The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics
As we wrote in last week’s issue, MIT was the host of the second-ever workshop on Formal Approaches to South Asian Linguistics (FASAL 2) last weekend, and it was a fantastic conference, with great speakers and a great atmosphere. Thank you, organizers - and special thanks to Pritty Patel-Grosz.for creating such a successful and exciting event!
photo credit mitcho
Speaker: Adam Albright
Title: Discovering and modeling cumulative markedness interactions with loglinear models
Date/Time: Monday Mar 19, 5:30pm
Location: 32-D461 (Note unusual location)
It is often observed that “phonology can’t count”. This principle rules out, among other things, languages in which a marked structure is tolerated once or twice within a word, but not three or more times. In this talk, I discuss a set of restrictions in Lakhota (Siouan) which are very similar to such a ‘threshold’ effect: roots often contain a single marked structure (fricative, aspirated or ejective stop, consonant cluster), but roots containing multiple marked structures are rarer than one would expect, based on the independent frequencies of those structures. This observation leads two questions: is the degree of underattestation significant, and if so how should it be accommodated in a grammatical model? I show that both questions can be addressed using log-linear (maximum entropy) models of constraint interaction. First, I present results of a series of statistical models of the Lakhota lexicon, attempting to predict the relative type frequency of root shapes based on their phonological properties. The results show that models with interaction terms, in which multiple simultaneous violations may be penalized more than expected based on the individual violations, do significantly better at predicting lexical counts. Furthermore, the effect is strongest for combinations of structures that are independently most strongly penalized. Thus, it appears that cumulative effects are real, and some form of ‘counting’ is indeed warranted. I argue that these statistical models are too powerful, however: they could, in principle, impose strong penalties on combinations that are independently penalized only weakly (or not at all), or they could even reverse the direction of the preference so that languages tolerate a marked structure only in the presence of another marked structure. I argue that we can avoid these predictions with a simpler model, in which markedness constraints interact with MParse (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004). I present the results of a learning simulation, showing that the observed cumulative effects can be predicted using a small set of markedness constraints on simple structures. Finally, I consider some typological predictions of the proposed model.
Speaker: Hadas Kotek
Date/Time: Monday, Mar 19, 5:30p
Location: 32-D124 (Note unusual location)
The full abstract is available (pdf).
I will present pilot results from two sentence processing studies that we ran in the department last month - one concerning multiple questions and the other concerning the quantificational nature of `any’. Both studies yield unexpected results that bear on the theories of questions and of free choice `any’, respectively. In particular, I will argue that covert wh-movement may not target the same position as overt wh-movement but rather a much lower position (if it occurs at all), and that any should be analyzed as an existential quantifier that QRs locally, targeting a lower position than the one targeted by the QR of `every’.
Speaker: Alex Silk (University of Michigan / MIT)
Title: Information-Sensitivity in Deontic ‘Ought’ and ‘Must’
Date/Time: Tuesday Mar 20, 10:00AM-11:30AM
Location: 66-168
(Note unusual time and location)
Abstract:
There is a growing literature on how deontic modals can be interpreted with respect to bodies of information or evidence. However, previous treatments of information-sensitivity in deontic modals focus exclusively on ‘ought’ and ignore important differences between weak necessity modals like ‘ought’ and strong necessity modals like ‘must’. In this paper I attempt to delineate and capture such differences in information-sensitivity between ‘ought’ and ‘must’. Drawing on and revising a suggestion by Aynat Rubinstein, I argue that ‘ought’ and ‘must’ exhibit different conventional signals vis-à-vis common ground assumptions: ‘ought’, unlike ‘must’, conventionally signals that the truth and acceptance of the necessity claim—currently and throughout the evolution of the conversation—relies on certain assumptions not currently established in the global discourse context. This hypothesis helps generate correct predictions concerning the contrasting felicity conditions of ‘ought’- and ‘must’- sentences and meanings of ‘ought’- and ‘must’- conditionals. It also correctly predicts that certain types of modus ponens violations can occur because of the presence of ‘ought’ but not because of the presence of ‘must’.
