Sign languages have two primary articulation tracts: the two hands. They also have secondary articulation tracts that can be partitioned: the nonmanuals. Thus multiple propositions can be conveyed simultaneously. We have attested at most four simultaneously articulated independent propositions in sign languages, and suggest that this limit follows at least partly from limitations on visual short-term memory to cope with the information received. It appears further that the simultaneous propositions must be connected, often sharing arguments or verbs, an account of which concerns matters of production and of cognitive load. A brief look at simultaneity in spoken language suggests that similar if not identical limitations apply.

This article examines the V3 particle så in Fenno-Swedish, where the particle can follow both initial arguments and adjuncts in root clauses. In Mainland Scandinavian, this distribution is rather strictly limited to the latter context. The starting point is that the V3-pattern-triggering så is the ‘general adverbial resumptive’ in copy-left dislocation. In copy-left dislocation, an agreeing resumptive item causes a similar V3 pattern, where the adverbial spell-outs of the resumptive are partially interchangeable with så. Three hypotheses are considered. Firstly, så may have become fully generalised resumptive being interchangeable with all spell-outs. Secondly, the distribution could include all initial elements, also wh-phrases and negation markers, that are not pure operators. Finally, the paper suggests that the phenomenon is partially prosodic, and så satisfies a preference of having an anacrusis in the prosodic constituent including the finite verb.

Competence-based theories of island effects play a central role in generative grammar, yet the graded nature of many syntactic islands has never been properly accounted for. Categorical syntactic accounts of island effects have persisted in spite of a wealth of data suggesting that island effects are not categorical in nature and that nonstructural manipulations that leave island structures intact can radically alter judgments of island violations. We argue here, building on work by Paul Deane, Robert Kluender, and others, that processing factors have the potential to account for this otherwise unexplained variation in acceptability judgments.

We report the results of self-paced reading experiments and controlled acceptability studies that explore the relationship between processing costs and judgments of acceptability. In each of the three self-paced reading studies, the data indicate that the processing cost of different types of island violations can be significantly reduced to a degree comparable to that of nonisland filler-gap constructions by manipulating a single nonstructural factor. Moreover, this reduction in processing cost is accompanied by significant improvements in acceptability. This evidence favors the hypothesis that island-violating constructions involve numerous processing pressures that aggregate to drive processing difficulty above a threshold, resulting in unacceptability. We examine the implications of these findings for the grammar of filler-gap dependencies.

Object relatives (ORs) have been reported to cause heavier processing loads than subject relatives (SRs) in both pre- and postnominal position (prenominal relatives: Miyamoto & Nakamura 2003, Kwon 2008, Ueno & Garnsey 2008; postnominal relatives: King & Just 1991, King & Kutas 1995, Traxler et al. 2002). In this article, we report the results of two eye-tracking studies of Korean prenominal relative clauses that confirm a processing advantage for subject relatives both with and without supporting context. These results are shown to be compatible with accounts involving the accessibility hierarchy (Keenan & Comrie 1977), phrase-structural complexity (O'Grady 1997), and probabilistic structural disambiguation (Mitchell et al. 1995, Hale 2006), partially compatible with similarity-based interference (Gordon et al. 2001), but incompatible with linear/temporal analyses of filler-gap dependencies (Gibson 1998, 2000, Lewis & Vasishth 2005, Lewis et al. 2006).

The source of syntactic island effects has been a topic of considerable debate within linguistics and psycholinguistics. Explanations fall into three basic categories: grammatical theories, which posit specific grammatical constraints that exclude extraction from islands; grounded theories, which posit grammaticized constraints that have arisen to adapt to constraints on learning or parsing; and reductionist theories, which analyze island effects as emergent consequences of non-grammatical constraints on the sentence parser, such as limited processing resources. In this article we present two studies designed to test a fundamental prediction of one of the most prominent reductionist theories: that the strength of island effects should vary across speakers as a function of individual differences in processing resources. We tested over three hundred native speakers of English on four different island-effect types (whether, complex NP, subject, and adjunct islands) using two different acceptability rating tasks (seven-point scale and magnitude estimation) and two different measures of working-memory capacity (serial recall and n-back). We find no evidence of a relationship between working-memory capacity and island effects using a variety of statistical analysis techniques, including resampling simulations. These results suggest that island effects are more likely to be due to grammatical constraints or grounded grammaticized constraints than to limited processing resources.

