Temporal adverbial superlatives in Dutch

This paper investigates adverbial superlative expressions in Dutch that have a temporal interpretation, i.e. that contain the forms eerst ‘first’, laatst ‘latest’, and vroegst ‘earliest’. I focus on possessive superlatives and superlatives embedded under the preposition voor. Although both constructions contain bare superlatives and are interpreted temporally, they represent semantically and pragmatically different readings, and attach to the sentence in structurally different ways. I present a semantic analysis of both types of superlatives, and I show what this entails for how time adverbials interact with superlatives

Still as an additive particle in conditionals

This paper studies a hitherto unexplored reading of still as an additive particle, attested when it appears in the consequent of a conditional. A standard existing approach to the meaning of still is couched in terms of events. However, I show that prominent event-based analyses (such as Ippolito 2007) are incompatible with modal environments, raising the general issue of the cross-world identity of events (cf. Hacquard 2009). This issue can be avoided by being explicit about the ontological status of events. On the basis of this I build a revised version of Ippolito's (2007) event-based account of aspectual still. I argue that the additive reading of still is the result of an additive focus particle taking wide scope over the conditional. This reading is also attested in the well-studied case of semifactual conditionals, and hence this analysis contributes to the open question about the role of still in semifactual conditionals

Clitics and Voicing in Dutch

BLS 39: General Session and Special Session on Space and Directionalit

Perfect variations in dialogue: a parallel corpus approach

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 Harry Potter 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)

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

Generating semantic maps through multidimensional scaling: linguistic applications and theory

This paper reports on the state-of-the-art in application of multidimensional scaling (MDS) techniques to create semantic maps in linguistic research. MDS refers to a statistical technique that represents objects (lexical items, linguistic contexts, languages, etc.) as points in a space so that close similarity between the objects corresponds to close distances between the corresponding points in the representation. We focus on the use of MDS in combination with parallel corpus data as used in research on cross-linguistic variation. We first introduce the mathematical foundations of MDS and then give an exhaustive overview of past research that employs MDS techniques in combination with parallel corpus data. We propose a set of terminology to succinctly describe the key parameters of a particular MDS application. We then show that this computational methodology is theory-neutral, i.e. it can be employed to answer research questions in a variety of linguistic theoretical frameworks. Finally, we show how this leads to two lines of future developments for MDS research in linguistics

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)