Camelia Bleotu - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Camelia Bleotu
Semantics and Linguistic Theory, Jan 18, 2024
The current paper addresses experimentally the question of whether Romanian 5-year-olds interpret... more The current paper addresses experimentally the question of whether Romanian 5-year-olds interpret negated deontic necessity modals as interdiction initially, and to what extent intonation and situational context may act as cues for a more adult-like interpretation. We find that, in the absence of situational context, children initially interpret all negated deontic modals as interdiction. Prosodic cues are on their own not enough to lead to an adult interpretation. However, in the presence of situational context, children are able to tease lack of necessity and interdiction apart and even show sensitivity to prosodic differences among negated modals.
Experiments in Linguistic Meaning, Jan 27, 2023
We investigate experimentally whether American English (AE) adult speakers are influenced in thei... more We investigate experimentally whether American English (AE) adult speakers are influenced in their interpretation of mustn't by pragmatic context (contexts favoring lack of necessity/necessity not to readings) and/or the semantic properties of the verbal complements of the modal (verbs denoting events in the physical realm vs. verbs expressing undesirable mental activities). In an experiment combining a forced choice task and a gradient acceptability task, participants saw sentences containing mustn't and physical events/negative mental activities in lack of necessity/necessity not to contexts (e.g., You mustn't worry. The woman will give you money) They had to choose the most suitable interpretation of mustn't ('it is necessary not to'/ 'it is not necessary' interpretations). They then had to rate the acceptability of the sentences containing mustn't in context on a Likert scale from 1 to 7. We find that participants split into two groups: an Interdiction Group, which always treated mustn't as expressing interdiction, and a Variation Group, which tended to interpret mustn't as lack of necessity when the context favored such a reading and when the verbal complement the modal combined with was a negative mental activity. We argue that the lack of necessity reading of mustn't is obtained via pragmatic weakening from its primary interdiction reading, and that this process is sensitive to context, as well as to the cognitive difficulty of imposing or forbidding mental (but not physical) activities to others.
Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics, 2021
The current paper looks at the meaning of denominal verbs, i.e. verbs derived from nominal roots,... more The current paper looks at the meaning of denominal verbs, i.e. verbs derived from nominal roots, through an experiment testing how Romanian children (Mean age: 4, Age range: 3-5) and adults understand nonce (non-existent) denominal verbs created from existing nouns such as a cireşi ‘to cherry’ or a vulpi ‘to fox’. We show that children tend to be more “literal” in their interpretation, understanding such novel denominal verbs as actions/processes involving the actual entity denoted by the nominal root. In contrast, adults prefer ‘figurative’ interpretations in certain contexts, for instance, when the nominal root refers to an animal (a vulpi ‘to behave like a fox’). The results can be explained either cognitively, through children’s preference for literal interpretations at this stage in language acquisition, or structurally, through a preference for a structure which is simpler from a lexico-syntactic point of view, combining mostly action “light” verbs (rather than a whole range...
Editura Academiei Române, 2019
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America
The current paper investigates experimentally whether, in a context requiring identifying green l... more The current paper investigates experimentally whether, in a context requiring identifying green leaves out of a set of long leaves, Romanian 4-year-olds and adults choose to place the Color adjective closer to the noun than the Size adjectives in accordance with a more rigid adjective ordering depending on the (type of) semantic property, or whether they choose to place the Set adjective closer to the noun than the Subset adjective, irrespective of the semantic property specified by the adjective (Size or Color). We find that both Romanian adults and children are more sensitive to the Set-Subset distinction, preferring to refer to the subset of green leaves out of a set of long leaves through frunzele mari verzi ‘the green long leaves’. We argue that adjectives are primarily ordered by a Recursive Set-Subset Ordering Constraint (RSSO), while orderings of adjectives in terms of properties such as Size and Color are cognitive.
The current paper brings experimental evidence that Romanian 4-and 5-year-olds are able to unders... more The current paper brings experimental evidence that Romanian 4-and 5-year-olds are able to understand recursive prepositional modifiers such as "papagalul de lȃngǎ hamsterul de lȃngǎ iepuraş", 'the parrot next to the hamster next to the bunny'. 23 children engaged in a picture matching task (PMT) where they heard sentences containing either recursive structures or coordinative structures, and they had to choose between a picture corresponding to a recursive interpretation and a picture corresponding to a coordinative interpretation. Interestingly, children provided recursive interpretations to recursive structures to a quite high degree, though their behavior was not fully adult-like. We argue that this can be accounted for through children's sensitivity to specific recursion cues that are present in Romanian, as well as to the contrast between recursion and coordination, which is activated through the experimental set-up.