While all of the Scandinavian languages have verb-second order in main clauses, they vary in the word order in subordinate clauses: in Icelandic the finite verb appears in a high position, to the left of negation and sentence-medial adverbs, while in all of the standard Mainland Scandinavian languages it remains in a low position, to the right of these elements. This order in Mainland Scandinavian is known to be the result of a historical change, and has frequently been tied to the loss of agreement morphology. Faroese has been argued to be currently undergoing a change of the same type, but it has proved difficult to establish a sound empirical footing for the various claims about the syntax of this language. In this article we present data from three experimental investigations of acceptability, supplemented with a study of available texts, that show that the language is very close to completing the change in the loss of the high position for the verb, but that its syntax is still distinct in this respect from that of Danish, the mainland Scandinavian language with which it is in most contact. In addition to establishing a firmer empirical basis for theories of verb movement, our study also makes the methodological point that grammaticality-judgment tasks can yield extremely fine-grained results even in cases where variability is at issue.

This article looks at a hitherto unnoticed series of parallels between Middle English (ME) and Medieval Spanish (MS). In the first place, while both appear to have been essentially VO languages, they allow identical classes of object to move leftward over the verb. In ME, movement is normally to a position between the auxiliary and the main verb, whereas in MS the movement is normally to the left of the auxiliary, if one is present. Second, both languages allowed the fronting of nonfinite verb forms. We argue that the parallels in question are the result of analogous processes of reanalysis operating in the two languages at earlier periods in their history. Both MS and ME descend from languages that tended toward O-V(-Aux) order. According to our analysis, when the structural mechanism giving rise to the latter order was lost, certain instances of OV ordering were nevertheless able to survive in reanalyzed form. The ‘low’ pattern of reanalysis in ME versus the ‘high’ pattern observable in MS can then be attributed to the blocking effect of the subject in Spec-TP in English and its absence in the Spanish case (where the subject is either null or not in spec-TP). As regards nonfinite fronting, this too can be regarded as a relic of the older word order. For MS we posit an analogous reanalysis to that observed for relic OV ordering, whereas for ME the evidence points toward an undisturbed continuation of the earlier V-Aux pattern. This difference between MS and ME can again be attributed to the absence versus presence of a spec-TP subject.

In this article we offer up a particular linguistic phenomenon, quantifier-variable binding in Kannada ditransitives, as a proving ground upon which competing claims about learnability can be evaluated with respect to the relative abstractness of children's grammatical knowledge. We first identify one aspect of syntactic representation that exhibits a range of syntactic, morphological, and semantic consequences both within and across languages, namely the hierarchical structure of ditransitive verb phrases (Barss & Lasnik 1986, Larson 1988, Harley 2002). Next we show that while the semantic consequences of this structure are parallel in English, Kannada, and Spanish, the word order and morphological reflexes of this structure diverge. Thus, although it is clear that the same structures are exhibited crosslinguistically, the evidence available to learners that would allow them to identify these structures is variable. We then turn to an examination of children learning Kannada, demonstrating that they have command of the relation between morphological form and semantic interpretation in ditransitives with respect to quantifier-variable binding. Finally, we offer a proposal on how a selective learning mechanism might succeed in identifying the appropriate structures in this domain despite the variability in surface expression.

The present study uses probabilistic models of corpus data in a novel way, to measure and compare the syntactic predictive capacities of speakers' of different varieties of the same language. The study finds that speakers' knowledge of probabilistic grammatical choices can vary across different varieties of the same language and can be detected psycholinguistically in the individual. In three pairs of experiments, Australians and Americans responded reliably to corpus model probabilities in rating the naturalness of alternative dative constructions, their lexical-decision latencies during reading varied inversely with the syntactic probabilities of the construction, and they showed subtle covariation in these tasks, which is in line with quantitative differences in the choices of datives produced in the same contexts.

