Maria Teresa Espinal - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Maria Teresa Espinal
Annual Review of Linguistics, 2019
This article critically reviews the main research issues raised in the study of response systems ... more This article critically reviews the main research issues raised in the study of response systems in natural languages by addressing the syntax and semantics of fragment answers and yes/no response particles. Fragment answers include replies that do not have a sentential form, whereas response particles consist solely of an affirmative or a negative adverb. While the main research question in the syntax of fragments and response particles has been whether these contain more syntactic structure than what is actually pronounced, the key issues in the study of their semantics are question–answer congruence, the anaphoric potential of response particles, and the meaning of fragments in relation to positive and negative questions. In connection to these issues, this review suggests some interesting avenues for further research: ( a) providing an analysis of particles other than yes/no, ( b) choosing between echoic versus nonechoic forms as answers to polar questions, and ( c) deciding whe...
Linguistic Variation
Besides its main use as a form of the movement verb ir ‘to go’, the Spanish form vaya (lit. go) i... more Besides its main use as a form of the movement verb ir ‘to go’, the Spanish form vaya (lit. go) is also used as a verbal discourse marker. Here we trace this transition from a purely verbal form to a discourse marker by searching a historical corpus of documents in Spanish, which reveals the increasing use over time of vaya in exclamatives to replace a presentational construction. We focus on vaya in isolation and in combination with an indefinite DP or a bare NP. We analyze the meaning of vaya as an epistemic discourse marker, by means of which the speaker expresses a judgment, a subjective epistemic and evidential evaluation of a proposition accessible from context. We postulate that these constructions sit in a Judgment Phrase at the syntactic-pragmatic interface (Krifka 2020), a position to which vaya also moves when its meaning is that of an expressive intensifier that directly modifies over one or more (contextually salient) properties of the noun contained in the DP/NP.
Annual review of linguistics, Jan 14, 2019
This article critically reviews the main research issues raised in the study of response systems ... more This article critically reviews the main research issues raised in the study of response systems in natural languages by addressing the syntax and semantics of fragment answers and yes/no response particles. Fragment answers include replies that do not have a sentential form, whereas response particles consist solely of an affirmative or a negative adverb. While the main research question in the syntax of fragments and response particles has been whether these contain more syntactic structure than what is actually pronounced, the key issues in the study of their semantics are question–answer congruence, the anaphoric potential of response particles, and the meaning of fragments in relation to positive and negative questions. In connection to these issues, this review suggests some interesting avenues for further research: ( a) providing an analysis of particles other than yes/no, ( b) choosing between echoic versus nonechoic forms as answers to polar questions, and ( c) deciding whether some non-lexically-based or nonverbal responses are systematically used in combination with polar particles to express (dis)agreement.
Frontiers in Psychology
This paper provides experimental evidence in support of the view that Greek does not have three p... more This paper provides experimental evidence in support of the view that Greek does not have three productive morphological classes of anticausative verbs, but only two: the class of verbs that bear non-active voice morphology and the class of verbs that are morphologically active. Across two experiments, native Greek speakers are found to prefer for each anticausative verb either non-active or active voice morphological marking, in the presence or absence of explicit contextual information. It is also shown experimentally that native speakers prefer an interpretation that involves a specific cause for all anticausatives, especially when the existence of such a cause is favored by the contextual setting. Our empirical findings are consistent with the view that the Voice Phrase that is realized as non-active voice morphology in Greek anticausatives is expletive. From a theoretical perspective, we analyze the expletiveness of this Voice projection as the result of semantic redundancy: th...
Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - Université de Nantes, 2019
Lingua, 2018
Although Mandarin Chinese (MC) has been characterized as a language in which two negative express... more Although Mandarin Chinese (MC) has been characterized as a language in which two negative expressions within the boundaries of a single sentential domain cancel each other to yield a positive reading, this paper examines whether a single negation reading may in fact result under certain conditions. The results of an online perception experiment performed by 114 native speakers of MC showed that single negation readings were indeed obtained, particularly when the first of the two negative expressions was an adjunct (i.e., có ngláibù/ có ngláiméi(yǒ u) 'never'), and when there was stress on the second negative expression (i.e., the negative markers méi(yǒ u) 'not' and bù 'not').