Agreement attraction errors, where the verb agrees with the intervenor instead of the head (*The ... more Agreement attraction errors, where the verb agrees with the intervenor instead of the head (*The key to the cabinets are rusty [1]), have been widely investigated in online and offline measures. There are two classes of mechanism argued to underlie these effects: 'representational' encoding errors, arising from a noisy encoding of the number of the subject [e.g. 2], and cue-based retrieval errors, arising when a cue-based retrieval for an agreement controller wrongly selects an intervenor [e.g. 3]. Here we investigate the relative contribution of these two mechanisms to agreement attraction effects by looking at these effects in Romanian using SPR with an offline comprehension task [4, 5, 6]. We ran three parallel experiments testing different intervenorattractor configurations in order to see what types of intervenors attract more. Experiment 1 (N=93) tested bare NP intervenors in Romanian, which cannot grammatically function as preverbal subjects; Experiments 2 (N=67) and 3 (N=63) tested full DP intervenors with adjectival modification-we expect the latter to be more potent agreement attractors [e.g. 7]. In all 3 experiments, the experimental items involved a 2x2 design crossing GRAMMATICALITY with INTERVENOR NUMBER (see 1). The verb was always au 'have.3PL'. The head was singular/plural. Each experiment consisted of 24 experimental item sets in 4 Latin Squared lists and 72 fillers. Importantly, all experimental items (as well as 24 fillers) were followed by a comprehension question that queried the subject of the utterance. Participants had 4 response options: singular intervenor, plural intervenor, singular head, and plural head. Overall, the results (Fig 1,2,3) show evidence in line with both representational and cue-based accounts. We analyzed the RT experimental data with maximal linear mixed effects models. We found a grammaticality effect in all experiments at target and Spillover: ungrammatical sentences were read significantly slower than grammatical ones (/t/ > 2). We saw limited evidence for an interference effect in online measures: Intervenor number was significant only in E2 at the spillover (t =-3.33), driven by a speed-up for plural intervenors in the ungrammatical conditions (an illusion of grammaticality), as well as a slowdown for singular intervenors in the grammatical conditions (an illusion of ungrammaticality). Both effects can be explained by representational accounts as a partial match between the features represented on the subject noun in memory and the verb; the effect in ungrammatical conditions may be driven by cue-based retrieval as well (e.g. facilitatory interference). However, the slowdown for singular intervenors in grammatical conditions is inconsistent with simple cue-based retrieval accounts, which predict the opposite pattern due to inhibitory interference when NPs share features. To explain the data, cue-based retrieval models need to assume that retrieval of the subject is affected by lossy compression or other types of encoding error [e.g. 8]. In comprehension (Tables 1, 2, Fig 4, 5), offline accuracy was higher in E1 (bare noun intervenors) experiment than in E2/3. In all three experiments, we saw significant effects of both experimental factors and their interaction on response accuracy, with lowest accuracy in the ungrammatical plural intervenor condition (e.g. the agreement attraction configuration). Most response errors were 'percolation' errors, with the intervenor's number feature marked on the subject, but there were also 'cue-retrieval' errors (selection of a feature matched intervenor) and other errors as well. The pattern of offline results is similar to what has been reported for Armenian [5]. The uneven pattern seen in the online RTs suggests that our online data may be underpowered. In addition, the finding of an online 'illusion of ungrammaticality' is unusual and merits further study. Despite these puzzles, these data indicate that both encoding and retrieval-based error mechanisms may be at work in agreement attraction in Romanian, as in other languages [5].
Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 2022
This poster was presented on 2021 April 8 - 11 at the 39th meeting of the West Coast Conference o... more This poster was presented on 2021 April 8 - 11 at the 39th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics.<br>Provided abstract:We bring experimental evidence that Kiparsky's (1997) distinction between true denominals ("tape") and pseudo denominals ("hammer") is not structural but pragmatic. The acceptability of sentences where denominals combine with various PP-objects is driven by object similarity to the incorporated root ("He taped with band aids"). We investigate the nature of this similarity, showing that participants are sensitive to multiple aspects which define nominal roots (shape, material, use).<br><br><i>For inquiries regarding the contents of this dataset, please contact the Corresponding Author listed in the README.txt file. Administrative inquiries (e.g., removal requests, trouble downloading, etc.) can be directed to data-management@arizona.edu</i><br><i>This item is part of the ...
