Attitude Verbs Research Articles

Pseudo-Coordinated Sitzen and Stehen in Spoken German: A Case of Emergent Progressive Aspect?

This paper investigates the aspectual potential of posture verb pseudo-coordination in spoken German. In a corpus study of sitzen ‘sit’ and stehen ‘stand’, it is shown that despite a preference for activity verbs, verbs of all aspectual classes occur in the second conjunct. The posture verb imposes its durative meaning component on the second verb, thus making a progressive interpretation of the construction possible. Apart from this emergent aspectual function, German posture verb pseudo-coordination has a subjective function (conveying the speaker’s beliefs about the subject referent’s stance), and a discourse pragmatic function (information packaging).*

The Internal Structure of Copular Sentences with desu and da in Japanese

Japanese is a language known for its rich honorific morphology. Different from many Indo-European languages, Japanese language has its honorifics built into the grammar system. Japanese honorifics have many different forms and their usages are not always clearly predictable, which makes it quite challenging for second language learners to grasp. This paper introduces a less-known honorific pattern that clearly shows how Japanese honorifics behave grammatically. The copula verb be in Japanese has two forms: a non-honorific form da and an honorific form desu. Da is used under conditions where the speaker indicates an informal or casual talk, while desu is used when the speaker intends to present good manners to the listener. From a formal linguistic perspective, a sentence with the plain copula form and one with the honorific copula form have a different underlying structure represented in the grammar of native Japanese speakers. The paper explains such difference between copular sentences with desu and da by presenting a syntactic structure analysis. It proposes a different internal structure for a copular sentence with desu and da, and further argues that the sentence with desu has more structure in the left periphery and presents a different verb position in the internal structure in comparison to the sentence with da. The analysis motivates a syntactical way to present and explain the differences in grammatical structures and social contexts of copula use when teaching honorifics in Japanese second language classrooms. It suggests that modern Japanese second language education start teaching honorifics with copular sentences where the distinction between honorific and non-honorific use is very clear and simple.

Motion verbs and future constructions: the case of Hebrew omed le-V ‘standing (up) to-V’/‘(be) about to-V’

This paper focuses on the constructionalization and grammaticalization path of the Hebrew construction omed le-V ‘standing (up) to-V’/‘about to-V’ as denoting ‘near future’. The investigation will be a diachronic and historical one, from biblical to contemporary Hebrew, stage by stage, and will discuss the evolution of the omed le-V ‘standing (up) to-V’ construction from a posture verb within a motion verb construction V1 to V2 into a ‘near future construction’. i.e., We will focus on the affinity of the meaning of the motion verb with the type of future it comes to denote and we will claim that the evolution of the omed le-V construction is based on three main sources: 1. Literal omed ‘standing up’ meaning is the basis of the near future grammaticalization: standing up from a sedentary posture marks the beginning of involvement in a certain upcoming action, thus perfect as the source conceptual schema for immediacy marking. 2. The shift from spatial to temporal motion maps spatial image schemas onto timelines that correlate with temporal domains. 3. The intrinsic future-orientation of a goal action gave rise to a pragmatic (metonymic) inference from purpose to futurity, later conventionalizing as futurity. Thus, the construction omed le-V ‘standing (up) to-V/about to-V’ shifted from the literal ‘standing up in order to perform an action’ to the near future ‘about to-V’ meaning via the conditioned or interdependent temporal relation of the standing (up) action and its consecutive goal action in real-world scenarios. Lastly, a comparison to two other Hebrew motion verb-based future constructions will be conducted: the constructions holex le-V ‘walking/going to-V’ and ba le-V ‘coming to-V’. The former will be claimed to denote an ‘undefined’ future (either near or distant) and the latter: an ‘unfulfilled future’ (an action that was about to be conducted but wasn't conducted or wasn't conducted on time). This will shed additional light on the evolution of posture and motion verb constructions into future marking constructions. Our conclusions will also be supported by the results of a questionnaire examining the future realization (either ‘near’, ‘undefined’ or ‘unfulfilled’) of the three constructions among native speakers of Hebrew.

Factive Entailments and Clausal Complementation in Karitiana

Attitude verbs describe mental states of their subject in relation to a proposition codified by their clausal complement. In this paper, we describe the behavior of such verbs in Karitiana, a Tupian language spoken in Brazil. Recently, it has been noted in the literature that embedded clauses with nominal features seem to lead to a factive reading of these verbs. In Karitiana, all embedded clauses are nominalized since they lack many clausal features, and conversely exhibit nominal distribution and behavior. We propose a structure with an N head for embedded clauses in Karitiana, which accounts for their morphological behavior and also explains why these constructions behave as strong islands. Judgments of contradiction with attitude verbs of Karitiana were collected and the results show that they fall into two categories: one that obligatorily entails the truth of the embedded clause and another that favors it, but that does not require it obligatorily. This shows that nominalization of embedded clauses seems to be tied to the presence of factive entailments, but this alone is not a sufficient condition to force a factive reading of the matrix attitude verb.

