Focus particles and negative scope: Both evidence for syntactic integration?

Negative Features on Negative Indefinites: Evidence from Split Scope

The assumption that negative indefinites are semantically non-negative elements associating with sentential negation has proven fruitful to account for the behaviour of negative indefinites in languages exhibiting negative concord. Under this view, negative indefinites carry a negative feature that has to be licensed by a semantic negation. This paper critically discusses and evaluates differen...

Scope as Syntactic Abstraction

What is the logic of scope? By “scope”, I mean scopetaking in natural languages such as English, as illustrated by the sentence Ann saw everyone. In this example, the quantifier denoted by everyone takes scope over the rest of the sentence, that is, it takes the denotation of the rest of the sentence as its semantic argument: everyone(λx.saw(x)(ann)). The answer I will give here will be to prov...

Grammaticalization in progress: the development of negative focus particles

Focus particles and prosody processing in Dutch: Evidence from ERPs

The present ERP study investigated the effect of focus particles on Dutch sentence processing. Focus particles such as only are claimed to indicate focus constituents and can thus affect the interpretation of pitch accents during speech comprehension [1]. Our results show that contrastive pitch accents are unexpected in sentences without a focus particle and triggered a fronto-central positivit...

Exploiting Rich Syntactic Features for Hedge Detection and Scope Finding∗

Hedge detection and scope finding are increasingly important tasks in information extraction, especially in the biomedical natural language processing community. In this paper, a novel approach detecting hedge cues and their scopes by sequence labeling is explored. It should be emphasized that syntactic dependencies are systematically exploited and effectively integrated by a large-scale featur...