Deictic information is present in every language; yet, there are significant differences as to how exactly such encoded, yielding different indexical systems across languages. The availability of cross-linguistic variation provides a window into the role contact shaping grammars: this work contributes discussion by investigating whether plays any determining grammar indexicality heritage variet...

This study examined the processing of Japanese wh-questions with preposed (scrambled) vs. in-situ (canonical SOV word order) wh-objects, and of yes/no-questions with scrambled vs. in-situ demonstrative objects. Questions with scrambled objects elicited bilateral slow anterior negative potentials between filler and gap. Scrambled demonstratives elicited P600 effects following the filler and (L)A...

The paper emphasizes the inadequacy of formal semantics, the classical paradigm in semantics, in treating contextual dependence. Some phenomena of contextual dependence threaten one central assumption of the classical paradigm, namely the idea that linguistic expressions have a fixed meaning, and utterances have truth conditions well defined. It is possible to individuate three forms of context...

Contextualists and relativists about predicates of personal taste, epistemic modals, etc. (“CR-expressions”) agree that the interpretation of these expressions depends, in some sense, on context. Relativists claim that the sort of context-sensitivity exhibited by CR-expressions is importantly different from that exhibited by paradigm context-sensitive expressions, like de nite descriptions, dem...

Definiteness is visibly expressed by definite articles in English, but some languages such as Korean lack this morphological exponent. However, speakers of such languages still mark definiteness in different ways. In this proposal, we lay out a study that examines the (re)assembly required by L1-English L2-Korean learners where the formal feature of definiteness in the L1 has to be readjusted t...

There are various notions of specificity, ranging from Fodor & Sag’s (1982) referentiality view to Givón’s (1983) discourse prominence view. Ionin (2006) discusses the relation between these two perspectives by analyzing the English indefinite this. She represents indefinite this as a referential operator in the sense of Fodor & Sag (1982), but also adds the felicity condition of “noteworthines...

Abstract The present study uses event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine nonlocal agreement processing between native (L1) English speakers and Chinese–English second language (L2) learners, whose L1 lacks number agreement. We manipulated marking with determiners ( the vs. that/these ) see how determiner-specification influences both nonnative downstream for verbal Behavioral ERP results sugg...

We report three experiments on reference resolution in Dutch. The results of two off-line experiments and an eye-tracking study suggest that the interpretation of different referential forms*in particular, ‘‘emphatic’’ strong pronouns, weak pronouns, and demonstrative pronouns*cannot be satisfactorily explained in terms of a single feature of the antecedent. The findings show that while the dif...

While demonstratives and other determiner-like words in English are part of the functional system, their Japanese counterparts are simple lexical categories. The semantic theory (e.g. Brown & Fraser 1963) predicts that these elements must emerge at a later stage in both languages since they denote relatively abstract and complex meanings; whereas Radford's (1990) maturational theory makes no su...

Pragmatic development requires the ability to use linguistic forms, along with non-verbal cues, to focus an interlocutor's attention on a referent during conversation. We investigate the development of this ability by examining how the use of demonstratives is learned in Turkish, where a three-way demonstrative system (bu, su, o) obligatorily encodes both distance contrasts (i.e. proximal and d...