WORD ORDER STRATEGIES IN THE OLD HIGH GERMAN NEGATIVE SENTENCE

This paper presents a description of word order patterns in Old High German with special emphasis given to the negative constructions. The Old Germanic syntax exhibits a relatively high variety in ordering constituents in the surface sentence structure, derived from the SOV-, SVO- and VSO-patterns. The study highlights the peculiarities of OHG word order with its verb-first, verb-second, and verd-third/last position of the finite verb regarding the conditions of such syntactic arrangement. The special attention is paid to the negative clauses, with the emphatically charged NEG-clitic in the proposition to the foregrounded finite verb. Sentence negation strategies in OHG (eighth-eleventh century) that display early signs of grammaticalization have been presented in the context of the available linguistic triggers, i.e., structural pressure and discourse specific to requirements of the texts under consideration. The paper provides the data-based analysis of NEG V1 patterns, retrieved from the OHG sources, aiming to show the role of the negative clitic in the word order arrangement. We assume that it was the interaction between the specific samples of the Old High German discourse and grammar that brought about the foregrounding of the negated head-initial VP. The discourse prose is regarded as a special case in the overall bulk of texts in the religious prose. The material shows that preposed negative clitic is placed separately or merged with the finite verb. The last option is represented rather strong in the negative verb-initial sentences. It is claimed that negation itself is an influential factor of the verb-first word order tightly related to the discourse peculiarities, shaped by the features of the religious texts of the mentioned period.

Realis morphology and Chatino’s role in the diversification of Zapotec languages

Abstract This paper concerns a semantic change whereby a continuous aspect prefix was reinterpreted as marking realis mood. This change took place in Chatino and then diffused to the Southern Zapotec subgroup, contributing to the genetic diversification of the Zapotec languages. Proto-Zapotecan marked irrealis mood with *k- and did not mark realis. *n- indicated continuous aspect and could concatenate with perfective *ku- to render a resultative reading. A continuous-marked positional verb *n-te later grammaticalized as a progressive prefix in Chatino. As both perfective and progressive refer to (at least partially) realized situations, *n- was reanalyzed as a marker of realis mood that could concatenate with aspectual viewpoint prefixes. The realis prefix is shown to be one of several traits diffused from Chatino which contribute to the creation of the Southern Zapotec clade and its divergence from Monte Albán Zapotec.

Factivity-Alternating Attitude Verbs in Azeri

Factivity alternations received at least two kinds of explanations in the literature: there are approaches that attribute the two readings to two different LFs and approaches that derive the presence/absence of a factive inference by appealing to general pragmatic mechanisms. In this paper I investigate verbs displaying two different kinds of factivity alternations in Azeri and argue for the former view of how factivity alternations emerge.

Knowing and Believing Things: What DP-Complementation Can Tell us about the Meaning and Composition of (Factive) Attitudes

Abstract In the Hintikkan tradition, attitude verbs are viewed as relations between individuals and propositions. Previous work on know and believe with Content DPs like the rumour has tended to treat know CP vs. know DP as polysemy. In this paper, I show that polysemy runs into conceptual and empirical problems, and propose instead a new decompositional approach to know-verbs, which avoids polysemy; linking both know DP and know CP to the same lexical root, which describes, broadly speaking, acquaintance. This analysis thus provides an explicit and compositional morpho-semantic link between know DP and know CP that accounts for the interpretation of DPs as objects of acquaintance, and further captures the idea that knowledge, and factivity more broadly, is tied to acquaintance with a situation, the res ( Kratzer 2002, a.o.). Based on detailed examination of the morpho-syntax and interpretation of DP and CP complements of believe, I further show that DPs can either combine with believe in the same fashion as CPs, as a direct object (saturating a propositional argument slot, as in Uegaki 2016), or as an indirect object, via a type of attitudinal applicative (proposed here). The former option is defined for Content DPs and the latter for agentive DPs, so-called Source DPs. Together, these proposals account for the observation that the interpretation of believe DP sentences varies depending on the type of DP (believe the rumour vs. believe the referee), whereas for know-verbs, both types of DPs are interpreted as objects of acquaintance. At the core of the current proposal is the idea that verbs like know and believe differ fundamentally at the level of argument structure and internal morpho-semantic composition, and thus combine with DPs via different routes; contrary to uniform approaches to know and believe. Whereas believe-verbs describe relations to intensional content, and require external licensing mechanisms to combine with DPs, know-verbs describe complex relations, fundamentally anchored in the attitude holder’s acquaintance with (abstract or concrete) individuals in the world, and thus make reference to individuals as part of their argument structure. The current proposal also builds on and adds to previous insights about connections between factivity, DP-complementation, and question-embedding.

