Publicaties

This article investigates the spread of thele/la/les-forms in the diachrony of French on the basis of large-scale corpora. It focuses on the issue of their "mixed" distribution viz. the observation that during a long period of time thele/la/les-forms in French do not pattern as either (anaphoric) demonstratives from which they originate (Late Latinille), nor as (uniqueness-based) definites, which they end up becoming in Modern French. We model ...

This paper investigates the interaction between constituent order and the use of determiners as means of marking givenness, understood here as a non-presuppositional existential inference that arises as a result of interpreting a predicate with respect to a context-specified situation, in light of (a version of) *New ≻ Given principle of Kučerová (2012). We attribute the principle to how situation binding operates in clauses, instead of ...

This paper examines the nature of the dependency between the availability of null subjects and the “richness” of verbal subject agreement, known as Taraldsen's Generalisation (Adams, 1987; Rizzi, 1986; Roberts, 2014; Taraldsen, 1980). We present a corpus-based quantitative model of the syncretization of verbal subject agreement spanning the Medieval French period and evaluate two hypotheses relating agreement and null subjects: one relating the ...

Oshima (2007) and Schwarz & Simonenko (2018a) credit the unacceptability of so-called factive islands to necessary infelicity – the violation of some or other felicity condition on (wh-)questions in all accessible contexts. We apply this analysis to new types of factive islands – in wh-questions with if any and in multiple wh-questions – and argue that they pose challenges for an analysis in terms of necessary infelicity. We propose that ...

We employ wh else-phrases as a novel tool for investigating the logical makeup of wh-questions. Applying the wh else-diagnostic to how- and why-questions, we show that they comprise two different logical types, which differ in terms of whether or not two of their Hamblin answers can be compatible. How- and why-questions can also be classified in grammatical or notional terms (e.g., Higginbotham 1993, Oshima 2007, Sæbø 2016). Our findings ...

It is often proposed that the unacceptability of a semantically interpretable sentence can be rooted in its meaning. Elaborating on Oshima (2008), we argue that the meaning-driven unacceptability of factive islands must make reference to felicity conditions, and cannot be reduced to the triviality of propositional content. We also observe, again elaborating on Oshima, that the triviality of factive islands need not be logical, but can be ...

This paper presents a treebank-based study of the effect the text form (prose vs. verse) has on the course of two grammatical changes in Medieval French: the loss of null subjects and the loss of OV word order. By means of statistical analysis, we demonstrate that naive estimates of the spread of overt subjects and VO orders give the impression that there is a significant difference between the rates of development in prose vs. verse. By ...

This paper provides a semantic-pragmatic answer to the question of why some definite DPs are islands for wh-subextraction while others are not. While it was suggested as early as in Chomsky (1973) that the key to the problem are differences between determiners involved, there has been no analysis which would be based on independently attested properties of the determiners. This paper focuses on the contrast in wh-subextraction between DPs with ...