{"title":"Adjective Order and Adnominal Modification in Naasioi","authors":"Jason Brown","doi":"10.1162/ling_a_00464","DOIUrl":"10.1162/ling_a_00464","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48044,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Inquiry","volume":"55 2","pages":"423-435"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44759805","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Condition B and Other Conditions on Pronominal Licensing in Serbo-Croatian","authors":"Ivana Jovović","doi":"10.1162/ling_a_00475","DOIUrl":"10.1162/ling_a_00475","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48044,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Inquiry","volume":"55 2","pages":"402-421"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44922460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nasal Assimilation Counterfeeding and Allomorphy in Haitian: Nothing Is Still Something!","authors":"Mohamed Lahrouchi;Shanti Ulfsbjorninn","doi":"10.1162/ling_a_00469","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00469","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48044,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Inquiry","volume":"55 2","pages":"255-286"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140606014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
How much of our linguistic knowledge is innate? According to much of theoretical linguistics, a fair amount. One of the best-known (and most contested) kinds of evidence for a large innate endowment is the so-called argument from the poverty of the stimulus (APS). In a nutshell, an APS obtains when human learners systematically make inductive leaps that are not warranted by the linguistic evidence. A weakness of the APS has been that it is very hard to assess what is warranted by the linguistic evidence. Current Artificial Neural Networks appear to offer a handle on this challenge, and a growing literature over the past few years has started to explore the potential implications of such models to questions of innateness. We focus here on Wilcox et al. (2023), who use several different networks to examine the available evidence as it pertains to wh-movement, including island constraints. They conclude that the (presumably linguistically-neutral) networks acquire an adequate knowledge of wh-movement, thus undermining an APS in this domain. We examine the evidence further, looking in particular at parasitic gaps and across-the-board movement, and argue that current networks do not, in fact, succeed in acquiring or even adequately approximating wh-movement from training corpora that roughly correspond in size to the linguistic input that children receive. We also show that the performance of one of the models improves considerably when the training data are artificially enriched with instances of parasitic gaps and across-the-board movement. This finding suggests, albeit tentatively, that the failure of the networks when trained on natural, unenriched corpora is due to the insufficient richness of the linguistic input, thus supporting the APS.
{"title":"Large Language Models and the Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus","authors":"Nur Lan, Emmanuel Chemla, Roni Katzir","doi":"10.1162/ling_a_00533","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00533","url":null,"abstract":"How much of our linguistic knowledge is innate? According to much of theoretical linguistics, a fair amount. One of the best-known (and most contested) kinds of evidence for a large innate endowment is the so-called argument from the poverty of the stimulus (APS). In a nutshell, an APS obtains when human learners systematically make inductive leaps that are not warranted by the linguistic evidence. A weakness of the APS has been that it is very hard to assess what is warranted by the linguistic evidence. Current Artificial Neural Networks appear to offer a handle on this challenge, and a growing literature over the past few years has started to explore the potential implications of such models to questions of innateness. We focus here on Wilcox et al. (2023), who use several different networks to examine the available evidence as it pertains to wh-movement, including island constraints. They conclude that the (presumably linguistically-neutral) networks acquire an adequate knowledge of wh-movement, thus undermining an APS in this domain. We examine the evidence further, looking in particular at parasitic gaps and across-the-board movement, and argue that current networks do not, in fact, succeed in acquiring or even adequately approximating wh-movement from training corpora that roughly correspond in size to the linguistic input that children receive. We also show that the performance of one of the models improves considerably when the training data are artificially enriched with instances of parasitic gaps and across-the-board movement. This finding suggests, albeit tentatively, that the failure of the networks when trained on natural, unenriched corpora is due to the insufficient richness of the linguistic input, thus supporting the APS.","PeriodicalId":48044,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Inquiry","volume":"285 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140582142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The possessive dative construction has been widely adopted as an unaccusativity diagnostic (Borer and Grodzinsky 1986). Gafter (2014) casts doubt on the relevance of unaccusativity to the acceptability of the construction. We ran a series of acceptability judgment experiments to investigate the validity of the possessive dative construction as an unaccusativity diagnostic, controlling for possible confounds such as animacy, definiteness, plausibility, lexical choice, type of possession and context salience. The experiments reveal that possessive datives are significantly more acceptable with unaccusative verbs than with unergatives, including reflexive and emission verbs. We conclude that unaccusatives, but not unergatives, are grammatical in the construction, and defend a structural account of the data.