Weak vs. strong definite articles: Meaning and form across languages Florian Schwarz 2 Definitene... more Weak vs. strong definite articles: Meaning and form across languages Florian Schwarz 2 Definiteness in Cuevas Mixtec Carlos Cisneros 3 Strong vs. weak definites: Evidence from Lithuanian adjectives Milena Šereikaitė 4 On (in)definite expressions in American Sign Language Ava Irani 5 A nascent definiteness marker in Yokot'an Maya Maurice Pico 6 Definiteness across languages and in L2 acquisition Bert Le Bruyn 7 Licensing D in classifier languages and "numeral blocking" David Hall 8 On kinds and anaphoricity in languages without definite articles Miloje Despić
Beyond Philology An International Journal of Linguistics, Literary Studies and English Language Teaching
The article compares the interpretation of singular topical nominals in Romance (Catalan) and Sla... more The article compares the interpretation of singular topical nominals in Romance (Catalan) and Slavic (Russian), and its relation to the presence/absence of the article in the overt morphosyntax. The empirical study, presented in this paper, confirmed the theoretical prediction that in Catalan the presence of a definite article conveys uniqueness of the referent, while an indefinite article suggests nonuniqueness. In the absence of articles (in Russian), bare nominals are compatible with both a uniqueness and a non-uniqueness interpretation. The reading of a bare noun phrase is inferred pragmatically, depending on contextual factors and the background knowledge of the interlocutors.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2015
In this volume, international experts in negation provide a comprehensive overview of cross-lingu... more In this volume, international experts in negation provide a comprehensive overview of cross-linguistic and philosophical research in the field, as well as accounts of more recent results from experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to fundamental questions ranging from why negation displays so many distinct linguistic forms to how prosody and gesture participate in the interpretation of negative utterances. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters are arranged in eight parts that explore, respectively, the fundamentals of negation; issues in syntax; the syntax–semantics interface; semantics and pragmatics; negative dependencies; synchronic and diachronic variation; the emergence and acquisition of negation; and experimental investigations of negation. The volume will be an essential reference for students and researchers across a wide range of disciplines, and will facilitate further interdiscipli...
Journal of Pragmatics
This paper focuses on the interpretation of what has been considered an expletive marker in the g... more This paper focuses on the interpretation of what has been considered an expletive marker in the grammar of the Greek nominal domain: the plural number of mass nouns. We present the results of an experimental investigation on the interpretation of plural mass nouns by native speakers of this language, and we propose a speech act analysis according to which at the time of producing utterances that contain plural mass nouns the speaker performs two speech acts: an assertion and an expressive speech act by which (s)he publicly commits to an emotive stance of DISLIKE towards the expressed proposition 4. This stance is analyzed as an emotive judgment with respect to 4, the expression of which directly transfers the speaker's emotion from the conversation into the speaker and addressee's common ground.
Caplletra: Revista Internacional de Filologia, 1990
This paper is an attempt to explain the phenomenon of neutralization to which certain negative ad... more This paper is an attempt to explain the phenomenon of neutralization to which certain negative adverbial structures are submitted when the stage of processing the corresponding utterances is reached. This notion of neutralization is to be understood as the disappearance of an ambiguity at the very moment at which people's representation of the world is built and modified. The analysis of the data shows that the level of Logical Form (at which a certain ambiguity is formally represented) and the level of representation at which propositions are conceptualized are different.
