Linguistic and Social Meaning Match: An experiment on modal concord in English

Modal concord (MC) refers to the phenomenon where two modal elements of the same flavor and force in a sentence yield an interpretation of single modality (SM). In this paper, we report on an experimental study on MC in English, addressing their linguistic and social meaning. Our results show a strengthening effect by necessity MC and a weakening effect of possibility MC in that significantly higher speaker commitment ratings were received for necessity MC vs. SM constructions (i.e., must certainly vs. must) with the reverse pattern for possibility modal constructions (i.e., may possibly vs. may). Furthermore, MC and SM were shown to differ in social meanings, suggesting a correlation between the meaning strength of a linguistic expression and the social perception of the speaker

Investigating fragment usage with a gamified utterance selection task

Nonsentential utterances, or fragments, like A coffee, please! can often be used to communicate a propositional meaning otherwise encoded by a complete sentence I\u27d like to order a coffee, please!). Previous research focused mostly on the syntax and licensing of fragments, but the questions of why speakers use fragments and how listeners interpret them are still underexplored. I propose a simple game-theoretic account of fragment usage, which predicts that (i) listeners assign fragments the most likely interpretation in context and (ii) that speakers are aware of this and trade-off production cost and the risk of being misunderstood when choosing their utterance. Using a corpus of production data, empirically founded and precise model predictions are generated. These predictions are evaluated with two experiments using a novel gamified utterance selection paradigm. The experiments suggest that, as predicted, speakers take into account both potential gain in efficiency and the risk of being misunderstood when choosing their utterance

Future reference and covert modality in Khalkha Mongolian

An open question in semantic theory is whether the future is best characterized as a temporal operator or as a future-oriented modal operator (see Bochnak 2019). Based on original field data from Khalkha Mongolian (Eastern Mongolic), I argue that the temporal reference of the tense morpheme -n and its morphosyntactic interaction with negation support an analysis of future reference as the combination of two morphemes: a covert modal, which is overtly realized under negation, and a prospective aspect, which is covert. This work adds to cross-linguistic analyses of future reference, expanding our existing typology of future marking (Matthewson et al. 2022; Mucha 2016; Pancheva & Zubizarreta 2023; Tonhauser 2011)

The morphosemantics of incremental plurality in Hualapai (Yuman)

Hualapai is a Yuman language with a verbal morphological system, seen in various languages of the region, which poses difficulties for a compositional analysis. In particular, Hualapai verb morphology exhibits incrementality (see Baerman 2016, 2019, 2024), where there is no one-to-one mapping between forms and meanings. Instead, forms are ordered on a scale tracking morphological complexity, and more complex morphological forms are mapped, all things being equal, to meanings that are higher on some semantic scale. In the case of Hualapai, the incremental system concerns a plurality, which in this case conflates plural argument marking and plural event marking, also known as pluractionality. This paper provides the first compositional morphosemantic treatment of Hualapai verbal plurality, which in addition, is used to think about how we might handle such incremental systems in general using standard morphological and semantic tools

Temporal de Re and semantic variation: Composing simultaneity in Asante Twi

This paper explores the temporal interpretation of attitude reports (AttR) in the Asante (Twi) dialect of Akan (Kwa, Niger Congo), with a focus on deriving the (past) simultaneous (SIM) reading in X-under-Past embeddings. We note that SIM in Asante arises when X represents: (i) the bare form, (ii) the distal deictic tense ná or (marginally) (iii) the perfective past LEN - with a decreasing preference in that order from (i) to (iii). Based on our empirical findings, accounts postulating deletion or binding of the embedded tense are ruled out for (ii) and (iii). Therefore, we propose that, while the bare form is associated with a de Se binding construal, both ná and LEN involve only a de Re construal. Consequently, we suggest that the speakers’ choices in embedding are guided by two pragmatic principles: one that favours de Se over de Re LFs (for (i) over (ii) and (iii)) and another that favours unbounded over bounded event structures (for (i) and (ii) over (iii))

When “anonymous” is not enough: methodological issues and the safety of human subjects in social media research

Drawing on data from a previous study on slur reclamation practices on Twitter/X, as well as scholarly discussion of context collapse and digital research ethics, I discuss the need to (re)evaluate how scholars engage with, publish, and present searchable language data online. Even when a subject’s social media persona is not linked –by name, location, and other identifying information – to their offline self, the distinction between the two is increasingly thin. Harm done to a person online –through harassment, dogpiling, suicide-baiting, other emotional abuse, and doxxing, among other tactics – is also harm done to their offline self. This is an especially salient risk for social media users from vulnerable or marginalized communities. I argue that stricter methodological and ethical standards should be established for research on social media language data, and present strategies myself and others have used (in various combinations) to tackle this issue: quotation with informed consent; discourse tallying; data aggregation; and focus on (in)famous public figures and organizations. I discuss the drawbacks and advantages of these methods, supplying examples from my work on metalinguistic attitudes towards slur reclamation on Twitter/X

Must "big" syllables carry stress in English?

