Abstract
This paper reviews a series of experimental studies that address what we call “interface judgment,” which is the complex judgment involving integration from multiple levels of grammatical representation such as the syntax-semantics and prosody-semantics interface. We first discuss the results from the ERP literature connected to NPI licensing in different languages, paying particular attention to the N400 and the P600 as neural correlates of this specific phenomenon and focusing on the study by Xiang et al. (2016). The results of this study show evidence that there are two distinct NPI licensing mechanisms, i.e., licensing and rescuing, in line with Giannakidou (1998, 2006). Then we discuss an acceptability judgment task on Greek NPIs which supports the negativity as a scale hypothesis (Zwarts, 1995, 1996; Giannakidou, 1998). For the semantics-prosody interface judgment, we discuss two types of findings on two different phenomena and languages: (i) the study by Giannakidou and Yoon (2016) on scalar and non-scalar NPIs in Greek and Korean, which serves as the foundation for Chatzikonstantinou's (2016) study of production data showing distinct prosodic properties in emphatic (scalar) and non-emphatic (non-scalar) Greek NPIs; (ii) a (production and perception) study by Etxeberria and Irurtzun (2015) on the prosodic disambiguation of the scalar/non-scalar readings of sentences containing the focus particle “ere” in Basque. The main conclusion of the paper is that experimental methods of the kind discussed in the paper are useful in establishing physical, quantitative correlates of interface judgment.
Highlights
Reviewed by: Leticia Pablos, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), Netherlands John E
We first discuss the results from the event-related potentials (ERPs) literature connected to negative polarity items (NPIs) licensing in different languages, paying particular attention to the N400 and the P600 as neural correlates of this specific phenomenon and focusing on the study by Xiang et al (2016)
What does it mean for speakers to have a linguistic judgment about meaning? How does the semantic judgment differ from the judgment about syntax, and how are the two to be distinguished from use errors or lexical failures? Are there hallmarks of syntax-semantics integration, and if so what are they? Are there grammatical phenomena that allow us to pinpoint physical correlates of this integration? Since sentences are typically uttered, what role does prosody play in disambiguating or bringing about additional dimensions of meaning that reflect different modules? These are some of the questions that we discuss in the present article
Summary
Let us define “interface judgment” as the judgment that comes from integrating representations from multiple grammatical levels such as, for instance, syntax and semantics, and semantics and prosody. The literature on NPIs (which we will not review here, but see Giannakidou, 2011 for a recent overview) has shown that a substantial part of NPI violations involve grammatical violations that have to do with syntactic constraints too Corpus studies such as Hoeksema (2010) on Dutch and English NPIs have been instrumental in illustrating the (often severely) limited distributions of NPIs. Corpus studies such as Hoeksema (2010) on Dutch and English NPIs have been instrumental in illustrating the (often severely) limited distributions of NPIs How does this semantico-syntactic integration judgment differ from infelicity, i.e., the merely pragmatic conflict of lexical anomaly and uninformativity? We will review (a) ERP literature showing distinct neural patterns for syntax-semantics integration with NPIs, (b) experiments, including mere acceptability judgment tasks, illustrating the usefulness of such methodology in extracting more refined sets of data, and (c) interaction of prosody with scalar structure and focus.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call