ABSTRACT see http://www.fcsh.unl.pt/linguistica/goingromance2014/GR\_Prog.pdf pp 29-31
Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 2021
This paper presents the results of an experimental investigation that looks into the acceptabilit... more This paper presents the results of an experimental investigation that looks into the acceptability and interpretation judgements that Basque native speakers give to sentences with multiple i-/bat ere indefinites in declarative sentences. It is argued that Basque i-/bat ere indefinites are Polarity Items (PIs) rather than Negative Concord Items (NCIs), as they are consistently associated with an existential reading in unacceptable declarative sentences without an overt negative licensor. That is, Basque i-/bat ere indefinites never give rise to a negative interpretation in the absence of an overt negative marker. It is also argued that Basque PIs differ from NCIs in Strict Negative Concord languages such as Greek in relevant ways, thus reinforcing the conclusion that Basque is not a NC language. This study contributes to a better understanding of the conditions that an indefinite expression must meet to be classified as a PI or as an NCI.
Introduction1 Long neglected as belonging to the "periphery", Comparative correlatives ... more Introduction1 Long neglected as belonging to the "periphery", Comparative correlatives (CC) have been much studied recently: Culicover & Jackendoff (1999) propose (for English) that they are a special construction with a symmetric syntax and an asymmetric semantics. Borsley (2004) argues that they are one of a number of non-standard head-adjunct structures (with the first clause as a syntactic adjunct). Den Dikken (2005) proposes a universal syntactic analysis of CCs as involving a subordinate (relative) clause adjoined to a main clause and claims that no special construction is needed. We present here some new data from Romance languages showing that: CCs require specific constructions, two syntactic patterns are available for CCs: an asymmetric pattern, as in English, Spanish (2a) or Italian (3a), or a symmetric pattern, as in Spanish (2b), or Italian (3b), one language can have the two patterns. French appears to have only one construction (1), but, depending on the spe...
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2017
This paper focuses on some issues involving expletive articles and long weak definites in Romance... more This paper focuses on some issues involving expletive articles and long weak definites in Romance (mainly Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Catalan), in comparison to DPs that elicit a strong reading. We show the similarities between expletive definites and long weak definites, and we argue for an analysis in common to other polarity items in terms of polarity sensitivity. We reach the conclusion that the definite article in Romance comes in two variants: the referentially unique variant (to be translated as the semantic iota operator) and the polar variant, formally characterized with an abstract [+σ] feature, that encodes a weak bound reading (to be semantically translated by an existential operator).
The Pragmatics of Catalan, 2011
Frontiers in psychology, 2017
Although contemporary linguistic studies routinely use unacceptable sentences to determine the bo... more Although contemporary linguistic studies routinely use unacceptable sentences to determine the boundary of what falls outside the scope of grammar, investigations far more rarely take into consideration the possible interpretations of such sentences, perhaps because these interpretations are commonly prejudged as irrelevant or unreliable across speakers. In this paper we provide the results of two experiments in which participants had to make parallel acceptability and interpretation judgments of sentences presenting various types of negative dependencies in Basque and in two varieties of Spanish (Castilian Spanish and Basque Country Spanish). Our results show that acceptable sentences are uniformly assigned a single negation reading in the two languages. However, while unacceptable sentences consistently convey single negation in Basque, they are interpreted at chance in both varieties of Spanish. These results confirm that judgment data that distinguish between acceptable and unac...
Frontiers in psychology, 2017
Although contemporary linguistic studies routinely use unacceptable sentences to determine the bo... more Although contemporary linguistic studies routinely use unacceptable sentences to determine the boundary of what falls outside the scope of grammar, investigations far more rarely take into consideration the possible interpretations of such sentences, perhaps because these interpretations are commonly prejudged as irrelevant or unreliable across speakers. In this paper we provide the results of two experiments in which participants had to make parallel acceptability and interpretation judgments of sentences presenting various types of negative dependencies in Basque and in two varieties of Spanish (Castilian Spanish and Basque Country Spanish). Our results show that acceptable sentences are uniformly assigned a single negation reading in the two languages. However, while unacceptable sentences consistently convey single negation in Basque, they are interpreted at chance in both varieties of Spanish. These results confirm that judgment data that distinguish between acceptable and unac...
