On the syntax of personal arguments

Bianchi, Valentina

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2005.05.002

Cited by 151 publications

(101 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Previous work (Kuperberg et al 2003(Kuperberg et al , 2008Quiñones et al 2014) points to cortical areas that are part of the language network, such as the LIFG and the MTG, as primarily involved in the comprehension of congruent sentences. Within this network, the finding of differential responses for Person and Number Violations (Person Violation > Number Violation) would provide evidence for featurespecific mechanisms in the building and interpretation of a sentential relation, in line with theoretical analyses (Bianchi, 2006;Mancini et al 2013;Sigurdsson, 2004Sigurdsson, , 2008. Based on this, one could expect to find a dissociation i) in areas that are thought to support the extraction of morphosyntactic information to build syntactic structure (Hagoort, 2005;Pallier et al 2011); ii) in areas supporting the mapping between 10 morphosyntactic and semantic-discourse information, to derive the overall interpretation of a sentence.…”

Section: The Current Studysupporting

confidence: 63%

“…What differentiates person from number would be the distinct mapping options (cardinality and discourse) that the interpretation of the two features requires, which would be behind the different posterior negative effect elicited by the two violations. 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 8 The findings and theoretical analyses described above invoke a more precise characterization of the basic mechanisms underlying form-to-meaning mapping, and point to a language processing system that i) functionally dissociates checking and mapping during integration processes; and ii) employs feature-based mapping procedures to assign an interpretation to an agreement dependency (see Bianchi, 2006;Sigurdsson, 2008). In this respect, Mancini and colleagues (Mancini et al 2013) have proposed that feature-checking and feature-mapping mechanisms are dealt with by two different mechanisms that separately target person and number.…”

Section: The Spaniards Celebrated the Win Of The National Soccer Teammentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While person (1st, 2nd, 3rd) encodes the discourse role played by an individual (speaker, addressee and non-participant), and thus contributes to indicating the perspective from which an event is told, number indexes his/her cardinality (a single entity vs. a multitude of individuals). This inherent difference between person and number has structural and interpretive differences, which amount to the autonomous representation of the two features in the hierarchical syntactic tree (Bianchi, 2006;Shlonsky, 1989) and to different mapping options. Specifically, because of its direct link to discourse, person is posited to occupy a higher node in syntactic structure compared to number (Bianchi, 2006;Mancini et al, 2013;Shlonsky, 1989;Sigurdsson, 2004), making it possible to associate each morphological realization of person (1 st , 2 nd or 3 rd ) with a specific participant (speaker, addressee, non-participant) and thus assign a discourse role.…”

Section: Computing Different Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This inherent difference between person and number has structural and interpretive differences, which amount to the autonomous representation of the two features in the hierarchical syntactic tree (Bianchi, 2006;Shlonsky, 1989) and to different mapping options. Specifically, because of its direct link to discourse, person is posited to occupy a higher node in syntactic structure compared to number (Bianchi, 2006;Mancini et al, 2013;Shlonsky, 1989;Sigurdsson, 2004), making it possible to associate each morphological realization of person (1 st , 2 nd or 3 rd ) with a specific participant (speaker, addressee, non-participant) and thus assign a discourse role. In contrast, no such linking to discourse is required for number: the number information extracted from verb is mapped onto the cardinality representation invoked by the subject argument, independently of the discourse role of this argument (see Mancini et al 2013 andMancini et al 2014 for a detailed theoretical explanation of person and number difference in mapping points).…”

Section: Computing Different Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this respect, the quantitative dissociation found between person and number would result from their different underlying structural representations (Bianchi, 2006;S. Mancini, Molinaro, Rizzi, & Carreiras, 2011;Sigurdsson, 2008).…”

Section: Structure Building: the Role Of The Pmtgmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Disentangling meaning in the brain: Left temporal involvement in agreement processing