Speaker: Theresa Biberauer (University of Cambridge)
Title: 231 and the Final-over-Final Constraint
Date/Time: Tuesday, Mar 20, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461
In terms of the Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC), structures in which a head-final phrase dominates a head-initial phrase within the same extended projection should be ruled out (cf. Biberauer, Holmberg & Roberts 2007 et seq.). While 2-verb clusters at all stages of Germanic seem to reflect this constraint, the same is apparently not true of 3-verb clusters: as i.a. Wurmbrand (2005), Barbiers (2005), Schmid (2006), Biberauer & Walkden (2010), Biberauer (2010) and Salzmann (2011) observe, a number of West Germanic varieties – notably, West Flemish, certain Swiss German varieties and Afrikaans – feature structures in which 231 orders are either obligatorily or optionally available (3 here refers to the most and 1 to the least deeply embedded verb in the cluster). The purpose of this talk is, firstly, to give an overview of the data, highlighting in particular the extent to which 231 structures are available in Afrikaans, the least well studied of the troublesome Germanic varieties; secondly, to consider the data against the background of existing attempts to account for the FOFC phenomenon (Biberauer, Holmberg & Roberts 2011, Sheehan 2011, Cecchetto 2010, Hawkins 2012), all of which will be shown to fall short in different ways; and, finally, to consider the question of what 231 phenomena suggest about the nature of FOFC and, accordingly, what a successful analysis of this phenomenon might look like.
The MIT Linguistics homepage now has a link for a comprehensive (we’re getting there…) listing of papers and presentations by the members of our department over the past decade or so. (Click on the new Research tab.) Most of the papers currently included are by our graduate students, and links to faculty papers (and more links across the board) will be added in the coming months. All of our alumni are invited to inspect their listing and write in with corrections and additions.
The program for CLS 48 is out, and it looks as though much of MIT will be transplanted to Chicago for the meeting. Adam Albright and Kai von Fintel are invited speakers at the conference, and a total of eight other talks will be presented by a total of nine current graduate students in various solo and ensemble combinations that would stretch a semanticist’s imagination to represent succinctly: Marie-Christine Meyer, Yusuke Imanishi, Ayaka Sugawara, [Hadas Kotek, Yasutada Sudo and Martin Hackl], [Laura Kalin (UCLA) and Coppe van Urk], first-year student Paul Marty (félicitations!), Sasha Podobryaev and Mitcho Erlewine (in order of listing in the program). Recent alums Giorgio Magri and Maria Giavazzi will also be giving talks.
The program for Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 21 (FASL) is also out, and features MIT-related talks by post-doc Erik Schoorlemmer and grad students Igor Yanovich and Liuda Nikolaeva - as well as an invited talk by Tania Ionin (2003 PhD from BCS, but a linguist at heart!). Поздравляем вас всех!
Speaker: Theresa Biberauer (University of Cambridge)
Title: One peculiarity leads to another: insights from Afrikaans analyticity
Date/Time: Thursday, Mar 22, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461
This talk takes two superficially unconnected phenomena in Afrikaans – negation doubling by clause-final nie2 as in (1) and predicate doubling as in (2) – as its point of departure.
(1) Ek is nie1/nooit tevrede nie2 I am not/never satisfied POL “I am not/never satisfied”
(2) a. Sing SING daardie man! sing sing there.the man “That man really sings with gusto!”
(2) b. Gelukkig is ek nou regtig GELUKKIG! happy am I now really happy “As for being happy, I’m REALLY happy!” Based on a combination of diachronic and synchronic considerations, I argue that these phenomena can in fact be connected and that doing so enables us to understand a third, from a Germanic perspective, very surprising fact, namely that Afrikaans readily permits embedded V2 wh-interrogatives, regardless of the nature of the selecting predicate. This latter property is shown in (3):
(3) a. Ek wonder watter eksamen skryf die studente vanaand I wonder which exam write the students tonight “I wonder what exam the students are writing tonight”
(3) b. Hulle vind net gou uit wie moet die kaartjies gaan koop they find just quickly out who must the tickets go buy “They’re just quickly finding out who needs to buy the tickets” From a theoretical perspective, the significance of the data under discussion is argued to be i.a. the insight they deliver into the notion ‘acategorial element’ and the properties elements of this type exhibit in relation to the Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC; Biberauer, Holmberg & Roberts 2007 et seq.), and also what they suggest about the underdiscussed question of the relationship between Minimalism’s putative phase heads and the more articulated functional domains assumed by cartographers.
Speaker: Mitcho Erlewine
Title: Association with traces and the copy theory of movement (practice talk for GLOW)
Date/Time: Thursday Mar 22, 10:00AM-11:30AM
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:
In this talk I give a principled account for the observation that exclusive only must associate with a focus within its complement (Tancredi’s (1990) Principle of Lexical Association; PLA), utilizing the copy theory of movement and associated work on the interpretation of traces. Previous explanations for this fact come from the idea that traces cannot be F-marked. I argue contra Beaver and Clark (2008) that traces (lower copies of movement chains) can in fact be F-marked and that this is exemplified in F-marking contained in quantifiers which undergo QR. Instead, PLA effects arise through the interpretation of the predicate in both the higher and lower copies of of the moved constituent.