As people increasingly interact with large language models (LLMs), a critical question emerges: do humans process language differently when communicating with an LLM versus another human? While there is good evidence that people adapt comprehension based on their expectations toward their interlocutor in human–human interaction, human–computer interaction research suggests the adaptation to machines is often suspended until expectation violation occurs. We conducted two event-related potential experiments examining Chinese sentence comprehension, measuring neural responses to semantic and syntactic anomalies attributed to an LLM or a human. Experiment 1 revealed reduced N400 but larger P600 responses to semantic anomalies in LLM-attributed text than human-attributed one, suggesting participants anticipated semantic errors yet required increased composition/integration efforts. Experiment 2 showed enhanced P600 responses to LLM-attributed than human-attributed syntactic anomalies, reflecting greater reanalysis or integration difficulty in the former than in the latter. Notably, neural responses to LLM-attributed semantic anomalies (but not syntactic anomalies) were further modulated by participants’ belief about humanlike knowledge in LLMs, with a larger N400 and a smaller P600 in participants with stronger belief of humanlike knowledge in LLMs. These findings provide the first neurocognitive evidence that people develop mental models of LLM capabilities and adapt neural processing accordingly, offering theoretical insights aligned with multidisciplinary frameworks and practical implications for designing effective human–AI communication systems.

In this article, we develop a theory of the form and interpretation of nonrestrictive nominal appositives (NAPs) by combining two recent syntactic and pragmatic approaches. Following Ott (2016), we assume that NAPs are independent elliptical speech acts, which are linearly interpolated into their host sentences in production. Building on insights in Onea 2016, we argue that NAPs make their pragmatic contribution as short answers to discourse-structuring Potential Questions. We show how these two assumptions combine to yield a comprehensive theory of NAPs that captures their central syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties and furthermore sheds light on the mechanisms that govern their linear interpolation.

This article proposes a syntax and a semantics for intonation in English and some related languages. The semantics is ‘surface-compositional’, in the sense that syntactic derivation constructs information-structural logical form monotonically, without rules of structural revision, and without autonomous rules of ‘focus projection’. This is made possible by the generalized notion of syntactic constituency afforded by combinatory categorial grammar (CCG)—in particular, the fact that its rules are restricted to string-adjacent type-driven combination. In this way, the grammar unites intonation structure and information structure with surface-syntactic derivational structure and Montague-style compositional semantics, even when they deviate radically from traditional surface structure.

The article revises and extends earlier CCG-based accounts of intonational semantics, grounding hitherto informal notions like ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’ (a.k.a. ‘topic’ and ‘comment’, ‘presupposition’ and ‘focus’, etc.) and ‘background’ and ‘contrast’ (a.k.a. ‘given’ and ‘new’, ‘focus’, etc.) in a logic of speaker/hearer supposition andupdate, usingaversion of Rooth's alternative semantics. A CCG grammar fragment is defined that constrains language-specific intonation and its interpretation more narrowly than previous attempts.

We present evidence for the influence of semantics on the order of subject, object, and verb in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) sentences. While some have argued for a prevailing pattern of SVO in Libras, we find a strong tendency for this order in sentences that do not presuppose the existence of the verb's object, but not in sentences that do, which instead favor SOV. These findings are coherent with those of a recent study on gesture. We argue that the variable influence of the relevant predicates is particularly salient in sign languages, due to the iconic nature of the visual modality.

This article scrutinizes the diachrony of relativizers and complement clause subordinators in Russian, Polish, and Czech. Historical morphology indicates a development from agreeing relative pronouns via noninflected relativizers to complement clause subordinators. This concurs with recent findings on Germanic (Axel-Tober 2017), but contradicts more traditional proposals that derive subordinators from demonstratives. The respective syntactic reanalyses are demonstrated on diachronic Slavic corpus data. Moreover, a quantitative comparison of sixteenth- to seventeenth- century East Slavic texts with and without West Slavic interference suggests that the use of kotoryj ‘which’ as a relative pronoun spread into Russian as an inner-Slavic contact-induced change.