To navigate many-to-many mappings between referents and linguistic expressions, listeners need to calibrate likelihood estimates for different referential expressions taking into account both the context and speaker-specific variation. Focusing on speaker variation, we present three experiments. Experiment 1 establishes that listeners generalize speakerspecific patterns of pre-nominal modificat...

In Section 2, we review (briefly and superficially) some of the basics of NP interpretations, the semantics of the relevant operator-like elements, and their interaction. Then we look at how some natural languages encode certain relations between NPs and certain operators, giving us a window on some aspects of the “logic of natural language”. There we find a puzzle in the Russian “genitive of n...

While most Mayan languages show an ergative-absolutive pattern of agreement in all main clauses, Chol shows what has been described as an aspect-based split (Quizar and Knowles-Berry 1988; Vázquez Álvarez 2002; Law et al. 2006): perfective clauses show an ergative-absolutive pattern, as in (1), while non-perfective clauses show what appears to be a nominative-accusative pattern, illustrated in ...

This paper deals with the distribution of use accusative as an indirect object in two major dialect groups Modern Greek, namely Northern Greek and Pontic Greek. The loss dative Medieval (c. 10th c. AD) resulted genitive southern varieties Asia Minor As Standard employs genitive, little attention has been paid to accusative, our study was aimed fill that gap by presenting data collected Greece f...

A configurational account of Finnish case Summary: This paper presents a configurational account of Finnishmorphological case wherein CP and vP phases serve as the local domains for case competition. I argue that, in the phasebased configurational case model, a DP with unmarked case located at the edge of phase α partakes in case competition at the next highest phase β such that it can receivem...

Possessives are ``complex'' DPs: they involve two distinct nominal expressions as components. In this paper I address the issue of characterizing the nature of the syntactic relation holding between these two nominal expressions in possessives whose possessum is arguably not a syntactic argument-taking category. This task can be divided into two parts: (i) providing an account of what licenses ...

Possessive constructions in English, Spanish, and French differ in several ways. This article considers variation in word order, in the expression of agreement, and in the appearance of a preposition. The article generalizes to Spanish and French Bernstein & Tortora’s (2005) analysis of English possessive constructions, particularly the idea that the prenominal possessive constructions are dist...