{"title":"The Relevance of Unaccusativity to Possessive Datives","authors":"Ziv Plotnik, Aya Meltzer-Asscher, Tal Siloni","doi":"10.1162/ling_a_00532","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00532","url":null,"abstract":"The possessive dative construction has been widely adopted as an unaccusativity diagnostic (Borer and Grodzinsky 1986). Gafter (2014) casts doubt on the relevance of unaccusativity to the acceptability of the construction. We ran a series of acceptability judgment experiments to investigate the validity of the possessive dative construction as an unaccusativity diagnostic, controlling for possible confounds such as animacy, definiteness, plausibility, lexical choice, type of possession and context salience. The experiments reveal that possessive datives are significantly more acceptable with unaccusative verbs than with unergatives, including reflexive and emission verbs. We conclude that unaccusatives, but not unergatives, are grammatical in the construction, and defend a structural account of the data.","PeriodicalId":48044,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Inquiry","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140602131","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Morphophonological alternations often involve dependencies between adjacent segments. Despite the apparent distance between relevant segments in the alternations that arise in consonant and vowel harmony, these dependencies can usually be viewed as adjacent on a tier representation. However, the tier needed to render dependencies adjacent varies crosslinguistically, and the abstract nature of tier representations in comparison to flat, string-like representations has led phonologists to seek justification for their use in phonological theory. In this paper, I propose a learning-based account of tier-like representations. I argue that humans show a proclivity for tracking dependencies between adjacent items, and propose a simple learning algorithm that incorporates this proclivity by tracking only adjacent dependencies. The model changes representations in response to being unable to predict the surface form of alternating segments—a decision governed by the Tolerance Principle, which allows for learning despite the sparsity and exceptions inevitable in naturalistic data. Tier-like representations naturally emerge from this learning procedure, and, when trained on small amounts of natural language data, the model achieves high accuracy generalizing to held-out test words, while flexibly handling cross-linguistic complexities like neutral segments and blockers. The model also makes precise predictions about human generalization behavior, and these are consistently borne out in artificial language experiments.
{"title":"A Learning-Based Account of Phonological Tiers","authors":"Caleb Belth","doi":"10.1162/ling_a_00530","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00530","url":null,"abstract":"Morphophonological alternations often involve dependencies between adjacent segments. Despite the apparent distance between relevant segments in the alternations that arise in consonant and vowel harmony, these dependencies can usually be viewed as adjacent on a tier representation. However, the tier needed to render dependencies adjacent varies crosslinguistically, and the abstract nature of tier representations in comparison to flat, string-like representations has led phonologists to seek justification for their use in phonological theory. In this paper, I propose a learning-based account of tier-like representations. I argue that humans show a proclivity for tracking dependencies between adjacent items, and propose a simple learning algorithm that incorporates this proclivity by tracking only adjacent dependencies. The model changes representations in response to being unable to predict the surface form of alternating segments—a decision governed by the Tolerance Principle, which allows for learning despite the sparsity and exceptions inevitable in naturalistic data. Tier-like representations naturally emerge from this learning procedure, and, when trained on small amounts of natural language data, the model achieves high accuracy generalizing to held-out test words, while flexibly handling cross-linguistic complexities like neutral segments and blockers. The model also makes precise predictions about human generalization behavior, and these are consistently borne out in artificial language experiments.","PeriodicalId":48044,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Inquiry","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140071243","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We dispute Folli and Harley’s (2020) account of Talmy’s typology, as it does not derive the unavailability of satellite-framed constructions in verb-framed languages, and it fails to predict the existence of weak satellite-framed languages like Latin and Slavic (Acedo-Matellán 2016). We propose an alternative approach based on Spanning (Svenonius 2016). Variation stems from the distribution of PF-interpretable features on the resultative head Res. Depending on the language, this head may or may not bear features triggering lexical access (w) and linearization (@). Conforming with minimalist desiderata, our account captures a wider range of Talmian patterns and produces some novel successful predictions.
{"title":"Talmy’s Typology Revisited: A Spanning Approach","authors":"Víctor Acedo-Matellán, Arkadiusz Kwapiszewski","doi":"10.1162/ling_a_00531","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00531","url":null,"abstract":"We dispute Folli and Harley’s (2020) account of Talmy’s typology, as it does not derive the unavailability of satellite-framed constructions in verb-framed languages, and it fails to predict the existence of weak satellite-framed languages like Latin and Slavic (Acedo-Matellán 2016). We propose an alternative approach based on Spanning (Svenonius 2016). Variation stems from the distribution of PF-interpretable features on the resultative head Res. Depending on the language, this head may or may not bear features triggering lexical access (w) and linearization (@). Conforming with minimalist desiderata, our account captures a wider range of Talmian patterns and produces some novel successful predictions.","PeriodicalId":48044,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Inquiry","volume":"84 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140076490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ergative and accusative behave as dependent cases insofar as their appearance on a nominal depends on the presence of another nominal in the same domain. Recent work on case theory has taken the phenomenon of case dependency to challenge the idea that case is assigned via the operation Agree. Focusing on the Shawi language (Kawapanan; Peru), we show not only that patterns of case dependency can be captured via Agree, but also that doing so opens up a new way of understanding the typology of global case splits. Ergative in Shawi appears when the subject is at least as high as the object on the person hierarchy—a global split pattern—and can be accompanied by explicit realization of the object’s features on the subject nominal (“object agreement on the subject”). We propose that ergative arises in Shawi when a probe on v Agrees with both the object and the subject, transferring object features to the subject; these features are spelled out as ergative case and as object agreement. In general, we show that dependent cases, both ergative and accusative, can be seen as a morphological outcome of syntactic Agree between a probe and a second goal, realizing features on that goal that were transferred from a previous goal in an earlier step of Agree.