The paper investigates whether agreement attraction is modulated by distributional properties det... more The paper investigates whether agreement attraction is modulated by distributional properties determining subject-likelihood. Romanian represents an ideal testing ground for this, given two distributional constraints making bare nouns less subject-like: Locative Determiner Omission, preventing locative prepositions from taking nouns with definite articles (unless modified by adjectives), and the Naked Noun Constraint, disallowing bare nouns as preverbal subjects. We conducted three speeded forced-choice sentence continuation tasks on Romanian native speakers: Experiment1: N+Article head, bare noun (non-subject-like) intervenor, Experiment 2: N+Article head, N+Article+Adjective (subject-like) intervenor, Experiment 3: N+Article+Adjective head, N+Article+Adj (subject-like) intervenor. Subject-like intervenors cause significantly more attraction than bare nouns, which lead to almost no errors. The results are consistent with cue-based retrieval, where the verb is more likely to activat...
Abstract: In this paper, I aim to provide an account of denominal verbs in English and Romanian t... more Abstract: In this paper, I aim to provide an account of denominal verbs in English and Romanian that is significantly different from the traditional one resorting to incorporation/ movement
Towards a Theory of Denominals, 2019
The aim of this paper is to look into the structure of location verbs and locatum verbs, as well ... more The aim of this paper is to look into the structure of location verbs and locatum verbs, as well as the locative alternation in Romanian, a Romance language, in opposition to English, a Germanic language, and offer a possible explantion for their different behaviour. After looking at these types of verbs in a bilingual dictionary (Arne 2007), I argue that, unlike English, a language full of location verbs (to shelve the books, to saddle the horses a. o.) and locatum verbs (to butter the bread, to paint the wall a.o.), Romanian is not so rich, it only has a few verbs like a adăposti ‘to shelter’ (location verb), or a bandaja 'to bandage', a potcovi ‘to shoe’ (locatum verbs). It is, however, quite productive in verbs constructed with the prefix în-, such as a îmbarca 'to ship' or a împodobi 'to adorn'. In addition, I argue that the locative alternation in a Romance language (like Romanian) has different properties from the locative alternation in a Germanic lan...
This paper looks at denominal verbs which can be paraphrased by means of the verb give, and argue... more This paper looks at denominal verbs which can be paraphrased by means of the verb give, and argues that the verb GIVE cannot incorporate. On the one hand, it does not represent a primitive in the lexical semantic representation of verbs, an explanation which might be a bit problematic given that other non-primitive verbs have been argued to incorporate (HAVE, PUT) (Hale & Keyser 2002). On the other hand, if one embraced the possibility that nouns could be incorporated into the null verb GIVE, this would give rise to syntactic and semantic problems, such as the formation of a verb with other case-assigning properties than the light verb it allegedly derives from, the formation of a verb with a completely different meaning from the expected one a.o. Such evidence supports the idea that paraphrases need to be clearly distinguished from the actual lexical semantic representation of denominals. The paper puts forth an account in terms of the applicative analysis proposed by MacDonald (20...
The aim of this paper is to look into the structure of location verbs and locatum verbs, as well ... more The aim of this paper is to look into the structure of location verbs and locatum verbs, as well as the locative alternation in Romanian, a Romance language, in opposition to English, a Germanic language, and offer a possible explanation for their different behaviour. English is a language full of location verbs (i.e. verbs incorporating Locations such as to shelve the books, to cage the parrots a.o.) and locatum verbs (i.e. verbs incorporating Locatums/ displaced Themes such as to butter the bread, to paint the wall a.o.). I argue that Romanian, on the other hand, is not so rich, it only has a few verbs like a adăposti ‘to shelter’ (location verb), or a bandaja 'to bandage', a potcovi ‘to shoe’ (locatum verbs). It is, however, quite productive in verbs constructed with the prefix în-, such as a îmbarca ʽto shipʼ or a împodobi ‘to adornʼ. In addition, following Mateu 2000 and Damonte 2005, I argue that a verb’s ability to occur in two location patterns, i.e. the locative alt...
