ewa willim | Jagiellonian University in Krakow (original) (raw)

Papers by ewa willim

Research paper thumbnail of Event, individuation and countability : a study with special reference to English and Polish

Research paper thumbnail of Linguistic countability and context

Research paper thumbnail of Universal Grammar in Noam Chomsky’s generative theory of language

The paper overviews the evolution of the views on Universal Grammar in Chomsky’s generative theor... more The paper overviews the evolution of the views on Universal Grammar in Chomsky’s generative theory of language. Originally envisaged as a rich, complex, highly specific and unique system of rules, principles and constraints underlying the speaker’s ability to produce and understand an infinitude of novel sentences and later, also to acquire language on the basis of impoverished data, Universal Grammar is currently reduced to a "bare minimum", containing only a universal set of features for the assembly of lexical items, the elementary binary operation of Merge (and a few others) as well as a restricted set of general principles and constraints. Some of these principles and constraints, if not all, may be grounded in language-external, general principles shaping the structure of organic forms and their course of development, in principles of learning, and efficient computation. While this leaner theory of Universal Grammar is a welcome development in the pursuit of "th...

Research paper thumbnail of Koncepcje gramatyki uniwersalnej w generatywnej teorii Noama Chomsky’ego

Research paper thumbnail of Idiosynkratyzm akomodacji morfologicznych wewnątrz i na zewnątrz fraz z liczebnikami typu pięć jako konsekwencja nieuzgodnienia cech przez mechanizm akomodacji składniowej

Research paper thumbnail of On the form-function dichotomy in linguistic theory

Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, 2010

This paper focuses on an important divide in theoretical linguistics between two broad perspectiv... more This paper focuses on an important divide in theoretical linguistics between two broad perspectives on the structural properties of human languages, generative and functionalist. In the former, linguistic structure is explained in terms of discrete categories and highly abstract principles, which may be language-independent or language-specific and purely formal or functional in nature. In the latter, explanation for why languages have the structure that they do is found 'outside' language, in the general principles of human cognition and the communicative functions of language. The aim of this paper is to highlight the need for abstractness, explicitness, simplicity and theoretical economy in linguistic description and explanation. The question is not whether principles of grammar are formal or functional. The question is whether the principles that are postulated to explain linguistic structure express true generalizations.

Research paper thumbnail of On the Syntax of the Genitive in Nominate

Research paper thumbnail of O sporach wokół formy i funkcji we współczesnym językoznawstwie. Formalizm kontra funkcjonalizm?

Linguistica Copernicana, Jan 15, 2010

Research paper thumbnail of On maximality modification in the psych domain : evidence from Polish

Research paper thumbnail of Grammatical number and the count/mass distinction

Research paper thumbnail of On linguistic relativity and number

Research paper thumbnail of On the category of number in language and cognition

Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, Feb 25, 2015

Number is the foundation of quantitative evaluation and an important parameter underpinning menta... more Number is the foundation of quantitative evaluation and an important parameter underpinning mental representations of the external reality formed in both the human and the non-human animal brain. It is generally accepted in cognitive sciences that at least some cognitive functions are mediated through language. Like the language faculty, the number faculty is characterized by the properties of recursion and generativity, which raises questions about the nature of the relationship between numerical cognition and language. Simply put, the main question is whether language is the key to number and whether mathematical reasoning can develop without the lexical and syntactic resources of language. This article overviews the results of various studies investigating the nature of the relationship between language and number. Taken together, the studies on the numerical capacities of speakers of indigenous languages lacking names of discrete quantities, pre-linguistic children, speakers with brain damage to the left perisylvian language area, as well as certain non-human animals demonstrate that language and numerical cognition are functionally independent of each other. This finding suggests that the links between language and thought are not as tight and direct as is often argued in linguistics, cognitive and developmental psychology as well as in the philosophy of language

Research paper thumbnail of Koncepcje gramatyki uniwersalnej w generatywnej teorii Noama Chomsky’ego

