Von Heusinger Research Articles

Dependent Case for Mongolian: Unifying accusative subjects

In Modern Mongolian, the subjects of many subordinate clauses, both complements and adjuncts, may be marked with the accusative case (von Heusinger, Klein & Guntsetseg 2011; Guntsetseg 2016). This study argues that the full empirical picture of these marked subjects necessitates an analysis based on Dependent Case Theory (Marantz 1991; Baker & Vinokurova 2010; Baker 2015), which additionally provides an account of case assignment more broadly in the language, including in differential object marking. Prior syntactic analyses (Bao et al. 2015; Fong 2019) rely on Agree-based case-licensing from v, resulting in ECM-like accounts. However, the appearance of accusative on subjects of adjoined clauses, as well as in clauses with no canonical accusative-assigning verbs (intransitives, passives) rules out v as the case assigner. Instead, following Baker & Vinokurova (2010), this account argues that accusative case is assigned configurationally. Once established that a configurational approach to case-assignment handles subjects, as well as direct objects, the approach is applied to Mongolian-specific issues including voice alternations and converbial adjuncts, showing that the theory predicts case-assignment patterns there. Finally, the study examines data from dative marking and scrambling in ditransitives to refine Baker & Vinokurova’s (2010) original theory, obviating the need for case-stacking by restricting the timing of application of the Dependent Case algorithm.

Differential Object Marking and discourse prominence in Spanish

Spanish, like many other Romance and non-Romance languages, shows Differential Object Marking (DOM), i.e., some direct objects are morphologically marked by the prepositional marker a ‘to’, while others remain unmarked. The literature has proposed different sentential parameters in order to capture this variation (Fábregas 2013, among others), including topicality (see Leonetti 2004, Iemmolo 2010, among others). In addition, Laca (1995: 82f.) has argued that DOM also depends on discourse properties. She assumes that in Spanish the use of DOM with an indefinite direct object signals that more information about this object referent is to be expected in the upcoming discourse (see also Comrie 1981/1989). First empirical evidence for this hypothesis comes from DOM in Romanian (Chiriacescu & von Heusinger 2010). In this paper we explore the hypothesis that, in Spanish, human indefinite direct objects with DOM show more forward-looking potential than those without DOM. We present original results from two corpus studies and two paragraph continuation tasks. The corpus studies provide support for the discourse effect of DOM, while the paragraph continuation tasks do not, which might be due to the particular design of our experimental items. We evaluate the different parameters that contribute to the discourse prominence of a direct object with DOM and those that might mask such effects. We conclude that there is evidence that DOM contributes to discourse prominence, but that further studies are necessary.

Successive Cyclicity in DPs: Evidence from Mongolian Nominalized Clauses

Successive Cyclicity in DPs: Evidence from Mongolian Nominalized Clauses

The impersonal gets personal

Multicultural London English (MLE) has developed a new pronoun, man, with a number of interesting properties. It can be interpreted as any person and number combination (1sg, 1pl, 2sg, 2pl, 3sg, 3pl), and at first blush appears the allow a generic impersonal reading. One central strand of analyses of the ‘generic’ or ‘quasi-universal’ interpretation of impersonal pronouns involves treating them as featurally impoverished pronouns which act as variables bound by a generic operator either high in the clause (Moltmann 2006; Sigurðsson and Egerland 2009, a.o.) or at the top of the DP (Ackema and Neeleman 2018). What is interesting about MLE man is that it seems to allow a generic reading while being generally resistant to binding: the pronoun never behaves as a bound variable, and so it could not reasonably be assumed that a generic operator can bind it. I show, however, that a closer look at the facts reveals that the quasi-generic interpretation, and all other possible interpretations of the pronoun, can be explained instead by assuming that it has a featureless person head, which introduces the full lattice of possible referents including speaker and addressee (following Harbour 2016), and then allowing contextually determined subsets of that full lattice to be picked out by a choice function, modelled on the epsilon operator of von Heusinger (2004). This novel data from MLE suggests that generic-like interpretations can arise even where generic binding is not possible, but that the traditional strategy of generating these interpretations are still needed to capture the full typology of impersonal pronouns.

