Prosodic marking in Russian multiple wh-questions: A sentence production study

Although the prosody of regular constituent/wh-questions is increasingly often discussed in the context of theories of prominence, focus and prosodic constituency (e.g [1]), prosodic contours of multiple wh-questions (cf. English Who bought what?) received surprisingly little attention in the literature so far. Slavic languages offer an additional dimension of interest to the problem as all wh-phrases are typically fronted in the clausal left periphery forming a wh-cluster, cf. Russian (1). Investigation of prosody of multiple wh-questions in these languages is likely to bring new theoretical insights, in particular, regarding realization of units with very similar prosodic properties, limits of prosodic autonomy of wh-phrases and the degree of mapping between prosodic and syntactic boundaries (cf. [2]

Two “many”-words in Slovenian

Slovenian features at least two lexical items that are potential semantic counterparts of the English many, namely veliko and precej, whose meaning appears close to identical. Yet speakers are certain that the two items are not equivalent, although they find intuitively felt differences hard to pinpoint. We argue that precej and veliko are lexically synonymous, but their meanings are pragmatically strengthened under relevant conditions, which leads to subtle interpretative differences. Specifically, we extend Krifka’s (2007) analysis of double negatives and propose that veliko is assigned the stereotypical interpretation of a quantity degree word, whereas precej is identified with the non-stereotypical one and consequently relates to moderately big amounts. To support this claim, we report the results of an experiment involving a sentence-picture verification task, which highlight the similarities and contextually-determined differences in the use of both determiners. Our results suggest that the interpretation of precej is not consistent with relations in the upper part of the proportional scale and is dependent on whether or not it is in direct competition with veliko in the appropriate contexts

Cross-Linguistic Variation in the Meaning of Quantifiers: Implications for Pragmatic Enrichment

One of the most studied scales in the literature on scalar implicatures is the quantifier scale. While the truth of some is entailed by the truth of all, some is felicitous only when all is false. This opens the possibility that some would be felicitous if, e.g., almost all of the objects in the restriction of the quantifier have the property ascribed by the nuclear scope. This prediction from the standard theory of quantifier interpretation clashes with native speakers’ intuitions. In Experiment 1 we report a questionnaire study on the perception of quantifier meanings in English, French, Slovenian, and German which points to a cross-linguistic variation with respect to the perception of numerical bounds of the existential quantifier. In Experiment 2, using a picture choice task, we further examine whether the numerical bound differences correlate with differences in pragmatic interpretations of the quantifier some in English and quelques in French and interpret the results as supporting our hypothesis that some and its cross-linguistic counterparts are subjected to different processes of pragmatic enrichment

Number mismatch effect and processing cataphora in a pro-drop language

Cataphora (also known as backward anaphora) is a type of pronominals that prcede their antecedents elinearly. Previous research on processing cataphora has explored the idea that cataphoric pronouns trigger a forward-looking active search for an antecedent to establish a coreference relation similar to a filler-gap dependency between a fronted wh-phrase and its base-generated syntactic position (Cowart & Cairns 1987). Van Gompel & Liversedge (2003) have shown that in an active search, the parser establishes a cataphoric coreference before considering pronominal phi-features. This results in a gender mismatch effect: sentences with incongruent incoming NP antecedents were more difficult to read than their congruent counterparts, as evidenced by slower reading times and eye movement regressions. In this paper, we report the results of a self-paced reading experiment in which the active search hypothesis is further tested by examining online cataphora resolution with respect to the number feature in Slovenian, a pro-drop language with a rich nominal and verbal morphology