Annual Review of Linguistics, 2019
This article critically reviews the main research issues raised in the study of response systems ... more This article critically reviews the main research issues raised in the study of response systems in natural languages by addressing the syntax and semantics of fragment answers and yes/no response particles. Fragment answers include replies that do not have a sentential form, whereas response particles consist solely of an affirmative or a negative adverb. While the main research question in the syntax of fragments and response particles has been whether these contain more syntactic structure than what is actually pronounced, the key issues in the study of their semantics are question–answer congruence, the anaphoric potential of response particles, and the meaning of fragments in relation to positive and negative questions. In connection to these issues, this review suggests some interesting avenues for further research: ( a) providing an analysis of particles other than yes/no, ( b) choosing between echoic versus nonechoic forms as answers to polar questions, and ( c) deciding whe...
Linguistic Variation
Besides its main use as a form of the movement verb ir ‘to go’, the Spanish form vaya (lit. go) i... more Besides its main use as a form of the movement verb ir ‘to go’, the Spanish form vaya (lit. go) is also used as a verbal discourse marker. Here we trace this transition from a purely verbal form to a discourse marker by searching a historical corpus of documents in Spanish, which reveals the increasing use over time of vaya in exclamatives to replace a presentational construction. We focus on vaya in isolation and in combination with an indefinite DP or a bare NP. We analyze the meaning of vaya as an epistemic discourse marker, by means of which the speaker expresses a judgment, a subjective epistemic and evidential evaluation of a proposition accessible from context. We postulate that these constructions sit in a Judgment Phrase at the syntactic-pragmatic interface (Krifka 2020), a position to which vaya also moves when its meaning is that of an expressive intensifier that directly modifies over one or more (contextually salient) properties of the noun contained in the DP/NP.
Annual review of linguistics, Jan 14, 2019
This article critically reviews the main research issues raised in the study of response systems ... more This article critically reviews the main research issues raised in the study of response systems in natural languages by addressing the syntax and semantics of fragment answers and yes/no response particles. Fragment answers include replies that do not have a sentential form, whereas response particles consist solely of an affirmative or a negative adverb. While the main research question in the syntax of fragments and response particles has been whether these contain more syntactic structure than what is actually pronounced, the key issues in the study of their semantics are question–answer congruence, the anaphoric potential of response particles, and the meaning of fragments in relation to positive and negative questions. In connection to these issues, this review suggests some interesting avenues for further research: ( a) providing an analysis of particles other than yes/no, ( b) choosing between echoic versus nonechoic forms as answers to polar questions, and ( c) deciding whether some non-lexically-based or nonverbal responses are systematically used in combination with polar particles to express (dis)agreement.
Frontiers in Psychology
This paper provides experimental evidence in support of the view that Greek does not have three p... more This paper provides experimental evidence in support of the view that Greek does not have three productive morphological classes of anticausative verbs, but only two: the class of verbs that bear non-active voice morphology and the class of verbs that are morphologically active. Across two experiments, native Greek speakers are found to prefer for each anticausative verb either non-active or active voice morphological marking, in the presence or absence of explicit contextual information. It is also shown experimentally that native speakers prefer an interpretation that involves a specific cause for all anticausatives, especially when the existence of such a cause is favored by the contextual setting. Our empirical findings are consistent with the view that the Voice Phrase that is realized as non-active voice morphology in Greek anticausatives is expletive. From a theoretical perspective, we analyze the expletiveness of this Voice projection as the result of semantic redundancy: th...
Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - Université de Nantes, 2019
Lingua, 2018
Although Mandarin Chinese (MC) has been characterized as a language in which two negative express... more Although Mandarin Chinese (MC) has been characterized as a language in which two negative expressions within the boundaries of a single sentential domain cancel each other to yield a positive reading, this paper examines whether a single negation reading may in fact result under certain conditions. The results of an online perception experiment performed by 114 native speakers of MC showed that single negation readings were indeed obtained, particularly when the first of the two negative expressions was an adjunct (i.e., có ngláibù/ có ngláiméi(yǒ u) 'never'), and when there was stress on the second negative expression (i.e., the negative markers méi(yǒ u) 'not' and bù 'not').