This special session of Syntax Square on Friday will be a practice talk for GLOW.
Speaker: Hadas Kotek
Title: WH-fronting in a two-probe system
Date/Time: Friday, Mar 23, 3:30-4:30p
Location: 32-D831
(Note unusual time and location)
The study of wh-movement has distinguished among several types of wh-fronting languages that permit distinct patterns of overt and covert movement, instantiated for example by the Slavic languages, English and German. This talk extends the cross-linguistic typology of multiple questions by arguing that Hebrew instantiates a new kind of wh-fronting language, unlike any that are presently discussed in the literature. I will show that Hebrew distinguishes between two kinds of interrogative phrases: those that are headed by a wh-word (wh-headed phrases: what, who, [DP which X], where, how …) and those that contain a wh-word but are headed by some other element (wh-containing phrases: [NP N of wh], [PP P wh]). We observe the special status of wh-headed phrases when one occurs structurally lower in a question than a wh-containing phrase. In that case, the wh-headed phrase can be targeted by an Agree/Attract operation that ignores the presence of the c-commanding wh-containing phrase.
I develop an account of the sensitivity of interrogative probing operations to the head of the interrogative phrase within Q-particle theory. I proposes that the Hebrew Q has an EPP feature which can trigger head-movement of wh to Q and that a wh-probe exists alongside the more familiar Q-probe, and shows how these two modifications to the theory can account for the intricate data that will be presented in the talk. The emerging picture is one in which interrogative probing does not occur wholesale but rather can be sensitive to particular interrogative features on potential goals.
mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine) received an East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute grant from the National Science Foundation, which will permit him spend two months this summer in Taiwan to conduct fieldwork on the Austronesian langage Atayal.
Congratulations, mitcho!
Speaker: Hadas Kotek
Title: Second meeting of blocking effects reading group
Date/Time: Monday, Mar 12, 5:30p
Location: 32-D461
In our previous meeting we discussed two approaches to blocking effects: the filter-based approach (Kiparsky 2005) and the derivation-based approach (Embick and Marantz 2008). This week I will survey the predictions that these theories make with regard to brain signals induced by the processing of blocked forms. I’ll present previous ERP studies of blocking effects in irregular verb morphology (Newman 2007, Munte et al. 1999) and recent pilot design/data from an experiment conducted by a group at Tohoku university that is researching blocking effects with -sase forms in Japanese. Finally, I’ll discuss some ideas for a new experiment. No prior knowledge of MEG/EEG will be assumed.
Speaker: Coppe van Urk
Date/Time: Tuesday, Mar 13, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461
This talk discusses work in progress on idiomatic readings of ‘give,’ ‘get,’ and ‘have.’ I show that this data provides evidence that there is a common possessive core to the prepositional dative and double object variant of ‘give,’ (contra Harley 1995 et seq.; Richards 2001). I then try to develop a syntax and semantics for the dative alternation that derives this, the attested classes of idioms of possession, and some other related facts.
Speaker: Sam Steddy
Title: How Palatalisation in Italian Verbs is a Regular Process
Date/Time: Wednesday, Mar 14, 5-7p
Location: 32D-831
Italian has a rule of palatalisation transforming velar stops /k,g/ into affricates [tʃ,dʒ] before front vowels /i,e/. At the boundary between verb stem and agreement suffix, though, the rule does not apply consistently - it can be blocked (underapply) or can overapply to forms suffixed by non-triggering vowels. In contrast to Pirelli & Battista (2000), I propose a phonological analysis that explains when each of these three patterns applies, and give a further explanation of a lexical gap in which there are no Italian infinitive forms that underpalatalise. The analysis employs a base-to-derivative relationship in which segments in a derived verb must match for stridency with stressed correspondents in the verb’s infinitive. Infinitives, having no base, palatalise as expected from their conjugation class suffix. Results from a wug-type experiment show the process is productive in the synchronic grammar.
Speaker: Sarah Ouwayda (USC)
Date/Time: 15 Mar (Thursday) 10-11:30am
Location: 32-D831
Title: The Mass-Like Behavior of Plurals of Mass
Abstract:
Plural marking, when it occurs on a noun that is typically mass, usually results in a plural count DP (1). This has been used to show the flexibility of nouns’ occurrence in both mass and count contexts and to argue for a universal packager (cf. Pelletier 1975, Chierchia 1998, Borer 2005 inter alia).
