When hypotaxis looks like parataxis:Embedding and complementizer agreement in Teiwa

Teiwa, an Alor-Pantar language of the Trans-New Guinea family, has been characterized as expressing speech reports not with complementation, but with combinations of two clauses juxtaposed under a single intonation contour with no morphological indication for integration (Klamer 2010: 'A Grammar of Teiwa', Mouton de Gruyter). We argue, contra Klamer, that speech and attitude reports in Teiwa should be analyzed as embedding (or 'hypotaxis'). We present evidence from intonation, syntax and semantics that speech reports are expressed by a single, monosentential structure in Teiwa with embedding of the speech report. Our results also show that purely morphological diagnostics can be unreliable for distinguishing between a monosentential or bisentential structure of speech reports. We describe several formal experiments from our fieldwork that provide more reliable tests. Our result has implications for both the ongoing theoretical discussions of clausal complementation, complementizer agreement, grammaticalization of complementizers and the historical evolution of complementation

Why some children accept under-informative utterances

Binary judgement on under-informative utterances (e.g. Some horses jumped over the fence, when all horses did) is the most widely used methodology to test children’s ability to generate implicatures. Accepting under-informative utterances is considered a failure to generate implicatures. We present off-line and reaction time evidence for the Pragmatic Tolerance Hypothesis, according to which some children who accept under-informative utterances are in fact competent with implicature but do not consider pragmatic violations grave enough to reject the critical utterance. Seventy-five Dutch-speaking four to nine-year-olds completed a binary (Experiment A) and a ternary judgement task (Experiment B). Half of the children who accepted an utterance in Experiment A penalised it in Experiment B. Reaction times revealed that these children experienced a slow-down in the critical utterances in Experiment A, suggesting that they detected the pragmatic violation even though they did not reject it. We propose that binary judgement tasks systematically underestimate children’s competence with pragmatics