A proximal Newton-type method for equilibrium problems

In this work we extend the method considered by von Heusinger et al. (Math Program 132(1):99–123, 2012) to the setting of equilibrium problems. Moreover, we introduce a family of auxiliary bifunctions containing that one used by them. We prove that the method is locally convergent and we establish the superlinear/quadratic convergence of the algorithm to a solution of the problem under suitable assumptions. An application of the proposed method to multiobjective optimization problems is considered. Some preliminary numerical results are reported showing the performance of our algorithm.

Equivalences Among Polarity Algorithms

The concept of polarity is pervasive in natural language. It relates syntax, semantics and pragmatics narrowly (Giannakidou, in: Maienborn, von Heusinger, Portner (eds.), Semantics: an international handbook of natural language meaning, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, 2011; Israel in The grammar of polarity: pragmatics, sensitivity, and the logic of scales, Cambridge studies in linguistics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014), it refers to items of many syntactic categories such as nouns, verbs and adverbs. Neutral polarity items appear in affirmative and negative sentences, negative polarity items cannot appear in affirmative sentences, and positive polarity items cannot appear in negative sentences. A way of reasoning in Natural Language is through Natural Logic (van Benthem in Essays in logical semantics, vol. 29 of Studies in linguistics and philosophy, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1986; Language in action: categories, lambdas, and dynamic logic, vol. 130 of Studies in logic, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1991). This logic is based on the concept of polarity in order to make the meaning of a sentence weaker o stronger without changing its truth value. There exist many proposals to compute polarity in the Natural Logic context, the most widely known are the ones by: van Benthem (1986, 1991), Sanchez-Valencia (Studies on natural logic and categorial grammar, Ph.D. thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1991), Dowty (Proceedings of the 4th conference on semantics and theoretical linguistics, Cornel University, CLC Publications, Rochester, 1994), and van Eijck (in: ten Cate, Zeevat (eds.), 6th international Tbilisi symposium on logic, language, and computation, Batumi, Georgia, Springer, 2007). If Natural Logic is going to be used, as an inferential mechanism between text fragments, in Natural Language Processing applications such as text summarization, question answering, and information extraction, it is a priority to know what the existing relationship among the aforementioned algorithms is; for example, to implement the most general. We show in this paper the equivalence among the analyzed algorithms, filling a gap in Natural Logic research, particularly in computing polarity, and the soundness of their algorithms.

Referential numerosity in quantification expressions. An ERP study on Italian.

Referential numerosity in quantification expressions. An ERP study on Italian.

Indefinite Donkeys on Islands

In this paper I present a theory of indefinites which captures two of their natural properties: indefinites license donkey anaphora (Geach 1962) and they exhibit ‘specific’ readings in which they appear to scope out of scope islands. In various flavours of dynamic semantics (Kamp 1981, Heim 1982, Dekker (2004)), these properties can be captured to the detriment of compositionally. Other theories have employed more involved technical machinery like choice functions (Kratzer 1998, von Heusinger 2002), Hamblin-semantics (Kratzer & Shimoyama 2002) or independence friendly logics (Brasoveanu & Farkas 2011) to derive exceptional scope readings, but ignored donkey anaphora. Theories of E-type anaphora, on the other hand, generally do not consider exceptional scope readings (Heim 1990, Elbourne 2001). My own analysis combines insights from dynamic semantics with referential indexing in LF-semantics, resulting in a fully compositional, static system.

Indefinite Donkeys on Islands

In this paper I present a theory of indefinites which captures two of their natural properties: indefinites license donkey anaphora (Geach 1962) and they exhibit ‘specific’ readings in which they appear to scope out of scope islands. In various flavours of dynamic semantics (Kamp 1981, Heim 1982, Dekker (2004)), these properties can be captured to the detriment of compositionally. Other theories have employed more involved technical machinery like choice functions (Kratzer 1998, von Heusinger 2002), Hamblin-semantics (Kratzer & Shimoyama 2002) or independence friendly logics (Brasoveanu & Farkas 2011) to derive exceptional scope readings, but ignored donkey anaphora. Theories of E-type anaphora, on the other hand, generally do not consider exceptional scope readings (Heim 1990, Elbourne 2001). My own analysis combines insights from dynamic semantics with referential indexing in LF-semantics, resulting in a fully compositional, static system.