Weak vs. strong definite articles: Meaning and form across languages Florian Schwarz 2 Definitene... more Weak vs. strong definite articles: Meaning and form across languages Florian Schwarz 2 Definiteness in Cuevas Mixtec Carlos Cisneros 3 Strong vs. weak definites: Evidence from Lithuanian adjectives Milena Šereikaitė 4 On (in)definite expressions in American Sign Language Ava Irani 5 A nascent definiteness marker in Yokot'an Maya Maurice Pico 6 Definiteness across languages and in L2 acquisition Bert Le Bruyn 7 Licensing D in classifier languages and "numeral blocking" David Hall 8 On kinds and anaphoricity in languages without definite articles Miloje Despić
Beyond Philology An International Journal of Linguistics, Literary Studies and English Language Teaching
The article compares the interpretation of singular topical nominals in Romance (Catalan) and Sla... more The article compares the interpretation of singular topical nominals in Romance (Catalan) and Slavic (Russian), and its relation to the presence/absence of the article in the overt morphosyntax. The empirical study, presented in this paper, confirmed the theoretical prediction that in Catalan the presence of a definite article conveys uniqueness of the referent, while an indefinite article suggests nonuniqueness. In the absence of articles (in Russian), bare nominals are compatible with both a uniqueness and a non-uniqueness interpretation. The reading of a bare noun phrase is inferred pragmatically, depending on contextual factors and the background knowledge of the interlocutors.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2015
In this volume, international experts in negation provide a comprehensive overview of cross-lingu... more In this volume, international experts in negation provide a comprehensive overview of cross-linguistic and philosophical research in the field, as well as accounts of more recent results from experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to fundamental questions ranging from why negation displays so many distinct linguistic forms to how prosody and gesture participate in the interpretation of negative utterances. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters are arranged in eight parts that explore, respectively, the fundamentals of negation; issues in syntax; the syntax–semantics interface; semantics and pragmatics; negative dependencies; synchronic and diachronic variation; the emergence and acquisition of negation; and experimental investigations of negation. The volume will be an essential reference for students and researchers across a wide range of disciplines, and will facilitate further interdiscipli...
Journal of Pragmatics
This paper focuses on the interpretation of what has been considered an expletive marker in the g... more This paper focuses on the interpretation of what has been considered an expletive marker in the grammar of the Greek nominal domain: the plural number of mass nouns. We present the results of an experimental investigation on the interpretation of plural mass nouns by native speakers of this language, and we propose a speech act analysis according to which at the time of producing utterances that contain plural mass nouns the speaker performs two speech acts: an assertion and an expressive speech act by which (s)he publicly commits to an emotive stance of DISLIKE towards the expressed proposition 4. This stance is analyzed as an emotive judgment with respect to 4, the expression of which directly transfers the speaker's emotion from the conversation into the speaker and addressee's common ground.
Caplletra: Revista Internacional de Filologia, 1990
This paper is an attempt to explain the phenomenon of neutralization to which certain negative ad... more This paper is an attempt to explain the phenomenon of neutralization to which certain negative adverbial structures are submitted when the stage of processing the corresponding utterances is reached. This notion of neutralization is to be understood as the disappearance of an ambiguity at the very moment at which people's representation of the world is built and modified. The analysis of the data shows that the level of Logical Form (at which a certain ambiguity is formally represented) and the level of representation at which propositions are conceptualized are different.