ЛЕКСИКО-СЕМАНТИЧНІ ОСОБЛИВОСТІ МОВИ УКРАЇНСЬКИХ ІНТЕРНЕТ-МЕДІА: РЕЛІГІЙНИЙ ВИМІР

<p><strong><em>The purpose</em></strong><em> </em><em>of the article is to determine the lexical and semantic features of messages on religious theme, the title complex in the Ukrainian segment of the Internet.</em></p><p><strong><em>Research methodology. </em></strong><em>According to the purpose of the research, a number of such methods was used: observation (to collect primary empirical materials), inductive-deductive (to define and describe the peculiarities of messages on religious topics and title complex); comparison, analysis, generalization.</em></p><p><strong><em>Results. </em></strong><em>The analysis has showed that messages of religious theme on media resources presented on the Internet are most often related to the life of Orthodox denominations (OCU and UOC MP) and the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church (UGCC). The title complex and the texts of messages often include verbatives with the same meaning of speech and those close to them: verbs of reporting and transmission of information (speak up, to speak, to say); verbs to indicate the content of speech (to tell, to explain); verbs of emotional attitude and evaluation (to condemn, to blame); verbs of speech influence (to call, to appeal). Most often, verbs of speech have a neutral meaning and are devoided of expressive coloring. Sometimes phraseme (idiom) and metaphors are used in the title complex. The use of stylistically elements and tropes is more characteristic of analytical genres: allusion, paronyms, oxymorons, occasionalisms. Metonymy prevails in informational genres. Expressive means of hate speech in the title complex are also not uncommon, in particular nicknames, slang, jargon, vulgar lexis. Publications also actively use the syntactic opportunities of the language, which are typical for online-resources, in particular, sentences in which the second part after the colon does not explain the meaning of the first one, but includes «hook phrase», the purpose of which is to «force» the reader to follow the hyperlink in order to learn more («what happened»; «explained the details»).<strong></strong></em></p><p><strong><em>Novelty </em></strong><em>is that the lexical and semantic features of messages on religious theme in the Ukrainian segment of the Internet have been determined.</em></p><p><strong><em>Practical significance.</em></strong><em> The results of the research can be used in a comprehensive investigation of religious journalism in Ukraine and as educational material in the training of future journalists.</em></p><p><strong><em>Key words:</em></strong><em> religious theme, title complex, verbs of speech,</em><em> </em><em>lexical and semantic groups, hate speech.</em></p>

Attitudes, Presuppositions, and the Binding Theory

Abstract In order to handle presuppositions in the scope of attitude verbs, the binding theory allows presuppositions triggered in a subject's beliefs to be bound at the matrix level; and it allows presuppositions triggered in non-doxastic attitudes to be bound in the subject's beliefs (Geurts, 1999; Maier, 2015). However, we argue that this leads to serious overgeneration, for example it predicts that the unacceptable ‘Sue will come to the party, but Bill is sure that she won't and that only Sue will come to the party’ should be equivalent to the acceptable ‘Sue will come to the party, but Bill is sure that nobody will come to the party’. This is because the presupposition triggered by ‘only Sue will come to the party’ should be able to be bound at the matrix level. We discuss some responses to this problem, but argue that they all have shortcomings.

Morphophonological realisation on inflected verbal roots with initial vowel sounds in Sepedi

In instances where verbs that start with vowel sounds and a vowel prefix is attached, the hiatus is repaired through resyllabification, i.e. the manifestation of an initial underlying sound called a glottal catch. This sound fills the onset position of vowel initial verbs in Sepedi, and is responsible for the drastic alternation when the verb comes into contact with a reflexive prefix or an object concord. This article examines the effect of morphophonological realisation on inflected verbal roots with initial vowel sounds in Sepedi. The data collected through documents and semi-structured interviews shows that the glottal catch makes verbs follow the CV syllable pattern. The vowel reflexive prefix which threatens to create a hiatus is repaired through epenthesis by adding a sound to the interior of a word (at the beginning of prosthesis). This repair strategy ensures that the CV syllable structure of Sepedi is maintained. This article provides new data that offers innovative understanding of Sepedi on the concepts such as epenthesis and hiatus, relating to alternations in morphophonological environments using the optimality theory.