Control Theory of Networked Systems

Communication technology makes it increasingly easy to connect sensors, controllers and actuators of controlled dynamical systems whenever an information exchange may improve the system performance. This current trend is associated with the notion of cyberphysical systems that describes systems connecting the physical world to be controlled with the virtual world of computers and data networks. For control theory, this technological development raises important questions. Given a network of physically interconnected systems that are controlled by local control stations, how should one design the corresponding data network among these stations in terms of topology and capacity? Which information needs to be transmitted in order to solve a given control task? How can we model and deal with technical limitations of the actually implemented network? Which new functions can be implemented by using this global network that connects the local controllers? These and other questions have been dealt with in the Priority Programme 1305 on Control Theory of Digitally Networked Dynamic Systems that the German Research Foundation (DFG) has financially supported between 2007 and 2013. Evidently, in order to find fundamental, yet applicable answers to these questions, various disciplines had to be integrated, ranging from more theoretical areas in mathematical systems theory all the way to fields dealing with software development and actual implementations. It is this interdisciplinary spirit which drove the collaborative effort in this Programme and made the engineers benefit from recent mathematical findings as much as the mathematicians from recent new concepts and possibilities of the new technology. The results of 17 PhD students working in departments of Control, Mathematics, and Communication at German universities are summarized in the monograph [1]. Further reports can be found in the special issues [2] and [3] of this journal and in the current issue. The papers of this special issue describe recent results along the mentioned lines and point to important open problems that should be tackled by control theory in the near future. Dominic Gro , Martin Jilg and Olaf Sturs berg propose a new method of Event-based communication in distributed model predictive control, where the data network connecting the local controllers of the subsystems of the plant is used only if an event signals that the local controllers need information about the behavior of the other subsystems in order to improve its performance. The method tries to balance the communication load and the performance of the overall closed-loop system. J rg Fischer, Marc Reinhardt and Uwe D Hanebeck develop a method for reducing the effect of transmission delay and data loss, which may be introduced by communication networks in the closed-loop system. Their paper entitled Optimal sequence-based control and estimation of networked linear systems proposes a new control scheme, in which sequences of control inputs rather than the current input value only are sent from the controller towards the actuators. The basis for this method is an extension of the ideas of the hypothesizing distributed Kalman filter. The control of multi-agent systems has attracted considerable interest in the networked control community. In the standard setting, autonomous dynamic systems are considered that have to be controlled such that they satisfy common goals. Consequently, the networked controller has to introduce couplings among all agents and the used communication topology needs to be chosen in dependence upon the design task to be solved. Anna von Heusinger and Uwe Helmke consider the synchronization problem, where the controller should give linear identical subsystems a coherent behavior. In their

Indefinite Determiners and the Pragmatics of Referential Anchoring

In this paper we propose a unified framework for the representation of different types of indefinite pronouns and determiners in terms of referential anchoring. Referential anchoring is a pragmatic operation that establishes a functional dependency between the referent of an indefinite DP and some other discourse item. As such, the idea of referential anchoring is not new (cf. Kratzer, 1998; von Heusinger, 2002; Kamp and Bende-Farkas, 2010, etc.), however there is some confusion in the discussion of referential anchoring regarding exceptional scope readings. We claim that referential anchoring is independent of scope, even though referentially anchored functional readings often entail exceptional scope readings. We make a transparent formal proposal for referential anchoring that draws on the idea of domain narrowing in the sense of Schwarzschild (2002). Finally, we present the advantage of our analysis by applying it to the Russian indefinite determiners kakoj-to, koe-kakoj and kakoj-nibud'.

