Van Valin (2013) proposed that, in sentence contexts, the two readings of verbs participating in the causative/inchoative alternation such as break (John broke the stick in half / The stick broke in half) are derived from an underspecified representation. In contrast, the active accomplishment reading of verbs such as march (The soldiers marched to the field in an hour) is assumed to be derived from the verb’s activity reading (The soldiers marched in the field for an hour). In this paper, we tested the two hypotheses in a sentence reading experiment using a priming technique. Our data are compatible with the view that verbs of the causative/ inchoative alternation are lexically underspecified: Verbs such as break yielded statistically unreliable priming for either form. However, we found no evidence for lexical derivation for verbs of the activity/active accomplishment alternation: Both forms were strongly primed and, importantly, more so than the two forms of causative/inchoative verbs.

Work by Sudo (2013) and Gyuris (2017) has shown that the bias of polar interrogatives varies both cross-linguistically as well as − in languages that possess more than one interrogative structure − across clause types. We take the “bias profileˮ of an individual polar interrogative type to be a non-empty choice from the power sets of evidential bias options,
(℘({+ev,−ev,%ev})−{∅}), and epistemic bias options, (℘({+ep,−ep,%ep})−{∅}), for each of its expressive instantiations as positive polar question (PPQ), and negative polar questions with inside (IN-NPQ) and outside negation (ON-NPQ) in the sense of Ladd (1981). By simple extrapolation we predict the existence of (7×7)3 = 117649 such bias profiles. Our study explores the “spaceˮ of bias profiles in a way that eclectically mixes general principles used as top-down heuristics, principles related to the discussion of bias in the literature, and some bottom-up observation-based theorizing where our small sample of biasprofiles from English, Japanese, and Hungarian points in the direction of “interestingˮ (partial) generalizations. Throughout we calculate the “effectivenessˮ of our principles in the sense of stating the extent to which they reduce the space of bias profiles numerically. Our discussion then focuses on salient counterexamples to and plausible motivations for or against the most
“effectiveˮ principles. Particular attention is paid to complementary choices of evidential and epistemic biases, which, encoded via the principle of Static Complementarity (together with Convexity) leads to a reduction of the space of bias profiles to just (4×2)3 = 512 permissible types.

In this paper we present arguments in order to make the general methodological point that linguistics, especially semantics, should explore lyrical texts as a data source. We show that a number of theoretical implications for linguistics emerge from the analysis of poetic texts. We claim that lyrical texts are in fact especially valuable for investigations in semantics for two reasons. First, the high density of creative uses of language by a language expert reveals the whole potential of language. Second, the lack of context creates a special communicative situation that makes poetry especially fit for investigations of grammar. We illustrate this by discussing the value of lyrical texts for studying coercion phenomena and referential expressions. We argue that lyrical texts follow the rules of UG by showing similarities with other types of data that have proven to be very fruitful for linguistic research. Accordingly, we thus propose that they should be considered more seriously as data for investigations of grammar, especially at the semantics-pragmatics interface.

Winfried Boeder über: Christopher Beedham, Warwick Danks & Ether Soselia (2014): Rules and exceptions. Using exceptions for empirical research in theoretical linguistics (Contemporary studies in descriptive linguistics, vol. 34). Oxford u.a.: Peter Lang.

Karsten Schmidt über: Hiltraud Strunk (2016): Einheitliche und einfache deutsche Orthografie. Die Geschichte einer (über)nationalen Idee 1870 bis 1970. Hildesheim/Zürich/New York: Georg Olms.

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