Mancini

Quiñones

Molinaro

et al. 2017

Cortex

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Sentence comprehension is successfully accomplished by means of a form-to-meaning mapping procedure that relies on the extraction of morphosyntactic information from the input and its mapping to higher-level semantic-discourse representations. In this study, we sought to determine whether neuroanatomically distinct brain regions are involved in the processing of different types of information contained in the propositional meaning of a sentence, namely person and number. While person information indexes the role that an individual has in discourse (i.e. the speaker, the addressee or the entity being talked about by speaker and addressee), number indicates its cardinality (i.e. a single entity vs. a multitude of entities). An event-related fMRI experiment was run using agreement-correct and person-and number-violated sentences in Spanish, to disentangle the processing mechanisms and neural substrates associated with the building of discourse and cardinality representations. The contrast between person and number violations showed qualitative and quantitative differences. A greater response for person compared to number was found in the left middle temporal gyrus (LMTG). However, critically, a posterior-to-anterior functional gradient emerged within this region. While the posterior portion of the LMTG was sensitive to both person and number violations, the anterior portion of this region showed selective response for person violations. These results confirm that the comprehension of the propositional meaning of a sentence results from a composite, feature-sensitive mechanism of form-to-meaning mapping in which the nodes of the language network are differentially involved

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Section: The Current Studysupporting

confidence: 63%

Section: The Spaniards Celebrated the Win Of The National Soccer Teammentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Computing Different Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Computing Different Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Structure Building: the Role Of The Pmtgmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Disentangling meaning in the brain: Left temporal involvement in agreement processing

Mancini

Quiñones

Molinaro

et al. 2017

Cortex

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Switch Reference and Obviation

Camacho

2017

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition

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Many of the world's languages track constituents across clauses using switch‐reference morphemes. These markers convey information about whether arguments in each clause have the same referent ( same subject ) or different referents ( different subject ). Switch‐reference morphemes tend to appear attached to a verbal head, although they track arguments in two separate clauses. Additionally, switch‐reference morphemes may indicate how the temporal denotation of each clause is ordered with respect to the other. Switch reference has been analyzed in the following three ways: first, as an instance of pronominal coreference, regulated by the principles of Binding Theory; second, as relations between the situations depicted by each proposition; and, third, as a phenomenon driven by agreement relations between clauses. Obviation morphology classifies nominal arguments in a clause depending on their ranking along scales of person, thematic role, animacy, definiteness, and topichood. For example, proximate marking can indicate a highly ranked argument in the person and the thematic role hierarchy. Obviation is frequently signaled through a complex interaction between two paradigms, the obviation paradigm proper (proximate vs. obviative) and a related voice‐marking system (direct or inverse). Since obviation refers to topichood ranking, it also serves the purpose of tracking referents across clauses, so that proximate marking indicates topic continuity, whereas obviative morphology signals change of topic. Likewise, switch reference may track topic continuity by marking subjects as coreferential (same‐subject marking), and topic discontinuity through a different‐subject setting. However, obviation can rank arguments clause‐internally, whereas switch reference always takes place across clauses. Additionally, the case system and the number of arguments of a verb indirectly determine the type of obviation marking, whereas case and argument structure rarely affect switch‐reference systems.

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Clitic Clusters

Pescarini

2017

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition

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this chapter deals with the morphosyntax of Romance clitic combinations. It summarizes some data and treatments of clitic sequences, focusing on three aspects: combinatorial restrictions, orderings, and morphological irregularities.First, not all clitic combinations are allowed, as combinatorial gaps arise from both robust cross-linguistic restrictions (the Person Case Constraint, or PCC) and language-specific constraints. The former has received much attention in the recent syntactic literature. Besides the PCC, however, Romance displays various kinds of gaps, part of which are arguably due to an identity-avoidance principle whose morphological or syntactic nature is still under discussion.Second, the order of clitic elements within a cluster is rigidly set on a language-specific basis and, third, the morphological shape of the cluster does not result from the agglutination of single clitics, as morphological irregularities arise rather frequently. Previous analyses argued that these aspects are due to some sort of extrasyntactic computation, namely morphological templates, post-syntactic operations, output constraints, etc.. Such non-syntactic devices, which do not follow from any general principle of Universal Grammar, are usually postulated to account for language-specific orderings and irregularities. In fact, however, ordering phenomena and morphological irregularities seem to be systematic, with certain patterns recurring frequently across languages. The second part of the chapter aims to show that ordering phenomena and morphological irregularities are related and both may be deemed evidence of the syntactic make-up of clitic sequences. In particular, it is shown that, building on a very restrictive theory of linearization, one may deal with the variation in clitic ordering without postulating extrasyntactic levels of computation.

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On the syntax of personal arguments

Cited by 151 publications

References 35 publications

Disentangling meaning in the brain: Left temporal involvement in agreement processing

Disentangling meaning in the brain: Left temporal involvement in agreement processing

Switch Reference and Obviation

Clitic Clusters

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