Triggering and blocking effects in the diachronic development of DOM in Romanian

According to recent studies, the diachronic development of differential object marking (DOM) in Romance is expected to start from elements high on the definiteness scale and spread steadily to elements low on the definiteness scale, whereby each development step is facilitated by fine-grained semantic distinctions which act as triggering conditions (cf. von Heusinger and Kaiser 2005). In Romanian the expected line of development can be observed until the 19th century, however this unidirectional evolution is surprisingly reversed around the 19th‐20th century: the conditions for the marking of indefinite direct objects with the preposition pe are more restrained today than two centuries ago. In this study we present the diachronic development of DOM in Romanian based on a diachronic corpus consisting of Bible translations from different centuries. We shall contend that the transition of DOM from one referential category to another, such as from proper names to definite NPs and from definite NPs to indefinite NPs is enabled by some distinction in the category DOM is spreading to. For instance in 16th century Romanian DOM spreads to definite NPs such that first NPs having a strong unique interpretation get pe-marked while other definite NPs receive DOM only in a later step involving the neutralization of this transitory distinction. However, Romanian data show that such a fine-graded distinction may not only occur in the category DOM is spreading to but also inside of referential categories already pe-marked. In this case

Explorations in the semantics-pragmatics interface

The semantics-pragmatics interface has recently been the focus of an increasing amount of descriptive, theoretical and methodological interest (Turner 1999; Bianchi 2004; Szabó 2005; von Heusinger & Turner 2006). This interest is very welcome, and the present Special Issue is a further expression of it.

Eigennamen als kontextabhängige und inhärent definite Ausdrücke

Longobardi proposes a syntactic-semantic theory to explain the distribution of the definite article with proper names. In this article I examine and modify this theory with regard to the semantic component. Concerning thesemantics of DPs with common nouns Longobardi adopts Russell's theory of definite descriptions (existence and uniqueness are elements of the article meaning). Concerning the semantics of proper names, however, Longobardi follows Kripke's idea that proper names are rigid designators. Longobardi assumes - in connection with the DP hypothesis - that the syntactical difference between proper names and common nouns consists in the fact that, in contrast to a common noun, a chain is established between the proper name and the D-position. In this article I will show that - in accordance with von Heusinger's theory of salience - DPs with proper names are context dependent expressions like other definite DPs. The data show clear differences between DPs with proper names and DPs with common nouns: this can be explained if proper names are regarded as inherent definite expressions. It means that proper names contain the syntactic-semantic feature [+D].

Conditionals as Definite Descriptions

In Counterfactuals David Lewis noticed that definite descriptions and conditionals display the same kind of non-monotonic behavior. We take his observation literally and suggest that if-clauses are, quite simply, definite descriptions of possible worlds [related ideas are developed in M. Bittner (2001) Proceedings from SALT XI, CLC, Cornell University, Ithaca, pp. 36–55]. We depart from Lewis,s analysis, however, in claiming that if-clauses, like Strawsonian definite descriptions, refer. We develop our analysis by drawing both on Stalnaker,s Selection Function theory of conditionals and on von Heusinger,s Choice Function theory of definiteness, and by generalizing their analyses to plural Choice/Selection Functions. Finally, we explore some consequences of this referential approach: being definites, if-clauses can be topicalized; the word then can be analyzed as a pronoun that doubles the referential term; the syntactician,s Binding Theory constrains possible anaphoric relations between the if-clause and the word then; and general systems of referential classification can be applied to situate the denotation of the descriptive term, yielding a distinction between indicative, subjunctive and ‘double subjunctive’ conditionals.

Completeness of indexed ?-calculus

Epsilon terms indexed by contexts were used by K. von Heusinger to represent definite and indefinite noun phrases as well as some other constructs of natural language. We provide a language and a complete first order system allowing to formalize basic aspects of this representation. The main axiom says that for any finite collection S 1,…,S k of distinct definable sets and elements a 1,…,a k of these sets there exists a choice function assigning a i to S i for all i≤k. We prove soundness and completeness theorems for this system S e i fin .