Research paper thumbnail of On the category of number in language and cognition

Number is the foundation of quantitative evaluation and an important parameter underpinning menta... more Number is the foundation of quantitative evaluation and an important parameter underpinning mental representations of the external reality formed in both the human and the non-human animal brain. It is generally accepted in cognitive sciences that at least some cognitive functions are mediated through language. Like the language faculty, the number faculty is characterized by the properties of recursion and generativity, which raises questions about the nature of the relationship between numerical cognition and language. Simply put, the main question is whether language is the key to number and whether mathematical reasoning can develop without the lexical and syntactic resources of language. This article overviews the results of various studies investigating the nature of the relationship between language and number. Taken together, the studies on the numerical capacities of speakers of indigenous languages lacking names of discrete quantities, pre-linguistic children, speakers with brain damage to the left perisylvian language area, as well as certain non-human animals demonstrate that language and numerical cognition are functionally independent of each other. This finding suggests that the links between language and thought are not as tight and direct as is often argued in linguistics, cognitive and developmental psychology as well as in the philosophy of language

Research paper thumbnail of Views on the syntax of the ’s-Marker in English

Research paper thumbnail of On the nature and role of linguistic variation on the example of syntactic variation in modern English

Linguistic variation is persistent and pervasive. It is everywhere in language, from the producti... more Linguistic variation is persistent and pervasive. It is everywhere in language, from the production and processing of individual sounds to the production and processing of utterances and larger texts. Also the grammars of the world's 7,000 or so languages exhibit extraordinary range and richness. In the functionalist tradition in linguistics, the significance of linguistic variables lies in their correlation with various extralinguistic factors, including demographic variables such as age, sex, region, social class, various social practices, interactional dynamics etc. The results of a recent quantitative, comparative analysis of syntactic variation in 46 present-day nonstandard varieties of English spoken around the world conducted by Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi (2004), some of which are presented here, revals that speakers of nonstandard English dialects exploit an impressive range of syntactic differences. At the same time, these differences stem mainly from variation in grammat...

Research paper thumbnail of PASE papers in linguistics

Research paper thumbnail of On the feature valuation/interpretability biconditional in Minimalist Theory : the case of (un)interpretable gender

This paper is a contribution to the on-going debate on the nature of the mechanism(s) of agreemen... more This paper is a contribution to the on-going debate on the nature of the mechanism(s) of agreement in natural language in minimalist syntactic theorizing, focusing on the interdependence of feature valuation and interpretability on which Chomsky’s (2000, 2001) theory of Agree is founded. To see whether valuation and interpretability go hand in hand, as conjectured by Chomsky (2000, 2001),the feature of (grammatical) gender in Polish, a language with a grammatical gender system and robust inflectional morphology, is investigated here. Taking grammatical gender to be (the content of) the categorizing head in the (lower) functional structure of noun phrases (cf. Lowenstamm 2008), it is shown here with reference to masculine personal nouns in Polish that their non-canonical, emotionally coloured, expressive uses derive from insertion of their roots or stems in the derivation under a categorizing head (n) bearing a feature of grammatical gender which does not license human individuals in their denotation at LF. The choice of n in the narrow syntax has consequences at PF in that inserted under different kinds of categorizing heads, the same roots/stems have different inflectional morphology and agreement patterns. To compute the interpretive difference, LF must have access to the distinguisher on the categorizing head with which the roots/stems are merged in the syntax. Evidence from Polish, a language with a fairly complex grammatical gender system, thus suggests that the feature of grammatical gender may have a role to play on both the PF and LF branches of the derivation. The problem of the (in)dependence of the properties of valuation and interpretability of the features that participate in syntactic operations or relations is addressed here in reference to Chomsky (2000, 2001), where the hypothesis of a logical connection between the valuation of unvalued features and deletion of uninterpretable features to ensure LF convergence is introduced for the first time rather than in reference to the revised conception of Agree in Chomsky (2004, 2008). The revisions in the latter do not bear on the valuation/interpretability biconditional, but they pose numerous problems for the analysis of the derivation of various types of syntactic structures (see Radford 2009: 403–409 for discussion). In particular, if grammatical gender is the bearer of the lexical items’ nominality, it cannot be deleted from the derivation. Confronted with different distinguishers, i.e. values on the nominalizing head n, which is the locus of the feature [Gender] under which the same root/stem inserted in the syntactic derivation is transferred to LF, semantics is forced to compute an interpretive difference, as can be expected on the Strong Minimalist Thesis. If no interpretive effects are triggered by the distinct values, the value parts of the attribute-value pair that encodes gender may be ignored by semantics. Thus, grammatical gender can be present at LF without violating the Principle of Full Interpretation/Legibility Principle.