从格和指称格作为从属格的表现来看，它们在一个名词上的出现取决于同一域中另一个名词的存在。最近的案例理论研究利用案例从属性现象对案例通过 "同意 "操作分配的观点提出了质疑。以 Shawi 语（秘鲁卡瓦帕南）为例，我们不仅证明了可以通过 "同意 "来捕捉大小写依存的模式，而且还证明了这样做为理解全局大小写分裂的类型学开辟了一条新途径。在沙维语中，当主语在人称层次结构中的地位至少与宾语一样高时，就会出现 "尔格"（ergative）--这是一种全局性的分割模式--同时，宾语的特征也会在主语名上得到明确的体现（"宾语与主语一致"）。我们提出，在沙维语中，当 v 上的探针同时与宾语和主语一致时，就会产生ergative，从而将宾语的特征转移到主语上；这些特征被拼写为ergative case 和宾语一致。总之，我们表明，从属格（包括ergative和指称格）可以看作是探针和第二个目标之间的句法Agree的形态结果，它实现了目标上的特征，而这些特征是在Agree的早期步骤中从上一个目标转移过来的。
{"title":"Dependent Case by Agree: Ergative in Shawi","authors":"Emily Clem, Amy Rose Deal","doi":"10.1162/ling_a_00529","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00529","url":null,"abstract":"Ergative and accusative behave as dependent cases insofar as their appearance on a nominal depends on the presence of another nominal in the same domain. Recent work on case theory has taken the phenomenon of case dependency to challenge the idea that case is assigned via the operation Agree. Focusing on the Shawi language (Kawapanan; Peru), we show not only that patterns of case dependency can be captured via Agree, but also that doing so opens up a new way of understanding the typology of global case splits. Ergative in Shawi appears when the subject is at least as high as the object on the person hierarchy—a global split pattern—and can be accompanied by explicit realization of the object’s features on the subject nominal (“object agreement on the subject”). We propose that ergative arises in Shawi when a probe on v Agrees with both the object and the subject, transferring object features to the subject; these features are spelled out as ergative case and as object agreement. In general, we show that dependent cases, both ergative and accusative, can be seen as a morphological outcome of syntactic Agree between a probe and a second goal, realizing features on that goal that were transferred from a previous goal in an earlier step of Agree.","PeriodicalId":48044,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Inquiry","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140071242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The article discusses agreeing ablatives in Aqusha Dargwa (Nakh-Daghestanian), arguing that morphological agreement in gender–number that these constituents display with the clausemate absolutive argument is not an instance of Agree, but should rather be analyzed as the result of Concord. The argument relies on a difference between Agree and Concord with regard to c-command. The article explores the behavior of the ablative complement to the vP-adjoined adverb ‘secretly’ and demonstrates that gender–number agreement on the complement is best predicted by Concord.
{"title":"Concord in the Verbal Domain: External Agreement in Nakh-Daghestanian","authors":"Dmitry Ganenkov","doi":"10.1162/ling_a_00528","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00528","url":null,"abstract":"The article discusses agreeing ablatives in Aqusha Dargwa (Nakh-Daghestanian), arguing that morphological agreement in gender–number that these constituents display with the clausemate absolutive argument is not an instance of Agree, but should rather be analyzed as the result of Concord. The argument relies on a difference between Agree and Concord with regard to c-command. The article explores the behavior of the ablative complement to the vP-adjoined adverb ‘secretly’ and demonstrates that gender–number agreement on the complement is best predicted by Concord.","PeriodicalId":48044,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Inquiry","volume":"47 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139946711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Among the proposals for multiple sluicing in Mandarin Chinese is what we call the multi-clausal analysis, which posits that it involves conjoined single wh-questions. This paper aims to examine the analysis through the possibility of pair-list interpretation for multiply sluiced clauses. The conclusion drawn is that the multiclausal analysis alone is not sufficient to fully explicate the relevant phenomenon.
{"title":"Pair-List Interpretation in Multiple Sluicing in Mandarin Chinese","authors":"Xue Bai, Daiko Takahashi","doi":"10.1162/ling_a_00527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00527","url":null,"abstract":"Among the proposals for multiple sluicing in Mandarin Chinese is what we call the multi-clausal analysis, which posits that it involves conjoined single wh-questions. This paper aims to examine the analysis through the possibility of pair-list interpretation for multiply sluiced clauses. The conclusion drawn is that the multiclausal analysis alone is not sufficient to fully explicate the relevant phenomenon.","PeriodicalId":48044,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Inquiry","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139481818","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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