What’s your Opinion? Negation and ‘Weak’ Attitude Verbs

Abstract Attitude verbs like ‘believe’ and ‘want’ exhibit neg-raising: an ascription of the form a doesn’t believe that p tends to convey that a disbelieves—i.e., believes the negation of—p. In ‘Belief is Weak’, Hawthore et al. observe that neg-raising does not occur with verbs like ‘know’ or ‘need’. According to them, an ascription of the form a believes that p is true just in case a is in a belief state that makes p more likely than not, and so—excepting cases of complete indifference—a will either believe p or disbelieve p. I expand and revise this explanation: so-called ‘weak’ attitude verbs are used in ascriptions of an opinion about some subject matter S—a kind of selection from among the elements of S—and these ascriptions are themselves responsive to conversational topics that presuppose that the subject of the ascription has an opinion about S. ‘Strong’ attitude verbs denote more direct relationships between subject and world.

Sensitivity to finiteness in attitude verb interpretation

Children are sensitive to syntactic structure when learning new verbs (Gleitman 1990). This has been shown in tracking transitivity (Naigles 1990), as well as in hypothesizing meanings for attitude verbs (Harrigan et al 2019). In English, desire and belief subcategories of attitude verbs have different finiteness properties; desire verbs occur with finite complements and belief verbs occur with non-finite complements. The current study explores adults’ sensitivity to varying distributions of finiteness in the complements of a novel attitude verb, aiming to better understand the mechanism for hypothesizing verb meaning based on syntactic distribution. We find that adults’ hypotheses for class of attitude verb are tied to the syntactic distribution—they strongly connect finiteness to belief verbs and non-finiteness to desire verbs.

Incorporation With Verbal Deletion In Mandailing Language

Incorporation in the Mandailing language occurs due to changes of verb position which results in deletion of verb. The theory used to analyze this incorporation of verb deletion is one presented by Fillmore (1988) referring to Jehane’s. Meanwhile, the method used in this study is based on Labov’s. According to Labov, the data of linguistic research are obtained from text, elicitation, intuition, experiment, and observation. Von Humboldt states that the term incorporation is the unification of lexical morphemes and words. The result of this analysis indicates that the incorporation in Mandailing occurs typologically rather than polysynthetically. The forms or types of incorporation in this language are apparently quite broad, varied, and applied clearly without changing the meaning of each incorporation. One of the incorporation forms or types results in incorporation with verb deletion. The kinds of incorporation with verb deletion based on the cases are objective, instrumental, locative, translative, and state incorporations. The incorporation process of verb deletion happens because the incorporating case changes its function. The case is verbalized by verb affix, and then the incorporation process causes changes in syntactic valence and construction.

Negation and Verb-Movement in Romance: New Perspectives on Jespersen’s Cycle

AbstractIn this article we bring to light one additional factor underlying so-called Jespersen’s Cycle (JC) in Romance which has to date gone unnoticed, namely the varying position of the finite verb within the IP. More specifically, we show that there exists an empirical correlation between the availability of clause-medial/high verb-movement and Stages II–III of JC in which a postverbal negator is licensed. Drawing on novel data, we demonstrate that this correlation holds not only across modern Romance varieties, but also across early varieties. Formally, we explain this link between negation and verb-movement from the (in)active status of the T-domain and the consequent (im)possibility of donating a [Neg] feature to the lowerv-VP domain. Although verb-movement in itself is not a sufficient condition to trigger a shift towards Stages II–III negation, we argue that it is a necessary one, a fact which explains the peculiar distribution of negation strategies across the Romània.

How do L2 learners deal with a “dead” language? A psycholinguistic study on sentence processing in Latin

Many decades of research have shown that sentence processing works in an highly incremental and predictive fashion (Marslen-Wilson, 1975) – in the L1 but also (maybe to a lower extent) in the L2. But whereas almost all studies on L2 sentence processing focus on modern languages, it is fully unclear how a language like Latin that fundamentally differs in the way it is taught and used is processed. Thus, the current study focuses on the question if proficient L2 learners of Latin show any evidence for incremental and predictive processing when reading Latin sentences. In a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) task 25 advanced learners of Latin read 384 easy three-word Latin sentences that were manipulated among the factors animacy, argument order and verb position. The results indicate that the participants used the word order and animacy information to incorporate the arguments into the sentence structure on-line and to predict upcoming arguments on the basis of verb information. These findings are interpreted as the first evidence for incremental and predictive processing when reading Latin sentences.

