This paper discusses verb-first conditionals (Had I known this, I would have stayed at home) with regard to the hypothesis that the construction developed from a dialogual sequence into a hypotactic structure. While plausible, independent evidence for this scenario has been scarce. An alternative account posits that questions could have been analogized with existing conditional clause types, ma...

Conceiving grammaticality as gradient poses problems for those traditional conceptions of grammar which assume that linguistic expressions can only be either grammatical or ungrammatical. That a sentence is, for instance, “grammatical to 75%” is a nonsensical statement from this point of view. In this tradition, generative grammar assumes the native speaker’s linguistic competence to be the sys...

We encounter the results of category formation every day, from demographic categories like race and gender, to role-playing-game classes like “fighter” or “mage”. Category membership is often not simply based on the possession of discrete properties but instead constructed from and reflect the highly nuanced relationships (gradience) between members and bestexample individuals called “prototype...

Australian English is referred to widely as a rising variety of English due to the prevalence of rising tunes in interactive discourse. Australian English subjects were required to listen to a series of rising stimuli that varied in terms of pitch level and pitch span and were asked whether they heard a question or statement. The results showed that both rise span and pitch level of the rise el...

This paper provides evidence for an analysis of subject inversion in whquestions in Spanish and demonstrates that techniques of experimental syntax play an important role in developing such analyses. The techniques used show that there is gradience in judgments of wh-questions depending on the nature of the filler and of the intervening subject. The facts fall out from the interplay of straight...

The behaviour of presupposition triggers in human language has been extensively studied and given rise to many distinct theoretical proposals. One intuitively appealing way of characterising presupposition is to argue that it constitutes backgrounded meaning, which does not contribute to updating the conversational record, and consequently may not be challenged or refuted by discourse participa...

Hydrovoltaic energy harvesting offers the potential to utilize enormous water for sustainable systems. Here, we report utilization and tailoring of an intrinsic anisotropic 3D continuous microchannel structure from native wood efficient hydrovoltaic by Fe3O4 nanoparticle insertion. Acetone-assisted precursor infiltration ensures homogenous distribution Fe ions gradience-free formation in wood. ...

The main purpose of this paper is to provide experimental evidence that two syntactic reflexes of split intransitivity in German the selection of perfective auxiliaries and the impersonal passive construction are sensitive to an aspectual/thematic hierarchy of verb classes. We show that there is a split between ‘core’ verbs that elicit categorical intuitions from native speakers, and ‘intermedi...

The purpose of this paper is to unpack some fundamental concepts that have been appearing more often in the literature recently, and show, through the use of a specific example, what sort of methodology may be appropriate to use in addressing these concepts empirically. The concepts are categoricality vs. gradience and variability vs. invariance; the example is -t,d deletion in American English...