The current paper employs a novel Shadow Play Paradigm to investigate the semantic knowledge and ... more The current paper employs a novel Shadow Play Paradigm to investigate the semantic knowledge and pragmatic ability of Romanian 5-year-olds with respect to the epistemic adverbs poate ‘maybe’ and sigur ‘certainly’. The paradigm is an improved version of the Hidden Object Paradigm, where, instead of merely looking at an inaccessible entity, participants can now infer the presence of the entity on the basis of evidence (a shadow, as well as a specific sound). We argue that Romanian children as young as 5 are able to derive implicatures with epistemic adverbs at an almost adultlike level. However, they exhibit the tendency to accept overly strong statements (i.e., statements where a certainty adverb is wrongly used instead of a possibility adverb) as optimal to a much higher degree than adults. This can be explained as a cognitive/communicative strategy to reduce multiple alternatives to a single one in cases of uncertainty.
Towards a Theory of Denominals, 2019
Much (if not all) of the literature written on pseudopartitives so far has dealt with the socalle... more Much (if not all) of the literature written on pseudopartitives so far has dealt with the socalled N-of-N constructions, or, in another denomination, the N1-of-N2 constructions. But nothing has been said about constructions in which, for some more or less strange reason, N2 happens to be the same as N1. The obvious question is why... Is there no such construction as the N1-of-N1 construction? Or is it simply the case that linguists have not paid enough attention to the empirical matter they were supposed to deal with? The aim of the following paper is to try and give an answer to the questions above. In so doing, the paper will mainly focus on Romanian data, and test whether constructions such as băiat de băiat (‘boy of boy’), fată de fată (‘girl of girl’), sentiment de sentiment (‘feeling of feeling’) a. o. can be subsumed under the name of “qualitative N-of-N constructions”.
The aim of this article is to discuss a possible argument structure representation for weather ve... more The aim of this article is to discuss a possible argument structure representation for weather verbs (to rain, to snow, to thunder a.o.) in the framework proposed by Hale and Keyser (2002). Starting from the idea that weather verbs sometimes take Agents as subjects, and sometimes Themes, we would like to propose that they can be decomposed either as V+N (rain = ‘FALL RAIN”), or as CAUSE followed by V+N (‘CAUSE [FALL RAIN]’). The article brings cross-linguistic evidence in favor of this proposal, showing that weather verbs in languages across the world display an ambiguous behavior, sometimes behaving like unaccusatives, and sometimes like unergatives.
Semantics and Linguistic Theory, Jan 18, 2024
The current paper addresses experimentally the question of whether Romanian 5-year-olds interpret... more The current paper addresses experimentally the question of whether Romanian 5-year-olds interpret negated deontic necessity modals as interdiction initially, and to what extent intonation and situational context may act as cues for a more adult-like interpretation. We find that, in the absence of situational context, children initially interpret all negated deontic modals as interdiction. Prosodic cues are on their own not enough to lead to an adult interpretation. However, in the presence of situational context, children are able to tease lack of necessity and interdiction apart and even show sensitivity to prosodic differences among negated modals.
Experiments in Linguistic Meaning, Jan 27, 2023
We investigate experimentally whether American English (AE) adult speakers are influenced in thei... more We investigate experimentally whether American English (AE) adult speakers are influenced in their interpretation of mustn't by pragmatic context (contexts favoring lack of necessity/necessity not to readings) and/or the semantic properties of the verbal complements of the modal (verbs denoting events in the physical realm vs. verbs expressing undesirable mental activities). In an experiment combining a forced choice task and a gradient acceptability task, participants saw sentences containing mustn't and physical events/negative mental activities in lack of necessity/necessity not to contexts (e.g., You mustn't worry. The woman will give you money) They had to choose the most suitable interpretation of mustn't ('it is necessary not to'/ 'it is not necessary' interpretations). They then had to rate the acceptability of the sentences containing mustn't in context on a Likert scale from 1 to 7. We find that participants split into two groups: an Interdiction Group, which always treated mustn't as expressing interdiction, and a Variation Group, which tended to interpret mustn't as lack of necessity when the context favored such a reading and when the verbal complement the modal combined with was a negative mental activity. We argue that the lack of necessity reading of mustn't is obtained via pragmatic weakening from its primary interdiction reading, and that this process is sensitive to context, as well as to the cognitive difficulty of imposing or forbidding mental (but not physical) activities to others.
Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics, 2021
The current paper looks at the meaning of denominal verbs, i.e. verbs derived from nominal roots,... more The current paper looks at the meaning of denominal verbs, i.e. verbs derived from nominal roots, through an experiment testing how Romanian children (Mean age: 4, Age range: 3-5) and adults understand nonce (non-existent) denominal verbs created from existing nouns such as a cireşi ‘to cherry’ or a vulpi ‘to fox’. We show that children tend to be more “literal” in their interpretation, understanding such novel denominal verbs as actions/processes involving the actual entity denoted by the nominal root. In contrast, adults prefer ‘figurative’ interpretations in certain contexts, for instance, when the nominal root refers to an animal (a vulpi ‘to behave like a fox’). The results can be explained either cognitively, through children’s preference for literal interpretations at this stage in language acquisition, or structurally, through a preference for a structure which is simpler from a lexico-syntactic point of view, combining mostly action “light” verbs (rather than a whole range...
Editura Academiei Române, 2019
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America
The current paper investigates experimentally whether, in a context requiring identifying green l... more The current paper investigates experimentally whether, in a context requiring identifying green leaves out of a set of long leaves, Romanian 4-year-olds and adults choose to place the Color adjective closer to the noun than the Size adjectives in accordance with a more rigid adjective ordering depending on the (type of) semantic property, or whether they choose to place the Set adjective closer to the noun than the Subset adjective, irrespective of the semantic property specified by the adjective (Size or Color). We find that both Romanian adults and children are more sensitive to the Set-Subset distinction, preferring to refer to the subset of green leaves out of a set of long leaves through frunzele mari verzi ‘the green long leaves’. We argue that adjectives are primarily ordered by a Recursive Set-Subset Ordering Constraint (RSSO), while orderings of adjectives in terms of properties such as Size and Color are cognitive.
The current paper brings experimental evidence that Romanian 4-and 5-year-olds are able to unders... more The current paper brings experimental evidence that Romanian 4-and 5-year-olds are able to understand recursive prepositional modifiers such as "papagalul de lȃngǎ hamsterul de lȃngǎ iepuraş", 'the parrot next to the hamster next to the bunny'. 23 children engaged in a picture matching task (PMT) where they heard sentences containing either recursive structures or coordinative structures, and they had to choose between a picture corresponding to a recursive interpretation and a picture corresponding to a coordinative interpretation. Interestingly, children provided recursive interpretations to recursive structures to a quite high degree, though their behavior was not fully adult-like. We argue that this can be accounted for through children's sensitivity to specific recursion cues that are present in Romanian, as well as to the contrast between recursion and coordination, which is activated through the experimental set-up.
Agreement attraction errors, where the verb agrees with the intervenor instead of the head (*The ... more Agreement attraction errors, where the verb agrees with the intervenor instead of the head (*The key to the cabinets are rusty [1]), have been widely investigated in online and offline measures. There are two classes of mechanism argued to underlie these effects: 'representational' encoding errors, arising from a noisy encoding of the number of the subject [e.g. 2], and cue-based retrieval errors, arising when a cue-based retrieval for an agreement controller wrongly selects an intervenor [e.g. 3]. Here we investigate the relative contribution of these two mechanisms to agreement attraction effects by looking at these effects in Romanian using SPR with an offline comprehension task [4, 5, 6]. We ran three parallel experiments testing different intervenorattractor configurations in order to see what types of intervenors attract more. Experiment 1 (N=93) tested bare NP intervenors in Romanian, which cannot grammatically function as preverbal subjects; Experiments 2 (N=67) and 3 (N=63) tested full DP intervenors with adjectival modification-we expect the latter to be more potent agreement attractors [e.g. 7]. In all 3 experiments, the experimental items involved a 2x2 design crossing GRAMMATICALITY with INTERVENOR NUMBER (see 1). The verb was always au 'have.3PL'. The head was singular/plural. Each experiment consisted of 24 experimental item sets in 4 Latin Squared lists and 72 fillers. Importantly, all experimental items (as well as 24 fillers) were followed by a comprehension question that queried the subject of the utterance. Participants had 4 response options: singular intervenor, plural intervenor, singular head, and plural head. Overall, the results (Fig 1,2,3) show evidence in line with both representational and cue-based accounts. We analyzed the RT experimental data with maximal linear mixed effects models. We found a grammaticality effect in all experiments at target and Spillover: ungrammatical sentences were read significantly slower than grammatical ones (/t/ > 2). We saw limited evidence for an interference effect in online measures: Intervenor number was significant only in