1. (much) oil -> (three) oils
In some cases, Levantine Arabic follows suit (2), but in others, the addition of a plural marker (specifically, the sound feminine plural), results in DPs that trigger plural agreement, but do not admit cardinals (3), and allows primarily an amount comparison (in the sense of Barner and Snedeker 2005).
2. (ktiir) zeit —> (tlat) zyuut
(much) oil (three) oil-plb
much oil three oil types
3. (ktiir) zeit —> (*tlat) zayt-eet Tayyb-iin
(much) oil (*three) oil-plf tasty-pl
much oil tasty oil (but not three oils)
The mass-like behavior of this type of mass+pl nouns has been taken to suggest that the plural marking is epiphenominal (Tsoulas 2006, for Greek), that the plural marking is lexical/idiosyncratic (Alexiadou 2010, for Greek), or that mass/count is not a strictly binary distinction (Acquaviva 2008, 2010, for Levantine Arabic).
I show that in Levantine Arabic, such DPs (a) do not allow kind or generic readings, (b) must be specific, (c) do not occur with measure words (e.g. ‘a cup of’, ‘a bag of’), and (d) do not allow comparison unless definite. Based on these and other restrictions independent of the mass-count distinction, I propose that the same thing (specifically, that DPs like those in (3) are count but are also specified for quantity) is responsible both for (a)-(d) and for the misleading mass-like behavior.
Title: The Constituency of Hyperlinks in a Hypertext Corpus
Speaker: Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (MIT)
Date/Time: Thursday, Mar 15, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461
While many have advocated for the use of Internet corpora in traditional corpus linguistics, no previous work has used one of the greatest characteristics of hypermedia—inline hyperlinks—as a tool in the generative study of syntax. In this talk I argue that the hyperlink-authoring behavior of naive speakers reflects the underlying syntactic constituency of sentences. I show that inline hyperlinks show a highly statistically significant tendency to be constituents in their host sentences (96% in our preliminary sample). In addition, hyperlinking behavior is sensitive to structural distinctions, distinguishing between complement and adjunct PPs. Finally, hyperlinks identified as non-constituents will be discussed as a unique natural class of nonconstituent linguistic structure.
Speaker: Masa Yamada (University of Kyoto/University of Chicago)
Date/Time: 3/16 (Friday) 3:30-5 pm (Note unusual time)
Location: 32-D831
Title: Reciprocal and Pluraction in Japanese
Abstract:
Numerous languages employ a morpheme that signals plurality, distributivity, or pluractionality to describe real world reciprocal situations. The Japanese verbal suffix -aw has reciprocal and non-reciprocal pluraction uses, but the previous studies only focus on the former use. I will propose two type-shift variants for the lexical meaning of the suffix and argue that the two uses are due to some sort of structural ambiguity in the verbal projection. When it combines with a semantic transitive predicate (i.e. a relation between two individuals), the canonical reciprocal interpretation obtains; when it combines with a semantic intransitive predicate (i.e. a property of individual, a context sensitive pluraction meaning results. I will also demonstrate that the proposed analysis of the verbal reciprocal correctly captures its interaction with other verbal suffixes such as causative and applicative. This is a formal case study of the widely observed phenomenon of (seemingly) polysemy of a linguistic reciprocal expression.
5th-year student Claire Halpert is off to New Orleans this week for the 43rd Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL), where she will give a talk on “Optional agreement: new facts about Zulu subjects”.
Next Saturday and Sunday (March 17 & 18), MIT will be hosting the second workshop on Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (FASAL 2), with papers in formal syntax, semantics and morphology. The invited speakers are: Rajesh Bhatt (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Veneeta Dayal (Rutgers), Brendan Gillon (McGill) and Maria Polinsky (Harvard). The conference will be great — see you there!
