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This book revives and reinterprets a persistent intuition running through much of the classical work: that the unitary appearance of Obligatory Control into complements conceals an underlying duality of structure and mechanism. Idan Landau argues that control complements divide into two types: In attitude contexts, control is established by logophoric anchoring, while non-attitude contexts it boils down to predication. The distinction is also syntactically represented: Logophoric complements are constructed as a second tier above predicative complements.The theory derives the obligatoryde sereading of PRO as a special kind ofde reattitude without ascribing any inherent feature to PRO. At the same time, it provides a principled explanation, based on feature transmission, for the agreement properties of PRO, which are stipulated on competing semantic accounts. Finally, it derives a striking universal asymmetry: the fact that agreement on the embedded verb blocks control in attitude contexts but not in non-attitude contexts. This book is unique in being firmly grounded in both the formal semantic and the syntactic studies of control, offering an integrated view that will appeal to scholars in both areas. By bringing to bear current sophisticated grammatical analyses, it offers new insights into the classical problems of control theory.

This article provides an account of the distribution and interpretation of POLARITY PARTICLES in responses, starting with yes and no in English, and then extending the coverage to their crosslinguistic kin. Polarity particles are used in responses to both declarative and interrogative sentences, and thus provide a window onto the semantics and discourse effects of such sentences. We argue that understanding the distribution and interpretation of polarity particles requires a characterization of declaratives and interrogatives that captures a series of challenging similarities and differences across these two sentence types. To meet this challenge we combine and extend insights from inquisitive semantics, dynamic semantics, and commitment-based models of discourse. We then provide a full account of the English data that leads to a typology of polarity particles and a series of crosslinguistic predictions. These predictions are checked against data from Romanian, Hungarian, French, and German, languages that contrast with English in that they have ternary polarity particle systems, and contrast with one another in further subtle ways.

This meta-analysis examined how focus guided the allocation of readers’ attention in natural reading of Chinese and English. After the literature search and screening, 15 eye movement experimental studies were obtained, and Cohen’s d effect values (consisting of 480 subjects and 552 groups of experimental materials) were extracted to explore the focus effect values of various eye movement indicators and to explore whether they are regulated by focus marking and language type. The indices of first fixation time (FFD), gaze time (GD), total fixation time (TFD), and regression path reading time were selected for analysis. The findings were as follows: (1) In the focus condition, the first fixation time, the gaze duration, and the total fixation time of focus in the target region were shorter. They had medium effects. (2) Subgroup analysis revealed no difference in the effect size between Chinese and English media or in the types of focus marking (focus particles vs. syntactic markers). Additionally, the focus effect was not adjusted. This indicates that focus, as a special grammatical marker, has the characteristics of stably attracting attention resources and promoting information processing faster, regardless of language type and marking method. Nonetheless, it is easily influenced by other language rules.

A novel view of the syntax-semantics interface that analyzes the behavior of indefinite objects.

The papers in this volume develop and challenge our understanding of the fine structure of the left periphery, and of the theory of sentence structure in general.

Purpose: The authors examine how adults use linguistic information from verbs, direct objects, and particles to interpret an event description as encoding a logical endpoint to the event described (in which case, it is telic) or not (in which case, it is atelic). Current models of aspectual composition predict that quantity-sensitive verbs combined with quantized objects produce telic predicates. Behavioral results from previous experiments have not unequivocally confirmed this prediction. The study presents a more fine-grained analysis that examines the influence of partitive verbs, resultative particles, and different determiner types on listeners' evaluations of verb phrases as telic or atelic. Method: Forty-eight English-speaking adults participated in a truth-value judgment task to determine whether they interpreted verb phrases with different types of verbs and direct objects as telic or atelic. Participants viewed short videos and responded to a yes/no question after each one. Results: The presence of partitive quantity-sensitive verbs and the presence of a definite determiner versus a cardinal number in quantized direct objects had a differential impact on listeners' interpretations of sentences as telic. Conclusion: The results indicate that actual behavioral interpretations of telicity are meaningfully influenced by the presence of partitive verbs, resultative particles, and different types of determiners.

In Urama, there are two clause-final particles, ka and ra, that encode a variety of both semantic and pragmatic meanings. While previous approaches have treated these particles as clause-type markers or evidential morphemes, this paper argues that one of these particles, ka, has another previously undocumented function in conversation: to mark speaker-knowledge and what the speaker assumes the addressee to know. We term these interactional uses of ka and ra. Functionally, the interactional use of ka follows from its clause-typing and speech act properties. Theoretically, Urama represents a language that has a grammatical strategy for tracking information in the Common Ground, which is close in spirit to evidentiality and clause-typing, but qualitatively different.

This set of eleven articles, by linguists from four different European countries and a variety of theoretical backgrounds, takes a new look at the discourse functions of a number of English connectives, from simple coordinators (and, but) to phrases of varying complexity (after all, the fact is that). Using authentic spoken and written data from varied sources, the authors explore the ways in which current uses of connectives result from the interaction of syntax, semantics and prosody, both over time and through diversity of discourse situations. Most adopt an integrative approach in which speaker-listener or writer-reader relationships are viewed as part and parcel of the linguistic properties of each marker. Because it combines functional, generative and enunciative approaches into a coherent whole with a common explanatory aim, this book will be of interest to linguists, corpus-linguists and all those who investigate the semantics-pragmatics interface.

Elements of the sentence completes each other as in a chain in which every connected parts closely completes the other. Sometimes the main elements of the sentences such as nouns , verbs , adjective and adverbs may not be convenient in the sentence. They might need other parts to complete and clarify their meanings .One example of such elements of clarification is the apposition which refers to nouns or pronouns placed beside other nouns to identify or describe it. This research deals with the appositives , appositive phrases and clauses , the types of apposition and their application in both English and Arabic languages.