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1. M-merger and copy spell-out in Inuktitut noun incorporation

   Yuan, Michelle (October 2018, Proceedings of the Forty-eighth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society)

   A long-standing issue in the analysis of noun incorporation (NI) concerns whether the noun-verb complex is derived by syntactic movement of the object or postsyntactic merger of the verb and an in situ object. The same question pervades the literature on word formation and affixation more generally. This paper investigates these questions from the point of view of Inuktitut, an Inuit language of Northern Canada, and argues that both NI and polysynthetic word formation in Inuit are postsyntactic phenomena, derived by successive m-merger between adjacent elements along the clausal spine. I argue that incorporated nominals in Inuktitut are syntactically active, in that they remain accessible for case, agreement, and even phrasal movement operations, despite being overtly realized within the verb complex. These patterns follow straightforwardly from interactions between postsyntactic m-merger and general conditions on copy spell-out. M-merger of a nominal copy in a movement chain prevents that copy from being deleted, in accordance to morphological well-formedness conditions on word formation. 

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2. Proleptic objects as complex-NPs

   https://doi.org/10.1515/tlr-2024-2022  

   Gluckman, John (November 2024, The Linguistic Review)

   Abstract Proleptic (or prothetic) objects (Majaliwa remembered about Samson that he’s sick) present a particular puzzle because they appear to instantiate an unconstrained cross-clausal dependency between the proleptic object (Samson) and a correlate (he). The current analytical approach to prolepsis is relies on a syntactic mechanism of treating the embedded clause as a predicate, derived by merging a null operator which unselectively binds the correlate. This approach faces a number of known empirical challenges. Moreover, this work does not meaningfully engage with any of the recent semantic innovations in our understanding of embedded clauses (Kratzer 2006. Decomposing attitude verbs. Available at:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/DcwY2JkM/attitude-verbs2006.pdf). I offer an alternative to the CP-predicate approach, adopting three (semi-)independently motivated ideas concerning (i) the syntax of cross-clausal dependencies in Lohninger et al. (2022. From prolepsis to hyperraising.Philosophies7(32)), (ii) the semantics of embedded clauses in Kratzer (2006. Decomposing attitude verbs. Available at:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/DcwY2JkM/attitude-verbs2006.pdf)/Moulton (2009. Not moving clauses: Connectivity in clausal arguments.Syntax16(3). 250–291), and (iii) the semantics ofaboutin Rawlins (2013. About about.Proceedings of SALT23. 336–357)/Onea and Mardale (2020. From topic to object, grammaticalization differential object marking in Romanian.Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue Canadienne de Linguistique65(3). 350–392). I argue that proleptic objects are complex-NPs, roughly,the thing about Samson. The somewhat particular properties of prolepsis are natural consequences of these combined ideas. I further present empirical evidence from Japanese that the complex-NP analysis is on the right track. This analysis deepens our understanding of prolepsis by including both semantic and syntactic factors. 

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3. Transferring Implicit Knowledge of Non-Visual Object Properties Across Heterogeneous Robot Morphologies

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA48891.2023.10160811  

   Tatiya G.; Francis J.; and Sinapov, J. (May 2023, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation)

   Abstract— Humans leverage multiple sensor modalities when interacting with objects and discovering their intrinsic properties. Using the visual modality alone is insufficient for deriving intuition behind object properties (e.g., which of two boxes is heavier), making it essential to consider non-visual modalities as well, such as the tactile and auditory. Whereas robots may leverage various modalities to obtain object property understanding via learned exploratory interactions with objects (e.g., grasping, lifting, and shaking behaviors), challenges remain: the implicit knowledge acquired by one robot via object exploration cannot be directly leveraged by another robot with different morphology, because the sensor models, observed data distributions, and interaction capabilities are different across these different robot configurations. To avoid the costly process of learning interactive object perception tasks from scratch, we propose a multi-stage projection framework for each new robot for transferring implicit knowledge of object properties across heterogeneous robot morphologies. We evaluate our approach on the object-property recognition and object-identity recognition tasks, using a dataset containing two heterogeneous robots that perform 7,600 object interactions. Results indicate that knowledge can be transferred across robots, such that a newly-deployed robot can bootstrap its recognition models without exhaustively exploring all objects. We also propose a data augmentation technique and show that this technique improves the generalization of models. We release code, datasets, and additional results, here: https: //github.com/gtatiya/Implicit-Knowledge-Transfer. 

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4. Amodal phonology

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226720000298  

   Berent, Iris; Bat-El, Outi; Brentari, Diane; Andan, Qatherine; Vakinin-Nusbaum, Vered (January 2020, Journal of linguistics)

   Does knowledge of language transfer spontaneously across language modalities? For example, do English speakers, who have had no command of a sign language, spontaneously project grammatical constraints from English to linguistic signs? Here, we address this question by examining the constraints on doubling. We first demonstrate that doubling (e.g., panana, generally, ABB) is amenable to two conflicting parses (identity vs. reduplication), depending on the level of analysis (phonology vs. morphology). We next show that speakers with no command of a sign language spontaneously project these two parses to novel ABB signs in American Sign language. Moreover, the chosen parse (for signs) is constrained by the morphology of spoken language. Hebrew speakers can project the morphological parse when doubling indicates diminution, but English speakers only do so when doubling indicates plurality, in line with the distinct morphological properties of their spoken languages. These observations suggest that doubling in speech and signs is constrained by a common set of linguistic principles that are algebraic, amodal and abstract. 

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5. Partial awareness

   Halpern, Joseph Y.; Piermont, Evan (January 2019, Proceedings of the Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   We develop a modal logic to capture partial awareness. The logic has three building blocks: objects, properties, and concepts. Properties are unary predicates on objects; concepts are Boolean combinations of properties. We take an agent to be partially aware of a concept if she is aware of the concept without being aware of the properties that define it. The logic allows for quantification over objects and properties, so that the agent can reason about her own unawareness. We then apply the logic to contracts, which we view as syntactic objects that dictate outcomes based on the truth of formulas. We show that when agents are unaware of some relevant properties, referencing concepts that agents are only partially aware of can improve welfare. 

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