Research paper thumbnail of On the invariance of Standard English

O n th e In v a ria n c e o f St a n d a r d En g lis h ...o u r ability to vary our language acc... more O n th e In v a ria n c e o f St a n d a r d En g lis h ...o u r ability to vary our language according to our social an d re gional backgrounds, our professional careers, an d indeed our cre ative urges as individuals, is at the very heart o f the gift that h um an language bestows.

Research paper thumbnail of Editors' preface

The 11 th Conference on Syntax, Phonology and Language Analysis was hosted by the Department of E... more The 11 th Conference on Syntax, Phonology and Language Analysis was hosted by the Department of English Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and it was held on October 11-13, 2018. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the members of the English Students' Society at the Jagiellonian University for their help in organizing the conference and to the Faculty of Philology of the Jagiellonian University of Kraków and the Municipality of Kraków for their financial support. This volume contains selected papers from the conference, divided into three parts: Part One. Theoretical and Experimental Syntax, Part Two. Phonology and Phonetics, and Part Three. Semantics and Pragmatics. We thank the external reviewers for the time and effort they invested into reviewing the submitted papers. We gratefully acknowledge financial support for this volume from the Faculty of Philology of the Jagiellonian University of Kraków.

Research paper thumbnail of Event, individuation and countability : a study with special reference to English and Polish

Research paper thumbnail of Linguistic countability and context

Research paper thumbnail of Universal Grammar in Noam Chomsky’s generative theory of language

The paper overviews the evolution of the views on Universal Grammar in Chomsky’s generative theor... more The paper overviews the evolution of the views on Universal Grammar in Chomsky’s generative theory of language. Originally envisaged as a rich, complex, highly specific and unique system of rules, principles and constraints underlying the speaker’s ability to produce and understand an infinitude of novel sentences and later, also to acquire language on the basis of impoverished data, Universal Grammar is currently reduced to a "bare minimum", containing only a universal set of features for the assembly of lexical items, the elementary binary operation of Merge (and a few others) as well as a restricted set of general principles and constraints. Some of these principles and constraints, if not all, may be grounded in language-external, general principles shaping the structure of organic forms and their course of development, in principles of learning, and efficient computation. While this leaner theory of Universal Grammar is a welcome development in the pursuit of "th...

Research paper thumbnail of Koncepcje gramatyki uniwersalnej w generatywnej teorii Noama Chomsky’ego

Research paper thumbnail of Idiosynkratyzm akomodacji morfologicznych wewnątrz i na zewnątrz fraz z liczebnikami typu pięć jako konsekwencja nieuzgodnienia cech przez mechanizm akomodacji składniowej

Research paper thumbnail of On the form-function dichotomy in linguistic theory

Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, 2010

This paper focuses on an important divide in theoretical linguistics between two broad perspectiv... more This paper focuses on an important divide in theoretical linguistics between two broad perspectives on the structural properties of human languages, generative and functionalist. In the former, linguistic structure is explained in terms of discrete categories and highly abstract principles, which may be language-independent or language-specific and purely formal or functional in nature. In the latter, explanation for why languages have the structure that they do is found 'outside' language, in the general principles of human cognition and the communicative functions of language. The aim of this paper is to highlight the need for abstractness, explicitness, simplicity and theoretical economy in linguistic description and explanation. The question is not whether principles of grammar are formal or functional. The question is whether the principles that are postulated to explain linguistic structure express true generalizations.

Research paper thumbnail of On the Syntax of the Genitive in Nominate

Research paper thumbnail of O sporach wokół formy i funkcji we współczesnym językoznawstwie. Formalizm kontra funkcjonalizm?

