Referring and quantifying without nominals: headless relative clauses across languages

Nominals can be used to refer to or quantify over individuals, while clauses convey propositional content, with the exception of set-denoting restrictive headed relative clauses. This well-attested crosslinguistic syntax/semantics mapping needs to be broadened. Recent crosslinguistic findings show that headless relative clauses—embedded argument or adjunct clauses with a missing constituent—are widely attested and are used to refer to or quantify over individuals, similar to nominals. The present work contributes to the investigation of the syntax/semantics interface of different varieties of headless relative clauses and begins to develop a much-needed close comparison with the syntax/semantics interface of nominals in order to establish which principles are at play in both families of constructions

Relative Embeddings: A Circassian Puzzle for the Syntax/Semantics Interface.

Linguistic

Relatively Speaking (in Circassian)

Linguistic

The Semantic Contributions of Wh-words and Type Shifts: Evidence from Free Relatives Crosslinguistically

No abstract

Free Relative Clauses in Two Mixtec Languages

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://www.jstor.org/stable/info/10.1086/668608Two previously unstudied Mixtec languages—Nieves Mixtec and Melchor Ocampo Mixtec—are investigated, with special emphasis on free relative clauses and two related wh-constructions: interrogative wh-clauses and headed relative clauses. It is shown that both Mixtec languages make use of most wh-words found in interrogatives to form free relatives, i.e., non-interrogative wh-clauses like the bracketed one in Luca tasted [what Adam cooked]. Both languages exhibit the three kinds of free relatives that are attested cross-linguistically: definite free relatives (with the distribution and interpretation of defnite descriptions like in the example above), existential free relatives (occurring in the complement position of existential constructions), and -ever free relatives (occurring as arguments like I'll do [whatever you say] or as clausal adjuncts like [Whatever you say], I won't change my mind). Similarities and diferences are discussed between free relative clauses and headed relative clauses in both languages and between Mixtec wh-constructions and cross-linguistic patternsThis work has been partially supported by a Latino Studies Research Initiative Research Grant, University of California, San Diego

The Semantics and Pragmatics of Clausal Question-Answer Pairs in ASL

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On the acquisition of maximality in free relative clauses and plural definite descriptions

Plural definite descriptions (e.g. 'the things on the plate') and free relative clauses (e.g. 'what is on the plate') have been argued to share the same semantic properties, despite their syntactic differences: both are non-quantificational expressions referring to the maximal element of a given set (e.g. the set of things on the plate). Experimental support for this semantic analysis is provided by the first investigation ever of children's interpretation of both constructions. A Truth-Value Judgment task, an Act-Out task, and a corpus study of children's linguistic input show that children are aware that the two constructions are different from quantificational nominals (e.g. 'all the things on the plate', 'some of the things on the plate') very early on (4 years old), despite the major difference in frequency in the input. Children acquire the adult interpretation of both constructions at the very same time, around 6-7 years old. We suggest that this relative delay depends on children's difficulties with the concept of the maximal element of a set or its association with specific linguistic constructions

Isolating Processing Factors in Negative Island Contexts *

Introduction The phenomenon referred to as negative islands was originally observed by (1) a. Which project didn't the intern complete __ conscientiously? b. *How didn't the intern complete the project __? A number of proposals have been made in the theoretical linguistics literature that account for the difference between (1a) and (1b) in terms of global constraints operating within the grammar. Building on previous findings in the psycholinguistics literature, we used acceptability judgment measures to provide a new window into our understanding of negative islands. On the basis of results from two such studies, we argue that negative islands are not a unitary phenomenon due to a single global grammatical constraint, but rather the by-product of the simultaneous co-occurrence of different processing factors. The paper is structured as follows. In section 2, we show that alongside the global constraints proposed in existing accounts of negative islands, there is abundant evidence in the psycholinguistics literature that each of the individual factors that figure into negative islands -namely negation, extraction, and referentiality -incurs its own processing cost. The results from the acceptability judgment studies reported in section 3 demonstrate the importance of taking these individual factors into consideration when analyzing negative islands. In Experiment 1, we investigate the effects of the factors negation and extraction, and in Experiment 2 we additionally manipulate the factor of referentiality. In section 4, we discuss the results of these experiments and sugges