E2 at the spillover (t =-3.33), driven by a speed-up for plural intervenors in the ungrammatical conditions (an illusion of grammaticality), as well as a slowdown for singular intervenors in the grammatical conditions (an illusion of ungrammaticality). Both effects can be explained by representational accounts as a partial match between the features represented on the subject noun in memory and the verb; the effect in ungrammatical conditions may be driven by cue-based retrieval as well (e.g. facilitatory interference). However, the slowdown for singular intervenors in grammatical conditions is inconsistent with simple cue-based retrieval accounts, which predict the opposite pattern due to inhibitory interference when NPs share features. To explain the data, cue-based retrieval models need to assume that retrieval of the subject is affected by lossy compression or other types of encoding error [e.g. 8]. In comprehension (Tables 1, 2, Fig 4, 5), offline accuracy was higher in E1 (bare noun intervenors) experiment than in E2/3. In all three experiments, we saw significant effects of both experimental factors and their interaction on response accuracy, with lowest accuracy in the ungrammatical plural intervenor condition (e.g. the agreement attraction configuration). Most response errors were 'percolation' errors, with the intervenor's number feature marked on the subject, but there were also 'cue-retrieval' errors (selection of a feature matched intervenor) and other errors as well. The pattern of offline results is similar to what has been reported for Armenian [5]. The uneven pattern seen in the online RTs suggests that our online data may be underpowered. In addition, the finding of an online 'illusion of ungrammaticality' is unusual and merits further study. Despite these puzzles, these data indicate that both encoding and retrieval-based error mechanisms may be at work in agreement attraction in Romanian, as in other languages [5].
Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 2022
This poster was presented on 2021 April 8 - 11 at the 39th meeting of the West Coast Conference o... more This poster was presented on 2021 April 8 - 11 at the 39th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics.<br>Provided abstract:We bring experimental evidence that Kiparsky's (1997) distinction between true denominals ("tape") and pseudo denominals ("hammer") is not structural but pragmatic. The acceptability of sentences where denominals combine with various PP-objects is driven by object similarity to the incorporated root ("He taped with band aids"). We investigate the nature of this similarity, showing that participants are sensitive to multiple aspects which define nominal roots (shape, material, use).<br><br><i>For inquiries regarding the contents of this dataset, please contact the Corresponding Author listed in the README.txt file. Administrative inquiries (e.g., removal requests, trouble downloading, etc.) can be directed to data-management@arizona.edu</i><br><i>This item is part of the ...
The paper investigates whether agreement attraction is modulated by distributional properties det... more The paper investigates whether agreement attraction is modulated by distributional properties determining subject-likelihood. Romanian represents an ideal testing ground for this, given two distributional constraints making bare nouns less subject-like: Locative Determiner Omission, preventing locative prepositions from taking nouns with definite articles (unless modified by adjectives), and the Naked Noun Constraint, disallowing bare nouns as preverbal subjects. We conducted three speeded forced-choice sentence continuation tasks on Romanian native speakers: Experiment1: N+Article head, bare noun (non-subject-like) intervenor, Experiment 2: N+Article head, N+Article+Adjective (subject-like) intervenor, Experiment 3: N+Article+Adjective head, N+Article+Adj (subject-like) intervenor. Subject-like intervenors cause significantly more attraction than bare nouns, which lead to almost no errors. The results are consistent with cue-based retrieval, where the verb is more likely to activat...
Abstract: In this paper, I aim to provide an account of denominal verbs in English and Romanian t... more Abstract: In this paper, I aim to provide an account of denominal verbs in English and Romanian that is significantly different from the traditional one resorting to incorporation/ movement
Towards a Theory of Denominals, 2019
The aim of this paper is to look into the structure of location verbs and locatum verbs, as well ... more The aim of this paper is to look into the structure of location verbs and locatum verbs, as well as the locative alternation in Romanian, a Romance language, in opposition to English, a Germanic language, and offer a possible explantion for their different behaviour. After looking at these types of verbs in a bilingual dictionary (Arne 2007), I argue that, unlike English, a language full of location verbs (to shelve the books, to saddle the horses a. o.) and locatum verbs (to butter the bread, to paint the wall a.o.), Romanian is not so rich, it only has a few verbs like a adăposti ‘to shelter’ (location verb), or a bandaja 'to bandage', a potcovi ‘to shoe’ (locatum verbs). It is, however, quite productive in verbs constructed with the prefix în-, such as a îmbarca 'to ship' or a împodobi 'to adorn'. In addition, I argue that the locative alternation in a Romance language (like Romanian) has different properties from the locative alternation in a Germanic lan...