Two types of syllables with ambiguous stress-status are identified:  open syllables with a full vowel adjacent to the primary stress (e.g. no.tá.tion) and closed syllables with a full vowel that occur non-adjacent to, but to the right of the primary stress syllable (e.g. cá.ra.van}). Both syllable types have a full vowel but need not be heavy; the latter type also has a coda consonant. These two segmental properties of syllables were separated into two "big" syllable shapes, [Cæ] and [Cəs]. Two perception studies were run in which these syllables were given the prosodic characteristics of unstressed syllables and placed in syllable strings where a listener would expect a stressed syllable given the otherwise alternating pattern of the string. Listeners also heard truly alternating strings, and strings with initial or final stress lapse without a big syllable as part of the stress lapse. It was found that unstressed open syllables with full vowels were highly confusable with a truly alternating pattern, whereas unstressed closed syllables were not. As both ambiguously-stressed syllable shapes under consideration involve a full vowel, our full vowel study gives support for the hypothesis that such syllables may not be stressed, and are confusable with stressed syllables because of their vowel quality.

How can zenme(yang) be so?

This paper observes that zenme(yang) ‘how’ in Mandarin Chinese can be used not only to express manners but also to convey degrees. A unified compositional analysis of zenme(yang) ‘how’ has been provided to account for the fact that zenme(yang) can be used across two domains: manners and degrees. By borrowing Anderson & Morzycki (2015)’s proposal on the anaphoric words tak and jak, zenme(yang)’s two uses can be modeled by the general notion of kinds: manner zenme(yang) modeled as kinds of events and the degree use modeled as state kinds. For the manner use, zenme(yang) with wh feature is base-generated on the head position of DegP under AP and its trace undergoes the Kind-Shift after wh-movement, which leads to a manner question. Regarding the degree use, zenme(yang), which takes a kind as its complement, needs the negation marker bu ‘not’ to license it. Hence, by borrowing the general notion of kind, it becomes feasible to achieve a compositional unification for the two uses of zenme(yang)

Missing the cues: LLMs’ insensitivity to semantic biases in relative clause attachment

We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) replicate English speakers\u27 well-established preference for low attachment in relative clause (RC) ambiguities, and how they respond when semantic cues such as world knowledge and stereotypical associations (e.g., age or gender plausibility) conflict with this preference. Eight commercial LLMs spanning the Claude-3/3.5 and GPT-3.5/4o families were evaluated using structurally and semantically ambiguous stimuli, alongside items that introduced plausibility-based biases toward either high or low attachment. In the absence of disambiguating cues, all models showed a strong preference for low attachment, consistent with human tendencies in ambiguous contexts (i.e. no semantic bias cues). However, models varied in their sensitivity to semantic information: newer Claude-3.5 models frequently shifted toward high attachment when the LA interpretation was implausible, while GPT-based models rarely did so. Attachment preferences were also affected by prompt format, suggesting that LLMs do not consistently integrate syntactic and semantic information in a stable, human-like way. These findings highlight both convergence and divergence between LLMs and human sentence processing, offering insight into the limits of current pretraining paradigms in handling structural ambiguity and world knowledge

A dynamic neural field model of asymmetric interference effects in code-switching

During instances of code-switching, bilingual speakers rapidly transition between languages. Following a transition from one language to the other, a code-switched word can exhibit phonetic differences from the same word produced in a single-language context. Observation of such ‘interference’ effects depends on language dominance. Interference effects are reported when a speaker switches from their non-dominant language into their dominant language, as shown, for example, in measurements of voice onset time (VOT) from Spanish-English bilinguals. We propose a neurocognitive model of such effects using Dynamic Field Theory (DFT). Interference arises from the interaction of separate language inputs into a single VOT planning field. Following principles from the inverse frequency effect, the amplitudes of the two language inputs are modulated by the frequency of language use, deriving the asymmetry. A key assumption underlying this result is that bilinguals’ speech representations interact in a shared phonetic space