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1. Mediating functions and the semantics of noun incorporation

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-021-09511-4  

   McKenzie, Andrew (April 2021, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract Noun incorporation is commonly thought to avoid the weak compositionality of compounds because it involves conjunction of an argument noun with the incorporating verb. However, it is weakly compositional in two ways. First, the noun’s entity argument needs to be bound or saturated, but previous accounts fail to adequately ensure that it is. Second, non-arguments are often incorporated in many languages, and their thematic role is available for contextual selection. We show that these two weaknesses are actually linked. We focus on the Kiowa language, which generally bars objects from incorporation but allows non-arguments. We show that a mediating relation is required to semantically link the noun to the verb. Absent a relation, the noun’s entity argument is not saturated, and the entire expression is uninterpretable. The mediating relation for non-objects also assigns it a thematic role instead of a postposition. Speakers can choose this role freely, subject to independent constraints from the pragmatics, syntax, and semantics. Objects in Kiowa are in fact allowed to incorporate in certain environments, but we show that these all independently involve a mediating relation. The mediating relation for objects quantifies over the noun and links the noun+verb construction to the rest of the clause. The head that introduces this relation re-categorizes the verb in the syntactic derivation. Essentially, we demonstrate two distinct mechanisms for noun incorporation. Having derived the distribution of Kiowa, we apply the same relations to derive constraints on English complex verbs and synthetic compounds, which exhibit most of the same constraints as Kiowa noun incorporation. We also look at languages with routine object incorporation, and show how the transitivity of the verb depends on whether the v° head introducing the external argument assigns case to the re-categorized verb. 

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2. Lexico-syntactic constraints influence verbal working memory in sentence-like lists

   https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-023-01496-2  

   Schwering, Steven C.; Jacobs, Cassandra L.; Montemayor, Janelle; MacDonald, Maryellen C. (December 2023, Memory & Cognition)

   We test predictions from the language emergent perspective on verbal working memory that lexico-syntactic constraints should support both item and order memory. In natural language, long-term knowledge of lexico-syntactic patterns involving part of speech, verb biases, and noun animacy support language comprehension and production. In three experiments, participants were presented with randomly generated dative-like sentences or lists in which part of speech, verb biases, and animacy of a single word were manipulated. Participants were more likely to recall words in the correct position when presented with a verb over a noun in the verb position, a good dative verb over an intransitive verb in the verb position, and an animate noun over an inanimate noun in the subject noun position. These results demonstrate that interactions between words and their context in the form of lexico-syntactic constraints influence verbal working memory. 

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3. The morphosemantics of incremental plurality in Hualapai (Yuman)

   https://doi.org/10.3765/85s4v882  

   Henderson, Robert (December 2024, Semantics and Linguistic Theory)

   Hualapai is a Yuman language with a verbal morphological system, seen in various languages of the region, which poses difficulties for a compositional analysis. In particular, Hualapai verb morphology exhibits incrementality (see Baerman 2016, 2019, 2024), where there is no one-to-one mapping between forms and meanings. Instead, forms are ordered on a scale tracking morphological complexity, and more complex morphological forms are mapped, all things being equal, to meanings that are higher on some semantic scale. In the case of Hualapai, the incremental system concerns a plurality, which in this case conflates plural argument marking and plural event marking, also known as pluractionality. This paper provides the first compositional morphosemantic treatment of Hualapai verbal plurality, which in addition, is used to think about how we might handle such incremental systems in general using standard morphological and semantic tools. 

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4. Explaining patterns of fusion in morphological paradigms using the memory-surprisal tradeoff

   Rathi, N. (January 2022, Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society)

   J. Culbertson, A. Perfors (Ed.)

   Languages often express grammatical information through inflectional morphology, in which grammatical features are grouped into strings of morphemes. In this work, we propose that cross-linguistic generalizations about morphological fusion, in which multiple features are expressed through one morpheme, can be explained in part by optimization of processing efficiency, as formalized using the memory--surprisal tradeoff of Hahn et al. (2021). We show in a toy setting that fusion of highly informative neighboring morphemes can lead to greater processing efficiency under our processing model. Next, based on paradigm and frequency data from four languages, we consider both total fusion and gradable fusion using empirical measures developed by Rathi et al. (2021), and find that the degree of fusion is predicted by closeness of optimal morpheme ordering as determined by optimization of processing efficiency. Finally, we show that optimization of processing efficiency can successfully predict typological patterns involving suppletion. 

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5. Beyond c-structure and f-structure: On the argument-adjunct distinction in O’dam

   Everdell, Michael; Melchin, Paul B.; Asudeh, Ash; Siddiqi, Daniel (February 2021, The proceedings of the LFG Conference)

   Butt, Miriam; Findlay, Jamie Y; Toivonen, Ida (Ed.)

   In this paper we examine the argumenthood properties of Controlled Complement Clauses and Non-Complement Subordinate Clauses in O’dam. We show that in O’dam only controlled COMPs are arguments, while other putative complement clauses are adjunct relative clauses that elaborate on a pronominal OBJ incorporated in the matrix verb. We use the LRFG framework to capture both the argumenthood properties of the two types of clauses in O’dam as well as the patterns of object marking on the matrix verb by taking advantage of mismatches between c-structure (phrase structure and f-descriptions) and v-structure (the vocabulary items realizing this structure). 

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