When a wh-in-situ behaves like a parasitic gap

This work investigates the syntax of wh-in-situ by drawing attention to a unique type of multiple wh-question in Mandarin, which we refer to as the visible parasitic gap construction. Specifically, an island-bound wh-in-situ, i.e., what we call the visible parasitic gap, is licensed by the covert Ā-movement of an independent island-free wh-in-situ, in essentially the same way as the licensing of a standard parasitic gap. We therefore argue that (i) wh-in-situ may license parasitic gaps, and that (ii) LF movement of wh-in-situ should remain available as an option for the scope interpretation of wh-phrases in Mandarin grammar

Google Cloud Computing für offene Bibliometriedaten

Der Beitrag stellt die Nutzung des kommerziellen Cloud-Computing-Dienstes Google BigQuery für die Arbeit mit großen, offenen Datensätzen zu wissenschaftlichen Veröffentlichungen vor. Das frei zugängliche Open Scholarly Data Warehouse der Niedersächsischen Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen (SUB Göttingen) unterstützt sowohl die wissenschaftliche Arbeit als auch Data-Analytics-Anwendungen auf Grundlage offener Bibliometriedaten wie Crossref, OpenAlex oder Semantic Scholar. Die Nutzung und Abrechnung erfolgt über den europaweiten Rahmenvertrag „Open Clouds for Research Environments“ (ORCE 2024). Im Vortrag werden der Datenbestand, die Verarbeitung und die Zugriffsmöglichkeiten vorgestellt. Zudem werden verwandte Initiativen präsentiert und das Angebot vor dem Hintergrund naheliegender Fragen zu Zusammenarbeit und Datensouveränität erörtert

Language models assessment through linguistically motivated contrasts: A benchmark for Italian (BLiMP-IT)

We present BLiMP-IT, a linguistically-informed benchmark to assess the performance of Italian Language Models (LMs). Inspired by state-of-the-art tools for LM evaluation and informed both by generative theorizing and psycholinguistic metrics, this benchmark tests a rich variety of structures using minimal pair contrasts, i.e., a grammatical sentence and an ungrammatical one minimally differing with respect to a single morphosyntactic property. Prompting the model to assign a probability value to the sentences within each pair, BLiMP-IT tests LMs accuracy, as well as their ability to reach linguistically meaningful generalizations, ultimately offering insights on human-machine comparability and the validity of the Poverty of Stimulus hypothesis

Santali zero nominals: Evidence for verbal properties in nominalization

In the generative literature, morphologically zero nominals are taken as a subtype of derived nominals, formed directly from acategorial roots. The standard assumption holds that zero nominals, lacking argument structure and verbal properties, are fundamentally distinct from gerundive nominals. This paper challenges this traditional claim by arguing that in Santali, an Austroasiatic language spoken in the Indian subcontinent, zero nominals show verbal behavior and should be analyzed as argument supporting nominals or gerundive nominals. I claim that Santali zero nominals can maintain argument structure, take adverbial modifiers, accept aspectual modification, and exhibit high compositional productivity, which are characteristics of argument supporting nominals and gerundive nominals rather than derived nominals. Zero nominals in Santali are formed when a root undergoes verbalization before nominalization, resulting in a compositional meaning of the verb on the nominalizer. The analysis in this paper demonstrates evidence for extended verbal structure in zero nominals, implying that morphologically simplex structures like zero nominals can correspond to syntactically complex representations

Deep and surface zeros in Japhug person agreement

This paper explores the interaction between the syntax and morphology of agreement, using Japhug (Trans-Himalayan) as a case study. The complex agreement paradigm in Japhug provides evidence that not all non-overt realizations of formal features are equal. Specifically, two types of zeros are needed in morphological theory to account for the paradigm: a surface zero—a phonologically null exponent, and a deep zero—the non-insertion of vocabulary items

Antilocality in Samoan nominalizations

Based on data from nominalizations in Samoan, this paper develops a novel analysis of the source of the unaccusative restriction on nominalizations, which has been argued to follow from selectional properties of the nominalizer n. Focusing on genitive case alternations on external arguments, sensitive to the presence of additional aspectual layers, I demonstrate that the ban on external arguments in nominalizations is expected under general antilocality constraints

Doch is concessive after all!

German doch functions as a pragmatic particle, an adverb, and a contrastive conjunction. I propose an analysis connecting these through concessive meaning that reveals previously opaque connections between them, directly reflects intuitions on their functions, and accounts for differences in distribution

Indirect evidentiality deriving from temporal uncertainty: The case of Japanese goro

This paper examines the Japanese temporal approximative goro ‘around’. When it combines with ima ‘now’, which denotes the utterance time, the phrase ima-goro signals that the speaker does not directly witness the event described by the co-occurring predicate (so-called indirect evidentiality). When goro combines with other time expressions, this effect is not observed. I propose a semantic account that capture this phenomenon. Specifically, X-goro requires that the speaker is uncertain whether the described event occurs at X. It is also demonstrated that the proposed analysis has implication for two additional phenomena: i) ima-goro can mean that the occurrence of the described event is too late, and ii) there is an aspectual restriction on ima-goro. Finally, a remaining issue concerning the English temporal phrase by now is discussed

Specificity vs. lexical restriction: Inspecting D-linking in wh-islands

In this study, we follow up on the theoretical debate on the alleged syntactic effects of D-linking. We tried to tease apart the discourse-related component from the morphosyntactic effects driven by complex wh- phrases by (i) operationalizing D-linking as specificity and (ii) by comparing the acceptability of extraction of wh-items with and without D-linking, but crucially always bearing some form of lexical restriction. We present here three novel acceptability judgment tasks inspecting the role of D-linking and lexical restriction in the amelioration of Italian wh-island effects. Our results weaken the hypothesis that a discourse factor alone may modulate wh-island violations, while demanding deeper scrutiny on the role of lexical restriction

Deriving Adjectives in Heritage Tamil: Stability and Change

Heritage grammars tend to undergo structural change owing to their severely constrained input conditions and /or transfer effects from the L2 (Polinsky, 2018). This study uses adjectives in Tamil (Dravidian) to show a systematic difference between rule-governed, structural aspects of grammar and those that require case-by-case lexical learning. The former remains stable and the latter undergoes change in heritage Tamil. The empirical domain of adjectives in Tamil is novel and particularly informative, as the derived nature of these adjectives helps us identify areas of grammatical stability and those of change when the context of acquisition diverges from the norm, i.e, heritage grammars. The paper has two major aims: (i) to provide an explanation of adjectives in standard Tamil, and (ii) to inquire into how the derivation of adjectives fares in the context of heritage Tamil. (i) is addressed by showing that adjectives in Tamil are not an independent category in the lexicon, but the derivational component recognises them as a distinct category. We then proceed to question (ii): With respect to heritage Tamil, two domains — one requiring intensive learning, and not requiring learning — are identified. The paper provides novel empirical evidence to demonstrate their stability or variation in heritage grammars