to the emergence of syntax. In an effort to explore where combinatorial structure of meaningless elements arises the results of two pilot experiments are presented within which we observe human participants modifying a small lexicon of visual symbols through a process of iterated learning. As this lexicon evolves there is evidence that it becomes simpler and more learnable, more easily transmitted. I argue that these features are a consequence of spontaneous emergence of combinatorial, sub-lexical structure in the lexicon, that the pattern of emergence is more complex than the most widely espoused explanation suggests, and I propose ways in which future work can build on what we learn from these pilot experiments to confirm this hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insights regarding the theatrical lexicon in Latin language. The author states that the theatrical lexicon can be considered as a structured technical lexicon, denominative, and nomenclatural. She says that the use of theatrical lexicon as an actant can offer sequential and classematic relationships which are combined with the plot resulting to an assembly of literature and language. She mentions that the assembly will open several opportunities for the analysis of Latin theatrical plays.

In Modern European Portuguese the adverb sempre can have two different interpretations: a confirmative, non-temporal, and a temporal/aspectual interpretation. In the confirmative interpretation sempre means ‘after all’, and in the temporal/aspectual interpretation it means ‘always’. Each interpretation correlates with the position sempre occupies in the sentence. In this article we compare the behavior of sempre in modern varieties of Portuguese and in Medieval Portuguese (MP). Modern European Portuguese (MEP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) behave differently as to the placement and interpretation of sempre. This situation is assumed in the literature as deriving from aspects of clause structure, such as verb movement and licensing of null subjects (Brito, Clause structure, subject positions and verb movement: About the position of sempre in European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, John Benjamins, 2001; Ambar, Gonzaga and Negrão, Tense, quantification and clause structure in EP and BP, John Benjamins, 2004, among others). In MP, however, sempre is always temporal/aspectual and can be placed before or after the verb. Therefore, we argue that the variation found in MP does not relate to structural differences of the kind that exist between MEP and BP, but rather to the inherent semantics of sempre. We propose that somewhere during the history of Portuguese there was a specialization of the adverb sempre, that resulted in the fact that its syntactic placement derives its meaning. In fact, we show that the first occurrences of non-temporal sempre appeared during the Classical Portuguese period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Judgments about the grammaticality/acceptability of sentences are the most widely used data source in the syntactic literature. Typically, syntacticians rely on their own judgments, or those of a small number of colleagues. Although a number of researchers have argued that this is problematic, there is little research which systematically compares professional linguists' intuitions with those of linguistically naive speakers. This article examines linguists' and nonlinguists' judgments about one particular structure: questions with long distance dependencies. Linguists' judgments are shown to diverge from those of nonlinguists. These differences could be due to theoretical commitments (the conviction that linguistic processes apply ‘across the board’, and hence all sentences with the same syntactic structure should be equally grammatical) or to differences in exposure (the constructed examples of this structure found in the syntactic literature are very unrepresentative of ordinary usage). Whichever of these explanations turns out to be correct, it is clear that linguists' judgments are not representative of the population as a whole, and hence syntacticians should not rely on their own intuitions when testing their theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Double Negation languages like Dutch and German still exhibit constructions, such as Dutch niemand niet ‘nobody not’ or nooit geen ‘nothing no’, that seem to have a Negative Concord reading. Since these constructions normally have an emphatic reading, they are called Emphatic Multiple Negative Expressions (EMNEs). In this article I discuss the difference between so-called EMNEs and plain Negative Concord constructions. I demonstrate that EMNEs are fundamentally different from Negative Concord constructions, and that for this reason EMNEs should not be taken to be instances of Negative Concord in Double Negation languages. Instead, I argue that EMNEs are best analyzed as lexical items that consist of two semantic objects, of which only one is semantically negative. By applying overt movement, followed by partial reconstruction at the level of Logical Form both semantic objects can take scope from a different position in the tree. I argue that the single negation an EMNE consists of is the result of the disappearance of Negative Concord in Dutch: after the loss of the preverbal negative marker en/ne, strings containing two n-words or an n-word and a negative marker niet could no longer act as a cue for NC and therefore had to be stored in the lexicon. The death of Dutch NC, so to speak, led to the birth of EMNEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tai languages are often described as “lacking” a major lexical class “adjectives”; accordingly, they and other area languages are frequently cited as evidence against adjectival universality. This article brings the putative lack under examination, arguing that a more complete distributional analysis reveals a pattern: overlap is highest among semantically peripheral adjectives and verbs and in constructions prototypically associated to both classes crosslinguistically, and lowest among semantically core adjectives and verbs and in constructions prototypically associated to only one or the other class. Rather than “lacking” adjectives, data from Thai thus in fact support functional-typological characterizations of adjectival universality such as those of Givón (1984), Croft (2001), and Dixon (2004). Finally, while data from Thai would fail to falsify an adaptation of Enfield's (2004) Lao lexical class-taxonomy (in which adjectives are treated as a verbal subclass) on its own terms, this article argues that in absence of both universally-applicable criteria for the evaluation of categorial taxonomies crosslinguistically and evidence for the cognitive reality of categorial taxonomies so stipulated, even this more limited sense of a “lack” of adjectives in Thai is less radical a challenge to adjectival universality than has sometimes been supposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a cluster of approaches in linguistic theory known as exemplar-based models. Such exemplar-based models are being developed in research domains as diverse as phonetics, phonology, morphology, historical linguistics, semantics, syntax, and language acquisition. This special issue brings together, for the first time, articles applying exemplarbased models to a wide range of linguistic subdisciplines. We hope that this collection will give readers a sense for the challenges and new research tools that exemplar-based models offer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]