Some conceptual metaphors common in spoken languages are infelicitous in sign languages. The explanation suggested in this article is that the iconicity of these signs clashes with the shifts in meaning that take place in these metaphorical extensions. Both iconicity and metaphors are built on mappings of two domains: form and meaning in iconicity, source domain and target domain in metaphors. Iconic signs that undergo metaphoric extension are therefore subject to both mappings (Taub 2001). When the two mappings do not preserve the same structural correspondence, the metaphorical extension is blocked. This restriction is formulated as the double-mapping constraint, which requires multiple mappings to be structure-preserving. The effects of this constraint go beyond explaining possible and impossible metaphors in sign languages. Because of the central role of metaphors in various linguistic processes, constraints on their occurrence may affect other linguistic structures and processes that are built on these metaphors in both sign and spoken languages.

The hypothesis that children's errors in interpreting adjunct PRO clauses are due to their use of a nominal structure was tested in two act-out experiments. Four- to six-year-old English-speaking children permitted a by phrase inside an adjunct clause containing an intransitive verb to be interpreted as agentive, and they gave such an interpretation for a construction for which a nominal analysis is not permitted in the adult grammar (when PRO clauses). This behavior can be accounted for if children have knowledge of general principles governing the interpretation of nominal and PRO constructions, and use a nominal analysis in interpreting adjunct clauses. In the second experiment, children distinguish between constructions that are unambiguously nominal and those that are ambiguous between a nominal and PRO structure, permitting agentive readings of by more frequently in the former case. This argues that adjunct PRO may be acquired by some children at a point during the preschool years. Overall the results fit a view of acquisition in which the language learner actively analyzes the input data, using knowledge of general grammatical principles, and is not narrowly bound by his or her current knowledge of the lexicon of the language.

This paper analyses whether the confiscation of real estate assets from organised crime affects citizens’ trust in government institutions and the legal system. The case of Italy is considered, where confiscation constitutes a distinctive policy tool against mafia-type organisations. The empirical analysis combines individual-level trust data from the Italian National Institute of Statistics’ Aspects of Daily Life survey with regional data on confiscations from the National Agency for Seized and Confiscated Assets for the period 2014–2022. Using linear and non-linear regression models, along with an instrumental variables approach, we find heterogeneous results. The confiscation of real estate assets from mafia organisations increases trust in government institutions and the legal system in the Southern regions, where organised crime is generally stronger. In Central and Northern regions, the positive effect is weaker and confined to the local tiers of government. Here, confiscations reduce trust in the legal system.

This paper presents a discourse-functional account of English inversion, based on an examination of a large corpus of naturally-occurring tokens. It is argued that inversion serves an information-packaging function, and that felicitous inversion depends on the relative discourse-familiarity of the information represented by the preposed and post-posed constituents. The data moreover indicate that evoked elements and inferrable elements are treated alike with respect to inversion; both are treated as discourse-old information. Finally, it is suggested that discourse-familiarity correlates not with subjecthood, but rather with relative sentence position.

The introduction of the psychophysical technique of MAGNITUDE ESTIMATION to the study of acceptability judgments (Bard et al. 1996) has led to a surge of interest in formal acceptability-judgment experiments over the past fifteen years. One of the primary reasons for its popularity is that it was developed as a tool to measure actual units of perception, offering the possibility of data that is inherently more informative than previous scaling tasks. However, there are several untested cognitive assumptions that must hold in order for ME to be the perceptual measurement test that it is purported to be. Building on the recent formalization of these assumptions in the psychophysics literature (Narens 1996, Luce 2002), this article presents two experiments designed to test whether these assumptions hold for acceptability-judgment experiments. The results suggest that the cognitive assumptions of magnitude estimation do not hold for participants in acceptability-judgment experiments, eliminating any reason to believe that ME could deliver inherently more meaningful data than other acceptability-judgment tasks.