Speakers: Yasu Sudo and Hadas Kotek
Date/Time: Monday, Mar 5, 5:30p
Location: 32-D461
In this talk we will discuss our latest work on
many andmost . We will argue that the three readings ofmany that have been previously recognize in the literature, (1), can be detected for most as well.(1) Many Scandinavians are Nobel prize winners
a. Cardinal: |Scandinavian Nobel prize winners| is largeC
b. Proportional: |Scandinavian Nobel prize winners| / |Scandinavians| is largeC
c. Reverse Proportional: |Scandinavian Nobel prize winners| / |Nobel prize winners| is largeCIn particular, we will show that most has a reverse-proportional reading, and in addition we identify a new reading of most which we call the fragile reading: a superlative reading which is sensitive to the number of comparisons that are made and to the distance between the numbers compared. The fragile reading prominently manifests itself in “strong” environments, for example in the subject position of individual-level predicates. These findings lend support to Hackl’s (2009) analysis of most as being composed of many and the superlative morpheme -est. We will suggest that the familiar proportional and superlative readings of most are derived from cardinal many; RP most is derived from RP many and fragile most is derived from proportional many. We will argue that proportional many is cardinally evaluative and discuss the implications of this suggestion.
Speaker: Omer Preminger
Title: Syntactic Ergativity in Q’anjob’al
Date/Time: Tuesday, Mar 6, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461
(Full paper available at LingBuzz.)
Many morphologically ergative languages show asymmetries in the extraction of core arguments: while absolutive arguments (transitive objects and intransitive subjects) extract freely, ergative arguments (transitive subjects) cannot. This falls under the label “syntactic ergativity” (see e.g. Dixon 1972, 1994; Manning 1996).
Extraction asymmetries of this sort are found in many languages of the Mayan family, where in order to extract transitive subjects (for focus, wh-questions, or relativization), a special construction known as “Agent Focus” (AF) must be used (Aissen 1999; Stiebels 2006, Preminger 2011). In this talk — which presents collaborative work with Jessica Coon and Pedro Mateo Pedro — we offer a proposal for (i) why some morphologically ergative languages exhibit these extraction asymmetries, while others do not; and (ii) how the Mayan AF construction circumvents this problem.
We adopt recent proposals that ergative languages vary in the locus of absolutive case assignment (Aldridge 2004, 2008a; Legate 2002, 2008), and demonstrate that the same variation can be found within the Mayan family itself. Based primarily on comparative data from Q’anjob’al and Chol, we argue (contra previous accounts) that the inability to extract ergative arguments is not due to properties of the ergative argument itself, but rather comes about as the result of the locality conditions on absolutive case assignment in the relevant languages.
We show how the AF morpheme “-on” circumvents this problem in Q’anjob’al, by assigning structural case of its own to the internal argument. Evidence for this approach comes from reflexive and extended reflexive constructions, incorporated objects, nominalized embedded clauses, and the distribution of so-called “hierarchy effects” in related Mayan languages.
This Wednesday’s installment of the Phonology Circle features a talk by Peter Graff and Emad Taliep. They will also be presenting the same talk earlier in the day, at Wednesday 10am in TedLab.
Speakers: Peter Graff and Emad Taliep
Title: English Speakers Track Absolute Frequency in Consonant Co-occurrence
Date: March 7 (Wednesday)
Time: 5:00–7:00
Location: 32D831
Phonotactic wellformedness has been shown to affect behavior in a variety of linguistic tasks such as word-likeness judgments (e.g., Coleman and Pierrehumbert 1997). However, different researchers have often employed rather different measures for phonotactic wellformedness. This is particularly evident in the literature on consonant co-occurrence where two distinct measures of the wellformedness of constellations of consonants separated by vowels (e.g., p_t in pat) have been hypothesized. The first measure is the joint probability (i.e., absolute frequency) of the constellation P(C1_C2). Studies have found, e.g., that the joint probability of labial-coronal constellations (e.g. pat) is greater than the joint probability of coronal-labial ones (e.g. tap) in many different languages (MacNeilage et. al 1999, Carrissimo-Bertola 2010) and children as young as 7 months have been shown to be sensitive to this phonotactic (Nazzi et al. 2009, Gonzalez Gomez and Nazzi 2012). The second measure of wellformedness often employed is the observed- overexpected ratio (O/E) also known as pointwise mutual information (PMI). The difference between PMI and joint probability is that PMI relativizes the joint probability of a constellation to the independent probabilities of its parts such that PMI(C1;C2) = log(P(C1_C2)/(P(C1)·P(C2))), i.e. log(O/E). PMI has been hypothesized as a measure of wellformedness in studies of OCP-Place type phenomena (e.g. Frisch et al. 2004, Coetzee and Pater 2008) and PMI-based generalizations have been shown to affect wordlikeness judgments in languages like Arabic (Frisch and Zawaydeh, 2001). In this study, we compare the patterning of PMI and joint probability in the English lexicon and show that English CVCs present an ideal test-case for disambiguating the two measures. We present results from an online wordlikeness judgment study (N=50) and find that speakers’ judgments are more accurately predicted by joint probability (i.e., absolute frequency) than PMI.