ABSTRACT see http://www.fcsh.unl.pt/linguistica/goingromance2014/GR\_Prog.pdf pp 29-31
Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 2021
This paper presents the results of an experimental investigation that looks into the acceptabilit... more This paper presents the results of an experimental investigation that looks into the acceptability and interpretation judgements that Basque native speakers give to sentences with multiple i-/bat ere indefinites in declarative sentences. It is argued that Basque i-/bat ere indefinites are Polarity Items (PIs) rather than Negative Concord Items (NCIs), as they are consistently associated with an existential reading in unacceptable declarative sentences without an overt negative licensor. That is, Basque i-/bat ere indefinites never give rise to a negative interpretation in the absence of an overt negative marker. It is also argued that Basque PIs differ from NCIs in Strict Negative Concord languages such as Greek in relevant ways, thus reinforcing the conclusion that Basque is not a NC language. This study contributes to a better understanding of the conditions that an indefinite expression must meet to be classified as a PI or as an NCI.
Introduction1 Long neglected as belonging to the "periphery", Comparative correlatives ... more Introduction1 Long neglected as belonging to the "periphery", Comparative correlatives (CC) have been much studied recently: Culicover & Jackendoff (1999) propose (for English) that they are a special construction with a symmetric syntax and an asymmetric semantics. Borsley (2004) argues that they are one of a number of non-standard head-adjunct structures (with the first clause as a syntactic adjunct). Den Dikken (2005) proposes a universal syntactic analysis of CCs as involving a subordinate (relative) clause adjoined to a main clause and claims that no special construction is needed. We present here some new data from Romance languages showing that: CCs require specific constructions, two syntactic patterns are available for CCs: an asymmetric pattern, as in English, Spanish (2a) or Italian (3a), or a symmetric pattern, as in Spanish (2b), or Italian (3b), one language can have the two patterns. French appears to have only one construction (1), but, depending on the spe...
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2017
This paper focuses on some issues involving expletive articles and long weak definites in Romance... more This paper focuses on some issues involving expletive articles and long weak definites in Romance (mainly Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Catalan), in comparison to DPs that elicit a strong reading. We show the similarities between expletive definites and long weak definites, and we argue for an analysis in common to other polarity items in terms of polarity sensitivity. We reach the conclusion that the definite article in Romance comes in two variants: the referentially unique variant (to be translated as the semantic iota operator) and the polar variant, formally characterized with an abstract [+σ] feature, that encodes a weak bound reading (to be semantically translated by an existential operator).
The Pragmatics of Catalan, 2011
Frontiers in psychology, 2017
Although contemporary linguistic studies routinely use unacceptable sentences to determine the bo... more Although contemporary linguistic studies routinely use unacceptable sentences to determine the boundary of what falls outside the scope of grammar, investigations far more rarely take into consideration the possible interpretations of such sentences, perhaps because these interpretations are commonly prejudged as irrelevant or unreliable across speakers. In this paper we provide the results of two experiments in which participants had to make parallel acceptability and interpretation judgments of sentences presenting various types of negative dependencies in Basque and in two varieties of Spanish (Castilian Spanish and Basque Country Spanish). Our results show that acceptable sentences are uniformly assigned a single negation reading in the two languages. However, while unacceptable sentences consistently convey single negation in Basque, they are interpreted at chance in both varieties of Spanish. These results confirm that judgment data that distinguish between acceptable and unac...
Frontiers in psychology, 2017
Although contemporary linguistic studies routinely use unacceptable sentences to determine the bo... more Although contemporary linguistic studies routinely use unacceptable sentences to determine the boundary of what falls outside the scope of grammar, investigations far more rarely take into consideration the possible interpretations of such sentences, perhaps because these interpretations are commonly prejudged as irrelevant or unreliable across speakers. In this paper we provide the results of two experiments in which participants had to make parallel acceptability and interpretation judgments of sentences presenting various types of negative dependencies in Basque and in two varieties of Spanish (Castilian Spanish and Basque Country Spanish). Our results show that acceptable sentences are uniformly assigned a single negation reading in the two languages. However, while unacceptable sentences consistently convey single negation in Basque, they are interpreted at chance in both varieties of Spanish. These results confirm that judgment data that distinguish between acceptable and unac...