The syntax of generics and the absence of generic articles

Cross-linguistically, no language has a dedicated generic article. To address why this is, I decompose GEN into its quantificational and modal components and locate them inside nominal structure. Adopting an event licensing analysis of pre- and post-verbal bare subjects in Modern Hebrew, I use the restriction of pre-verbal bare subjects to generic interpretations and unacceptability of pre-verbal bare singulars to argue that the quantificational component of GEN is best analyzed as a D-quantifier. Evidence from adnominal conditionals further identifies a modal source for GEN within the nominal, which I suggest is adjectival and derived from a reduced relative clause source. I propose that the formation of generic articles is blocked by the non-local (e.g. non-spanning) relationship between these quantificational and modal components

Compositional states

Whether a transitive stative predicate licenses an existential interpretaiton of its subject (EIS) depends on the type of object it has. While previous theories have related this to the object's ability to function as a topic, I present evidence that the quantized/homogeneous distinction between objects better captures EIS and propose an event composition analysis of EIS for transitive stative predicates. This analysis points to the aspectual nature of EIS and also illuminates other aspectual behaviors of stage-level/individual-level states

Structural Prediction During Language Comprehension Revealed by Electrophysiology : Evidence from Italian Auxiliaries

Prediction in language comprehension has become a key mechanism in recent psycholinguistic theory, with evidence from lexical prediction as a primary source. Less work has focused on whether comprehenders also make structural predictions above the lexical level. Previous research shows that processing is facilitated for syntactic structures which are predictable based on context; however, there is so far no direct evidence that speakers formulate structural predictions ahead of encountering input. We investigated whether subject noun animacy cues comprehenders to predict different verb phrase (VP) structures, with the incompatibility between a low animacy subject and an Agent interpretation of transitives/unergative VPs predicting a derived (passive/unaccusative) VP structure, using Italian auxiliaries. Native Italian speakers read sentences with subject nouns varying from high to low animacy followed by the auxiliary avereHAVE, which is compatible with underived VPs, or essereBE, which is compatible with derived VPs. The auxiliary avereHAVE elicited greater frontal negativity when preceded by a subject noun with lower animacy. The auxiliary essereBE elicited no differential ERP given subject animacy. We propose that this frontal negativity reflects violation of a structural prediction, with amplitude reflecting the strength of initial commitment or difficulty in revising a predicted structure. Differences between auxiliaries are proposed to follow from the more specific distribution of avereHAVE. We argue that this evidence unambiguously supports a predictive mechanism for phrase-level structure

Contradictory (forward) lifetime effects and the non-future tense in Mandarin Chinese

Lifetime effects refer to the inferences about the life/death of the individual in sentences with individual-level predicates like Mary is/was blue-eyed. In English, contradictory lifetime inferences arise when the subject denotes one living and one dead individual (e.g. Saussuredead and Chomskyliving #are/??were both linguists.), but no such inferences arise in Mandarin Chinese, a language that has been considered"tenseless" due to the lack of past tense morphemes. This paper investigates the online processing of contradictory lifetime effects and presents additional empirical observations about "forward lifetime effects", which suggest that both covert past tense and tenseless accounts of Chinese are inadequate for capturing temporal interpretations in this language; instead, finite clauses in Chinese display a Future/Non-Future distinction and are likely to possess a tense node. We discuss our findings in relation to the typology of tense as well as implications for other superficially tenseless languages

Prediction of phonological and gender information:An event-related potential study in Italian

Do people predict different aspects of a predictable word to the same extent? We tested prediction of phonological and gender information by creating phonological and gender mismatches between an article and a predictable noun in Italian. Native Italian speakers read predictive sentence contexts followed by the expected noun (e.g., un incidente: ‘accident’) or another plausible, but unexpected noun, either beginning with a different phonological class (consonant vs. vowel, e.g., uno scontro: ‘collision’; phonological mismatch) or belonging to a different gender class (e.g., un'inondazione: ‘flooding’; gender mismatch). Phonological mismatch articles elicited greater negativity than expected articles at posterior channels around 450–800 ms post-stimulus. In contrast, gender mismatch articles elicited greater negativity than expected articles at left posterior channels around 250–800 ms. Unexpected nouns showed an N400 effect followed by frontal positivity relative to expected nouns. The earlier effect for the gender mismatch articles suggests that people are quicker or more likely to pre-activate gender information vs. phonological information of a predictable word. We interpret the results with respect to production-based prediction accounts

Large-scale replication study reveals a limit on probabilistic prediction in language comprehension

Do people routinely pre-activate the meaning and even the phonological form of upcoming words? The most acclaimed evidence for phonological prediction comes from a 2005 Nature Neuroscience publication by DeLong, Urbach and Kutas, who observed a graded modulation of electrical brain potentials (N400) to nouns and preceding articles by the probability that people use a word to continue the sentence fragment (‘cloze’). In our direct replication study spanning 9 laboratories (N=334), pre-registered replication-analyses and exploratory Bayes factor analyses successfully replicated the noun-results but, crucially, not the article-results. Pre-registered single-trial analyses also yielded a statistically significant effect for the nouns but not the articles. Exploratory Bayesian single-trial analyses showed that the article-effect may be non-zero but is likely far smaller than originally reported and too small to observe without very large sample sizes. Our results do not support the view that readers routinely pre-activate the phonological form of predictable words

Dissociable effects of prediction and integration during language comprehension: Evidence from a large-scale study using brain potentials

Composing sentence meaning is easier for predictable words than for unpredictable words. Are predictable words genuinely predicted, or simply more plausible and therefore easier to integrate with sentence context? We addressed this persistent and fundamental question using data from a recent, large-scale (N = 334) replication study, by investigating the effects of word predictability and sentence plausibility on the N400, the brain's electrophysiological index of semantic processing. A spatiotemporally fine-grained mixed-effects multiple regression analysis revealed overlapping effects of predictability and plausibility on the N400, albeit with distinct spatiotemporal profiles. Our results challenge the view that the predictability-dependent N400 reflects the effects of either prediction or integration, and suggest that semantic facilitation of predictable words arises from a cascade of processes that activate and integrate word meaning with context into a sentence-level meaning

Self-repairs as right node raising constructions

In normal everyday speech, speakers occasionally become disfluent, mis-speak, and then correct their utterances mid-sentence. While these errors and repairs seem to be a natural case of language performance, language competence also plays an intimate role in shaping their ultimate form. Drawing on and extending insights from Levelt, 1983 and Levelt, 1989, this paper argues that self-repairs are a species of right node raising. I demonstrate that self-repairs share many of the properties of right node raising constructions, with the resumption behaving like the shared material of right node raising. I also suggest that self-repairs may illuminate the current theoretical bind seen in the analysis of right node raising by supporting recent proposals that favor a sparse representation for right node raising constructions.</p