This paper looks at denominal verbs which can be paraphrased by means of the verb give, and argue... more This paper looks at denominal verbs which can be paraphrased by means of the verb give, and argues that the verb GIVE cannot incorporate. On the one hand, it does not represent a primitive in the lexical semantic representation of verbs, an explanation which might be a bit problematic given that other non-primitive verbs have been argued to incorporate (HAVE, PUT) (Hale & Keyser 2002). On the other hand, if one embraced the possibility that nouns could be incorporated into the null verb GIVE, this would give rise to syntactic and semantic problems, such as the formation of a verb with other case-assigning properties than the light verb it allegedly derives from, the formation of a verb with a completely different meaning from the expected one a.o. Such evidence supports the idea that paraphrases need to be clearly distinguished from the actual lexical semantic representation of denominals. The paper puts forth an account in terms of the applicative analysis proposed by MacDonald (20...
The aim of this paper is to look into the structure of location verbs and locatum verbs, as well ... more The aim of this paper is to look into the structure of location verbs and locatum verbs, as well as the locative alternation in Romanian, a Romance language, in opposition to English, a Germanic language, and offer a possible explanation for their different behaviour. English is a language full of location verbs (i.e. verbs incorporating Locations such as to shelve the books, to cage the parrots a.o.) and locatum verbs (i.e. verbs incorporating Locatums/ displaced Themes such as to butter the bread, to paint the wall a.o.). I argue that Romanian, on the other hand, is not so rich, it only has a few verbs like a adăposti ‘to shelter’ (location verb), or a bandaja 'to bandage', a potcovi ‘to shoe’ (locatum verbs). It is, however, quite productive in verbs constructed with the prefix în-, such as a îmbarca ʽto shipʼ or a împodobi ‘to adornʼ. In addition, following Mateu 2000 and Damonte 2005, I argue that a verb’s ability to occur in two location patterns, i.e. the locative alt...
The current paper employs a novel Shadow Play Paradigm to investigate the semantic knowledge and ... more The current paper employs a novel Shadow Play Paradigm to investigate the semantic knowledge and pragmatic ability of Romanian 5-year-olds with respect to the epistemic adverbs poate ‘maybe’ and sigur ‘certainly’. The paradigm is an improved version of the Hidden Object Paradigm, where, instead of merely looking at an inaccessible entity, participants can now infer the presence of the entity on the basis of evidence (a shadow, as well as a specific sound). We argue that Romanian children as young as 5 are able to derive implicatures with epistemic adverbs at an almost adultlike level. However, they exhibit the tendency to accept overly strong statements (i.e., statements where a certainty adverb is wrongly used instead of a possibility adverb) as optimal to a much higher degree than adults. This can be explained as a cognitive/communicative strategy to reduce multiple alternatives to a single one in cases of uncertainty.
Towards a Theory of Denominals, 2019
Much (if not all) of the literature written on pseudopartitives so far has dealt with the socalle... more Much (if not all) of the literature written on pseudopartitives so far has dealt with the socalled N-of-N constructions, or, in another denomination, the N1-of-N2 constructions. But nothing has been said about constructions in which, for some more or less strange reason, N2 happens to be the same as N1. The obvious question is why... Is there no such construction as the N1-of-N1 construction? Or is it simply the case that linguists have not paid enough attention to the empirical matter they were supposed to deal with? The aim of the following paper is to try and give an answer to the questions above. In so doing, the paper will mainly focus on Romanian data, and test whether constructions such as băiat de băiat (‘boy of boy’), fată de fată (‘girl of girl’), sentiment de sentiment (‘feeling of feeling’) a. o. can be subsumed under the name of “qualitative N-of-N constructions”.
The aim of this article is to discuss a possible argument structure representation for weather ve... more The aim of this article is to discuss a possible argument structure representation for weather verbs (to rain, to snow, to thunder a.o.) in the framework proposed by Hale and Keyser (2002). Starting from the idea that weather verbs sometimes take Agents as subjects, and sometimes Themes, we would like to propose that they can be decomposed either as V+N (rain = ‘FALL RAIN”), or as CAUSE followed by V+N (‘CAUSE [FALL RAIN]’). The article brings cross-linguistic evidence in favor of this proposal, showing that weather verbs in languages across the world display an ambiguous behavior, sometimes behaving like unaccusatives, and sometimes like unergatives.