Reference and Anaphoric Relations (review)

Reviewed by: Reference and anaphoric relations ed. by Klaus von Heusinger, Urs Egli Iván García Reference and anaphoric relations. Ed. by Klaus von Heusinger and Urs Egli. (Studies in linguistics and philosophy 72.) Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000. Pp. xi, 347. $132.00. This edited collection of fifteen original research articles has its roots in the workshop ‘Reference and Anaphoric Relations’ (University of Konstanz, June 1996). The papers deal with the representation and interpretation of indefinite and definite noun phrases; anaphoric pronouns; and several closely related issues such as reference, scope, quantifier movement, and the relation between context and meaning. The book begins with an overview article by the editors, ‘Introduction: Reference and the semantics of anaphora’, which surveys the motivation for the development of new semantic formalisms in the last decades and gives a general outline of the articles in the volume. The book is divided into five parts. In Part 1, ‘Historical aspects of anaphoric relations’ (15–76), the contributors consider the Stoic and scholastic treatment of reference and anaphora. Egli implements the Stoic view on anaphora and quantified sentences into a dynamic semantics. Reinhard Hülsen shows that medieval logicians advanced a fairly consistent and comprehensive theory of the semantics of ‘relativa grammaticalia’. Jeroen Groenendijk and Martin Stokhof illustrate some basic concepts of dynamic semantics and suggest an analysis of anaphoric (in)definite descriptions as contextually dependent quantificational expressions. The issues of scope and quantifier movement are considered in Part 2, ‘Quantification and scope’ (77–154). Donka Farkas reviews the main tasks that a theory of scope has to solve and develops a nonconfigurational, nonmovement based account of scope. Henriëtte de Swart investigates the relation between scope, lexical composition, and properties of generalized quantifiers. She argues against a lexical decomposition account of negative quantifiers in German and Dutch, suggesting instead a higher order interpretation of the determiners. Elena Paducheva provides an analysis of definiteness effects in English and Russian. Stephen Neale examines an inconsistency which arises from the conjunction of three commonly accepted hypotheses regarding persistence, polarity, and plurality. In Part 3, ‘Anaphoric reference’ (155–90), two papers by Robert van Rooy and Hartley Slater concentrate on the problem of intentional identity and the semantics of Hob-Nob sentences. Part 4, ‘Choice functions and the semantics of indefinites’ (191–266), contains three papers on the representation of indefinites by means of choice functions. Arnim von Stechow compares the in situ approach of choice functions with the classical movement approach of quantifier raising at LF, while Yoad Winter argues convincingly that the semantics of indefinites involves choice functions by appealing to universals of generalized quantifier theory. Klaus von Heusinger contends that the complex referential nature of indefinites must be reflected in their semantic representation. In Part 5, ‘Representation and interpretation’ (267–338), Jaroslav Peregrin investigates the related concepts of reference and inference, arguing that reference is parasitic on inference, contrary to what is commonly assumed. Paul Dekker discusses the relation between interpretation and representation and develops a weakly representational system of dynamic epistemic predicate logic that offers a unified treatment of anaphoric and demonstrative pronouns. Closing the volume, Reinhard Muskens investigates the interaction between representation and interpretation with respect to underspecified structures. This beautifully produced book reflects the increasing interest in the semantics of anaphoric expressions and is highly recommended to all those interested in formal semantics and the syntax-semantics interface. Iván García Stanford University Copyright © 2001 Linguistic Society of America

CONGENITAL AURAL FISTULA

Congenital aural fistula is not infrequently encountered, but its occurrence in 6 members of one family is of sufficient interest and rarity to warrant reporting. The 6 cases herein described clearly demonstrate the familial and hereditary features of this condition. A review of the literature reveals that this anomaly was first recognized and reported by von Heusinger,¹in 1864. Selkirk,²in a more recent review, thoroughly discussed all phases of this interesting congenital condition. His article included a report of 172 cases which he had examined. The incidence in a controlled group of his cases was 0.9 per cent. The majority of writers, however, have reported a lower incidence—about 0.2 per cent. Congdon,³in a study of Oriental races, found an incidence as high as 4 to 6 per cent. The origin of these congenital fistulas is explained on the basis of faulty development of the first branchial cleft or