A new paper (a “technical comment”) has just appeared in Science, co-authored by Florian Jaeger (Rochester), Dan Pontillo (Rochester) and our own Peter Graff (5th-year grad student), entitled Comment on “Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa”. Congratulations, Peter (and all)!!
Speaker: Guillaume Thomas
Date/Time: Thursday Mar 8, 10:00AM-11:30AM
Location: 32-D831
Title: Mbyá tense
Abstract:
Since I didn’t have time to address the main point of my work on tense in Mbyá during my ling-lunch talk, I will do it during this LFRG session—although I won’t assume that you have been to my ling-lunch talk. (1) and (2) both entail that there is a time before the time of utterance (TU) at which Juan is a teacher, but (2) also entails that Juan is not a teacher at TU, while (1) only implicates it. I propose that -kue is interpreted as a simple past tense in both cases, and that both (1) and (2) implicate that Juan is not a teacher at TU, but that this implicature can be canceled only in (1). During this session, I want to discuss (a) how we can generate this implicature and (b) how we can make sure that it stays in place in (2).
(1) Juan o-iko va?e-kue ñombo?ea.
Juan 3-be REL-PAST teacher
Juan was a teacher.(2) Juan ñombo?ea-kue
Juan teacher-PAST
Juan is an ex-teacher.
Speaker: Cristiano Chesi (NETS ‐ IUSS Pavia, CISCL ‐ University of Siena)
Title: Top‐Down, Left‐Right Derivations
Date/Time: Thursday, Mar 8, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461
The full abstract is available here (PDF).
The goal of this talk is to provide empirical arguments in favor of a derivational view of the grammar in which structure building occurs, incrementally, top-down (Chesi 2004a, 2007) and from left to right (Phillips 1996, 2003).
Following the Minimalist research spirit (Chomsky 1995-2008), I will show that the bottom-to-top orientation of phrase structure building is not a “virtual conceptual necessity” and that we can gain in descriptive adequacy if we drift away from the idea that the basic recursive operation is a set formation operation like Merge.
Speaker: Yosef Grodzinsky — McGill University
Date/Time: Friday 3/9 3:30 pm
Location: 32-141
Title: The Analysis of Negative Quantifiers: Multi-modal Evidence
Abstract:
Recent discussion of negative quantifiers (see Penka, 2011 and references therein) focuses on two main questions: do these quantifiers decompose, and if so, what are the mechanisms for decomposition? In this talk, I will describe a series of neuro- and psycholinguistic experiments my colleagues and I have conducted with healthy and brain-damaged participants that aim to provide relevant evidence. These experiments recorded responses from several modalities, as participants were analyzing sentences with positive and negative proportional and degree quantifiers in German and English (e.g., mehr/weniger-als-die-Hälfte die Kreise sind Gelb, many/few of the circles are blue).
All experiments used a Parametric Proportion Paradigm (PPP): participants were exposed to sentence-scenario pairs, and were requested to make truth value judgments. Sentences contained a quantifier in subject position, and scenarios depicted a proportion between 2 types of objects. Proportion was a parameter, systematically varied across images that were presented with each sentence type.
Our first experiment used functional MR imaging to extract a signal that represents localized brain activity. It aimed to identify brain loci that evince an intensity differential between the contrasting stimuli. Signal intensity for sentences with negative quantifiers was higher than that for their positive counterparts only in Broca’s region. Importantly, no other localizable intensity contrasts were found.
A second experiment (currently only a pilot) confronted English speaking, focally brain damaged, Broca’s aphasic patients with the same task. However here, the dependent measure was error rate. The results suggest a remarkably selective deficit: While patients performed near-normally on the positive quantifiers, their scores were drastically reduced when the stimuli contained negative quantifiers.
A third experiment attempted to take a deeper look at the behavioral signature of quantifier analysis through a study of complex RT functions obtained from healthy participants. Here, too, we observed that the signature of negative quantifiers is quite distinct from that of their positive counterparts.
In this talk, I will try to connect these results, obtained through different modalities from different populations, to previous ones that come from parametric studies of overt syntactic movement with healthy participants in fMRI, and with Broca’s aphasic patients. I will propose that a generalization over the experimental results supports an analysis of sentences with negative quantifiers that assumes covert movement. I will then try to situate these results in the broader context of a research agenda that tries to create a brain map of syntactic and semantic knowledge.