Linguistica Copernicana, Jan 15, 2010

Research paper thumbnail of On maximality modification in the psych domain : evidence from Polish

Research paper thumbnail of Grammatical number and the count/mass distinction

Research paper thumbnail of On linguistic relativity and number

Research paper thumbnail of On the category of number in language and cognition

Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, Feb 25, 2015

Number is the foundation of quantitative evaluation and an important parameter underpinning menta... more Number is the foundation of quantitative evaluation and an important parameter underpinning mental representations of the external reality formed in both the human and the non-human animal brain. It is generally accepted in cognitive sciences that at least some cognitive functions are mediated through language. Like the language faculty, the number faculty is characterized by the properties of recursion and generativity, which raises questions about the nature of the relationship between numerical cognition and language. Simply put, the main question is whether language is the key to number and whether mathematical reasoning can develop without the lexical and syntactic resources of language. This article overviews the results of various studies investigating the nature of the relationship between language and number. Taken together, the studies on the numerical capacities of speakers of indigenous languages lacking names of discrete quantities, pre-linguistic children, speakers with brain damage to the left perisylvian language area, as well as certain non-human animals demonstrate that language and numerical cognition are functionally independent of each other. This finding suggests that the links between language and thought are not as tight and direct as is often argued in linguistics, cognitive and developmental psychology as well as in the philosophy of language

Research paper thumbnail of Koncepcje gramatyki uniwersalnej w generatywnej teorii Noama Chomsky’ego

Research paper thumbnail of On the category of number in language and cognition

Number is the foundation of quantitative evaluation and an important parameter underpinning menta... more Number is the foundation of quantitative evaluation and an important parameter underpinning mental representations of the external reality formed in both the human and the non-human animal brain. It is generally accepted in cognitive sciences that at least some cognitive functions are mediated through language. Like the language faculty, the number faculty is characterized by the properties of recursion and generativity, which raises questions about the nature of the relationship between numerical cognition and language. Simply put, the main question is whether language is the key to number and whether mathematical reasoning can develop without the lexical and syntactic resources of language. This article overviews the results of various studies investigating the nature of the relationship between language and number. Taken together, the studies on the numerical capacities of speakers of indigenous languages lacking names of discrete quantities, pre-linguistic children, speakers with brain damage to the left perisylvian language area, as well as certain non-human animals demonstrate that language and numerical cognition are functionally independent of each other. This finding suggests that the links between language and thought are not as tight and direct as is often argued in linguistics, cognitive and developmental psychology as well as in the philosophy of language

Research paper thumbnail of Views on the syntax of the ’s-Marker in English

Research paper thumbnail of On the nature and role of linguistic variation on the example of syntactic variation in modern English

Linguistic variation is persistent and pervasive. It is everywhere in language, from the producti... more Linguistic variation is persistent and pervasive. It is everywhere in language, from the production and processing of individual sounds to the production and processing of utterances and larger texts. Also the grammars of the world's 7,000 or so languages exhibit extraordinary range and richness. In the functionalist tradition in linguistics, the significance of linguistic variables lies in their correlation with various extralinguistic factors, including demographic variables such as age, sex, region, social class, various social practices, interactional dynamics etc. The results of a recent quantitative, comparative analysis of syntactic variation in 46 present-day nonstandard varieties of English spoken around the world conducted by Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi (2004), some of which are presented here, revals that speakers of nonstandard English dialects exploit an impressive range of syntactic differences. At the same time, these differences stem mainly from variation in grammat...

Research paper thumbnail of PASE papers in linguistics

Research paper thumbnail of On the feature valuation/interpretability biconditional in Minimalist Theory : the case of (un)interpretable gender

