Metalinguistic "just" and "simply": exploring emphatic exclusives

Emphatic Stress 1 Running Head : EMPHATIC STRESS

In a series of studies, we examined how mothers naturally stress words across multiple mentions in speech to their infants and how this marking influences infants' recognition of words in fluent speech. We first collected samples of mothers' infant-directed speech using a technique that induced multiple repetitions of target words. Acoustic analyses revealed that mothers systematically alternat...

Emphatic Pronouns*

Metalinguistic negation and echoic use*

What I hope to achieve in this paper is some rather deeper understanding of the semantic and pragmatic properties of utterances which are said to involve the phenomenon of metalinguistic negation. According to Larry Horn, who has been primarily responsible for drawing our attention to it, this is a special non-truthfunctional use of the negation operator, which can be glossed as 'I object to U'...

Emphatic Temporal-Difference Learning

Emphatic algorithms are temporal-difference learning algorithms that change their effective state distribution by selectively emphasizing and de-emphasizing their updates on different time steps. Recent works by Sutton, Mahmood and White (2015), and Yu (2015) show that by varying the emphasis in a particular way, these algorithms become stable and convergent under off-policy training with linea...

Constraints on metalinguistic anaphora*

Just as it is possible to refer to any entity, concrete or abstract, in extralinguistic reality, it is also possible to refer to any linguistic entity, be that a phoneme, a word, a sentence, or any other linguistic object. Metalinguistic reference can be achieved in two ways, by means of ‘autonymous’ and ‘heteronymous’ mention (cf. Recanati 2000: 137). Autonymous mention is a matter of quotatio...