Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution

The assertion arrow“grounds”the chain of referential dependence: it allows us to infer that the event took place. If the event i ...

(39a) is a question, so the indefinitea carlacks existential force. However, since (39b) is declarative, it has an assertion arr ...

(42) Joan will/may buy a car... a. *She parked it on the street. b. and park it on the street. c. Fred already has bought one. W ...

(45) S/P: [[a friend of mine 2 ] 1 wants [to buy [a car] 5 ] 6 ] 3 DT: [WANT ([FRIEND (ME 2 )] 1 [BUY (PRO 4 , CAR 5 )] 6 )] 3 R ...

The complements of so-called“factive”verbs such asknowandrealizeare distinguished by being presupposed as true regardless of the ...

c. [[Suppose [a verb 1 takes an object 2 ] 3. Then [it 4 governs accusative case 5 ] 6 ] 7 RT: What is unusual about theif-thenc ...

(49) S/P: [Holmes 1 wanted [to buy a cigar 2 ] 3 ] 4 RT: As Clark points out, characters in a narrative have“referential access” ...

The index 1 corresponds to the“lifted”quantifier in the standard logical expression; it is placed in accordance with its logical ...

12.5 The information structure (topic/focus) tier Across a range oftheoretical approaches, there is a broad consensus thatpart o ...

a“pseudo-cleft”construction, as in (52e) and (53e). The remaining replies show that this correspondence is not random: it reflec ...

thesyntacticand phonological devicesused toexpress it;theinterfacecomponents encodehow particular grammatical devicescorrespondt ...

the uncertainty is limited to a specified set of individuals. This type of focus is evoked by question types such as (55). (55) ...

(58) a.JOHNSON died! b. Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived in a large, dark, forest. (58a) could be used to answ ...

In (60), the major syntactic break between NP and VP aligns perfectly with the major prosodic break and with the major informati ...

foci per clause. But the foci in each clause are not independent of each other; they for mordered pairs. We can paraphrase the r ...

(65) a.BILL took SALLY to school, and FRANK took PHIL there. b. BILL took Sally to SCHOOL, and FRANK took her to the MOVIES. Eac ...

How is the second clause of (67a) interpreted asBill likes bananas, and how is the second clause of (67b) interpreted as Fred th ...

This exposition of the information structure tier has been extremely sketchy. The idea has been only to show its general propert ...

The information structure tier, unlike the other two, is concerned with packaging a complex concept for the purpose of communica ...

(71) a. Put your coat in the bathroom. It's wet. [S 2 is reason for (saying) S 1 ] (note*Put your coat in the bathroom, and it's ...