Exceptional wide scope of bare nominals

One of the strongest arguments in favor of the kinds approach to bare nominals is that they always take narrow scope with respect to other scope bearing operators in the sentence (Carlson 1977; Chierchia 1998; Dayal 2011). The publications supporting the obligatory narrow scope of bare nominals in a wide range of typologically different languages vastly outnumber the ones that claim the opposite. In this paper, we survey the facts from the literature, work out how the kinds approach deals with them, and identify scrambled bare plurals as the ultimate challenge for the kinds approach. Dutch examples illustrate that scrambled bare plurals unambiguously take wide scope with respect to quantifiers and negation, while maintaining kind reference. The kinds approach proves unable to derive the wide scope reading of bare plurals under a surface-oriented composition of scrambled objects. Once we abandon the default kind shift, following Krifka (2004), and allow bare plurals to directly shift to an existential interpretation, we can easily derive the wide scope reading with a local type repair. We conclude that a flexible type shifting approach to bare nominals is preferred over a default kind shift for empirical reasons

Not…Until across European Languages: A Parallel Corpus Study

We present a parallel corpus study on the expression of the temporal construction ‘not…until’ in a sample of European languages. We use data from the Europarl corpus and create semantic maps by multidimensional scaling, in order to analyze cross-linguistic and language-internal variation. This paper builds on formal semantic and typological work, extending it by including conditional constructions, as well as connectives of the type as long as. In an investigation of 7 languages, we find that (i) languages use many more different constructions to convey this meaning than was expected from the literature; and (ii) the combination of polarity marking (negation/assertion) strongly correlates with the type of connective. We corroborate our results in a larger sample of 21 European languages. An analysis of clusters and dimensions of the semantic maps based on the enlarged dataset shows that connectives are not randomly distributed across the semantic space of the ‘not…until’-domain

A multilingual corpus study of the competition between past and perfect in narrative discourse

The western European present perfect is subject to substantial crosslinguistic variation. The literature, however, focuses on individual languages or on comparisons of a restricted number of languages. We piece together the puzzle and do so in a data-driven way by comparing the use of the present perfect through a parallel corpus based on the French novel L'Étranger and its translations in Italian, German, Dutch, European Spanish, British English, and Modern Greek. We introduce and showcase Translation Mining, a software suite combining a parallel corpus database with annotation and analysis tools. Translation Mining allows us to generate descriptive statistics of tense use across languages but also to visualize variation through its multidimensional scaling component and to link the variation we find to the underlying data through its integrated setup. We confirm that the present perfect competes with the past and we reveal the fine-grained scalar nature of the variation. To complete the puzzle, we ascertain the dimensions of variation, ranging from lexical and compositional semantics to dynamic semantics and pragmatics.

Perfect variations in Romance

The morpho-syntactic configuration auxiliary (have or be) + past participle known as the HAVE-PERFECT functions as a tense-aspect category in many Western European languages. Synchronic variation within Romance nicely illustrates the developmental pattern described as the aoristic drift, whereby the PERFECT develops over time into a PERFECTIVE PAST with full-fledged past meanings. A parallel corpus study of L’Étranger by Albert Camus (1942) and its translations using the Translation Mining methodology provides empirical data supporting the view that modern French, Romanian and Italian make a more liberal use of the PERFECT, whereas the PERFECT distribution in Spanish is closer to (but not identical to) English. Catalan occupies an intermediate position and Portuguese has the most restricted PERFECT among the Romance languages. We argue that this variation is best captured by a PERFECT scale, without a clear cut-off point between perfect and perfective past meaning. The meaning ingredients that govern the distribution of the HAVE-PERFECT across Romance languages emerge from the parallel corpus. They include lexical, compositional and discourse semantics, and range from sensitivity to aspectual class, pluractionality, hodiernal and pre-hodiernal past time reference to narration

Perfect variations in Romance

The morpho-syntactic configuration auxiliary (have or be) + past participle known as the have-perfect functions as a tense-aspect category in many Western European languages. Synchronic variation within Romance nicely illustrates the developmental pattern described as the aoristic drift, whereby the perfect develops over time into a perfective past with full-fledged past meanings. A parallel corpus study of L’Étranger by Albert Camus (1942) and its translations using the Translation Mining methodology provides empirical data supporting the view that modern French, Romanian and Italian make a more liberal use of the perfect, whereas the perfect distribution in Spanish is closer to (but not identical to) English. Catalan occupies an intermediate position and Portuguese has the most restricted perfect among the Romance languages. We argue that this variation is best captured by a perfect scale, without a clear cut-off point between perfect and perfective past meaning. The meaning ingredients that govern the distribution of the have-perfect across Romance languages emerge from the parallel corpus. They include lexical, compositional and discourse semantics, and range from sensitivity to aspectual class, pluractionality, hodiernal and pre-hodiernal past time reference to narration.

Perfect variations in dialogue

The variation in distribution and meaning of the English Present Perfect compared to its counterparts in other European languages raises a puzzle for the cross-linguistic semantics and pragmatics of tense and aspect. We apply Translation Mining, a form-based approach, to analyze the meaning of the HAVE-PERFECT across languages in a parallel corpus based on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and its translations in Swedish, Spanish, Dutch, German and French. We use the alternation in the HP novel between narrative discourse (storytelling) and dialogue (the characters talking to each other) to establish the PERFECT as an indexical tense-aspect category that appears exclusively in dialogue. We then link the proposed information management roles of the Present Perfect (Portner 2003; Nishiyama & Koenig 2010) to moves in the language game. We find different distributions of PERFECT use across the sentence types corresponding to these moves (declarative vs. interrogative). This lends support to a cross-linguistically common rhetorical structure in sequences of PERFECT sentences (de Swart 2007)

Parallel Corpus Research and Target Language Representativeness: The Contrastive, Typological, and Translation Mining Traditions

This paper surveys the strategies that the Contrastive, Typological, and Translation Mining parallel corpus traditions rely on to deal with the issue of target language representativeness of translations. On the basis of a comparison of the corpus architectures and research designs of the three traditions, we argue that they have each developed their own representativeness strategies: (i) monolingual control corpora (Contrastive tradition), (ii) limits on the scope of research questions (Typological tradition), and (iii) parallel control corpora (Translation Mining tradition). We introduce normalized pointwise mutual information (NPMI) as a bi-directional measure of cross-linguistic association, allowing for an easy comparison of the outcomes of different traditions and the impact of the monolingual and parallel control corpus representativeness strategies. We further argue that corpus size has a major impact on the reliability of the monolingual control corpus strategy and that a sequential parallel control corpus strategy is preferable for smaller corpora

Constructions with and without articles

Even in languages with a well-developed system of articles, such as Germanic and Romance languages, we find constructions in which the noun can appear without an article. Such constructions are often related to pseudo incorporation (cf. Borik & Gehrke, this volume), but this paper takes a broader perspective in terms of ‘weak referentiality’, and provides a roadmap for within and crosslinguistic variation. Bare nouns are sometimes in complementary distribution with the indefinite article (in predication, incorporation, with/without PPs), and sometimes with the definite article (in (the) hospital, play (the) piano). There is a third class of bare constructions which is neither definite nor indefinite, but plural or quantificational in nature. Here we find bare coordination (mother and child), reduplication (English from door to door = many doors in succession) and bare PPs like Dutch per jaar (= each year). The three classes are shown to be subject to different constraints within and across languages, due to the interaction of lexicon, syntax and semantics

Indéfini et généricité

De Swart Henriette. Indéfini et généricité. In: Faits de langues, n°4, Septembre 1994. L'indéfini. pp. 139-146