Grammatical categorization based on frequent frames in Persian child-directed speech

Previous research has revealed that distributional information obtained from child-directed speech could be informative for children when they are learning grammatical categories. Frequent frames are distributional units proposed by Mintz and explored by researchers in many languages with different typologies. This study investigated two parent–child corpora from the CHILDES database to determine frequent frames in Persian child-directed speech. To do so, a number of frequent frames in the two corpora and more specifically those which contained complex verbs were analyzed in detail. The results indicate that the accuracy of frequent frames in Persian (0.54) with some specific typological features is lower than that of English (0.91) at the word level due to the flexibility of the basic SOV order at the sentence level in Persian. It was also found that Persian frequent frames mostly included complex verbs. This evidence, along with the results of frames in categorizing words at this level, indicates that the accuracy of the frames is also affected by the fact that the subject position of verbs is mostly left vacant in Persian as a pro-drop language. That is why the non-finite forms of the verbs were taken into account when a verb was a part of the frames. The results also revealed that grammatical categories which mostly appeared in the context of frames were verbs, while the target words were nouns and adjectives.

DOES RUSSIAN ATTEST SYNTACTIC RAISING? PART 2: SMALL CLAUSES

I propose a raising analysis for a number of Russian constructions based on non-verbal predication: (1) constructions with nominal predicates and semi-lexical verbs; (2) constructions with transitive attitude verbs; (3) constructions with transitive perception verbs; (4) constructions with transitive causative verbs. What they all have in common is that their predicate can take a small clause as an internal argument. The small clause’s subject is assigned structural case in the matrix clause and attests all structural properties of the matrix subject / direct object, which signals raising. The peculiarity of raising in Russian is thus its restriction to small clauses.

There might be more to syntactic bootstrapping than being pragmatic: A look at grammatical person and prosody in naturalistic child-directed speech.

In 'Being pragmatic about syntactic bootstrapping', Hacquard (2022) argues that abstract syntax is useful for word learning, but that an additional cue, pragmatics, is both necessary and available for young children during the first steps of language acquisition. She focuses on modals and attitude verbs, where the physical context seems particularly impoverished as the sole basis for deriving meanings, and thus where linguistic cues may be particularly helpful. She convincingly shows how pragmatic and syntactic cues could be combined to help young language learners learn and infer the possible meanings of attitude verbs such as "think", "know" or "want". She also argues that, in some circumstances, syntax and pragmatics would need to be supplemented by semantic information from context - for instance, in the case of modals such as "might", "can", or "must". We agree with Hacquard on the importance of the synergies between these different cues to meaning, and wish to add two other aspects of the input that might also be used by young children in these contexts. The aspects we describe can only be noticed when one analyzes concrete examples of what children hear in their everyday lives, something which Hacquard does very often in her work (e.g., Dieuleveut, van Dooren, Cournane & Hacquard, 2022; Huang, White, Liao, Hacquard & Lidz, 2022; Yang, 2022). Taking into account different cues for meaning would help the field go beyond current models of syntactic bootstrapping, and create an integrated picture of the synergies between different levels of linguistic information.

The importance of modeling pragmatic syntactic bootstrapping.

Syntactic bootstrapping is based on the premise that there are probabilistic correspondences between the syntactic structure in which a word occurs and the word's meaning, and that such links hold, with some degree of generality, cross-linguistically. The procedure has been extensively discussed with respect to verbs, where it has been proposed as a mechanism for constraining the massive ambiguity that arises when inferring the meaning of a verb that is used to describe an event (Fisher, Hall, Rakowitz & Gleitman, 1994; Gleitman, 1990; Gleitman, Cassidy, Nappa, Papafragou & Trueswell, 2005). In her keynote paper (Hacquard, 2022), Hacquard focuses on classes of verbs for which inferences about meaning are arguably even harder, because they involve concepts that have no observable counterparts: these are attitude verbs such as think and want, and modals such as must and can. She walks us through, in meticulous detail, the limits of a purely syntactic bootstrapping mechanism, and she describes how augmenting syntactic information with pragmatic information, via pragmatic syntactic bootstrapping (Hacquard, 2022; Hacquard & Lidz, 2019), might address these limitations. The proposal is exciting, and the detail with which Hacquard works through these examples is impressive; she supports her arguments with behavioral experiments, corpus analyses, and two very targeted computational analyses. In this commentary I suggest that Hacquard's proposal is laid out in sufficient detail such that a comprehensive computational modeling effort would be fruitful for evaluating and further developing her account.