This paper looks at presuppositions of adpositions, a topic which has not been examined much, in spite of the very large body of work on presuppositions. Some earlier assertions about adpositional presuppositions turn out not to be relevant, because (1) they are incorrect (2) presuppose and/or presupposition are not used in a technical sense in them, or (3) the presuppositions involved are not ...

An eye-tracking experiment examined whether prosodic cues can affect the interpretation of grammatical functions in the absence of clear morphological information. German listeners were presented with scenes depicting three potential referents while hearing temporarily ambiguous SVO and OVS sentences. While case marking on the first noun phrase (NP) was ambiguous, clear case marking on the seco...

In this paper we explored factors that affect how children learning German understand which participant is the agent and which the patient in simple causative sentences (i.e. who does what to whom). Most languages, including German, have multiple cues to mark these roles. In two comprehension experiments we examined whether German children are able to use the grammatical cues of word order and ...

Mammalian imprinted genes are associated with differentially methylated regions (DMRs) that are CpG methylated on one of the two parental chromosomes. In mice, at least 21 DMRs acquire differential methylation in the germline and many of them act as imprint centres. We previously reported the physical extents of differential methylation at 15 DMRs in mouse embryos at 12.5 days postcoitum. To re...

BACKGROUND Colour-marking polymorphism is widely distributed among cryptic species. To account for the adaptive significance of such polymorphisms, several hypotheses have been proposed to date. Although these hypotheses argue over the degree of camouflage effects of marking morphs (and the interactions between morphs and their microhabitat backgrounds), as far as we know, most empirical eviden...

Persian has a case system whereby specific direct objects are marked with the enclitic را =rā. However, spoken language presents greater degree of flexibility regard to =rā marking, espe ...

Kamsá is a language isolate spoken in the Sibundoy Valley Putumayo department of southern Colombia. Its speech community lives on eastern slopes Andes Mountains, between linguistic areas and Amazon. This paper presents various grammatical features Kamsá, including its phonology, nominal morphology (especially noun class case marking), verbal person/number marking for core arguments evidentialit...