Negation is known to have inhibitory consequences for the information under its scope. However, how it produces such effects remains poorly understood. Recently, it has been proposed that negation processing might be implemented at the neural level by the recruitment of inhibitory and cognitive control mechanisms. On this line, this manuscript…

Tetun Dili, an Austronesian language spoken in East Timor, was until 1999 primarily an oral language of intercultural communication. Since the 1999 vote on independence from Indonesia, Tetun Dili has become the dominant language of public life, including the government, education and the media, as well as becoming an official language alongside…

The goal of this article is to make the case for a radical exemplar account of child language acquisition, under which unwitnessed forms are produced and comprehended by on-the-fly analogy across multiple stored exemplars, weighted by their degree of similarity to the target with regard to the task at hand. Across the domains of (1) word meanings,…

This paper will present a translation project with second-year bachelor students together with some observational data. The students firstly translated an academic abstract from Italian (their first language) to English by using the language resources they were acquainted with. Then they translated a second abstract by using a pre-compiled offline…

For almost 80 years, Chinese linguists have been fascinated by sentences like "Pijiu ba, he dianr!" ("Beer, I'll have some!"), which look superficially like a jumbled-up version of "normal-order sentences." Numerous accounts have been proposed to explain their structure and meaning, but no consensus has been reached as to how their true essence…

The ability to read is well-recognized as essential to being successful in school history. To be able to read history textbooks effectively, students can be made aware of some features typical of history discourse. Knowledge of how nominal groups are functional in history discourse can help students and teachers engage with the meanings presented…

Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that a variety of contextual factors can influence the interpretation of syntactically ambiguous structures, but psycholinguistic experimentation inherently does not allow for the investigation of the role that these factors play in natural (uncontrolled) language use. We use regression modeling in…

Recent work in language and text has explored such broad functional categories as evidentiality and affect, and has examined their cross-linguistic occurrences and manifestations. This paper focuses on a single construction, explores its variations, and describes and explains its pragmatic and textual functions. This rare construction, exemplified…

Expands on an earlier article that explained how a Gricean theory of implicature might provide a systematic partial reduction of the Binding Conditions, and introduces a radical alternative that uses the same pragmatic framework but gives an account better adjusted to some languages. (113 references) (GLR)

We present interpretation-based processing--a theory of sentence processing that builds a syntactic and a semantic representation for a sentence and assigns an interpretation to the sentence as soon as possible. That interpretation can further participate in comprehension and in lexical processing and is vital for relating the sentence to the…

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read and made acceptability judgments about sentences containing three types of adjective sequences: (1) normal sequences--e.g., "Jennifer rode a huge gray elephant"; (2) reversed sequences that violate grammatical-semantic constraints on linear order--e.g., *"Jennifer rode a…

Examines "it"-clefts and "wh"-clefts in English and their Chinese equivalents in a universal, functional perspective that consists of assigning "participant roles" in processing a clause. The analysis shows that a functionally-oriented and semantically-motivated approach to the focusing constructions provides greater insight into the discourse…

Discusses and compares the meaning of epistemic uses of modals. Demonstrates that the relation between them is not as simple as has been frequently suggested. The article bases its observations on the data from a corpus of parallel French and English texts, pointing out that such a corpus can open new avenues for investigation of an old topic. (18…

Describes rules for the use and interpretation of "verbally determinate ellipsis" involving the English verb group. Discussion covers: verbal determinacy and indeterminacy; verb group vs. verb phrase; the verb group as a five-part system; verb group echoing vs. auxiliary contrasting ellipsis; passive auxiliary; interpretation rules;…

Presents a corpus-based analysis of two lexical items: Modern English "hand" and "fist" and their Middle Cornish equivalents, resulting in discovering semantic and collocational differences between the corresponding lexemes in these two languages. The article argues that grammatical meaning may form part of the lexical meaning…