This paper is a contribution to the on-going debate on the nature of the mechanism(s) of agreemen... more This paper is a contribution to the on-going debate on the nature of the mechanism(s) of agreement in natural language in minimalist syntactic theorizing, focusing on the interdependence of feature valuation and interpretability on which Chomsky’s (2000, 2001) theory of Agree is founded. To see whether valuation and interpretability go hand in hand, as conjectured by Chomsky (2000, 2001),the feature of (grammatical) gender in Polish, a language with a grammatical gender system and robust inflectional morphology, is investigated here. Taking grammatical gender to be (the content of) the categorizing head in the (lower) functional structure of noun phrases (cf. Lowenstamm 2008), it is shown here with reference to masculine personal nouns in Polish that their non-canonical, emotionally coloured, expressive uses derive from insertion of their roots or stems in the derivation under a categorizing head (n) bearing a feature of grammatical gender which does not license human individuals in their denotation at LF. The choice of n in the narrow syntax has consequences at PF in that inserted under different kinds of categorizing heads, the same roots/stems have different inflectional morphology and agreement patterns. To compute the interpretive difference, LF must have access to the distinguisher on the categorizing head with which the roots/stems are merged in the syntax. Evidence from Polish, a language with a fairly complex grammatical gender system, thus suggests that the feature of grammatical gender may have a role to play on both the PF and LF branches of the derivation. The problem of the (in)dependence of the properties of valuation and interpretability of the features that participate in syntactic operations or relations is addressed here in reference to Chomsky (2000, 2001), where the hypothesis of a logical connection between the valuation of unvalued features and deletion of uninterpretable features to ensure LF convergence is introduced for the first time rather than in reference to the revised conception of Agree in Chomsky (2004, 2008). The revisions in the latter do not bear on the valuation/interpretability biconditional, but they pose numerous problems for the analysis of the derivation of various types of syntactic structures (see Radford 2009: 403–409 for discussion). In particular, if grammatical gender is the bearer of the lexical items’ nominality, it cannot be deleted from the derivation. Confronted with different distinguishers, i.e. values on the nominalizing head n, which is the locus of the feature [Gender] under which the same root/stem inserted in the syntactic derivation is transferred to LF, semantics is forced to compute an interpretive difference, as can be expected on the Strong Minimalist Thesis. If no interpretive effects are triggered by the distinct values, the value parts of the attribute-value pair that encodes gender may be ignored by semantics. Thus, grammatical gender can be present at LF without violating the Principle of Full Interpretation/Legibility Principle.

Research paper thumbnail of On the invariance of Standard English

O n th e In v a ria n c e o f St a n d a r d En g lis h ...o u r ability to vary our language acc... more O n th e In v a ria n c e o f St a n d a r d En g lis h ...o u r ability to vary our language according to our social an d re gional backgrounds, our professional careers, an d indeed our cre ative urges as individuals, is at the very heart o f the gift that h um an language bestows.

Research paper thumbnail of Editors' preface

The 11 th Conference on Syntax, Phonology and Language Analysis was hosted by the Department of E... more The 11 th Conference on Syntax, Phonology and Language Analysis was hosted by the Department of English Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and it was held on October 11-13, 2018. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the members of the English Students' Society at the Jagiellonian University for their help in organizing the conference and to the Faculty of Philology of the Jagiellonian University of Kraków and the Municipality of Kraków for their financial support. This volume contains selected papers from the conference, divided into three parts: Part One. Theoretical and Experimental Syntax, Part Two. Phonology and Phonetics, and Part Three. Semantics and Pragmatics. We thank the external reviewers for the time and effort they invested into reviewing the submitted papers. We gratefully acknowledge financial support for this volume from the Faculty of Philology of the Jagiellonian University of Kraków.

Research paper thumbnail of The puzzle of psychological verbs: (Why) are emotion verbs grammatically special? 1

This paper addresses the problem of the special behavior of verbs expressing emotions from the pe... more This paper addresses the problem of the special behavior of verbs expressing emotions from the perspective of the complexity of emotions as studied in psychology and philosophy. The evolution of the meaning of the word emotion in English provides the starting point for the discussion of the phenomenon of emotion, whose complexity is then argued to find reflection in language. It is argued that the finer-grained distinctions within the class of verbs encoding affective phenomena based on temporal relations and causativity can help to distinguish between the psychological experiences encoded with SE and OE verbs in English. It is also suggested that nominalizations provide evidence for the prominence of Experiencers as identifiers of psych eventualities, which is correlated with a cognitive imbalance between the Experiencer and the Stimulus. The puzzling properties of psych verbs are thus attributed to the variety of state and event types they describe.