Assessing the Role of Experimental Evidence for Interface Judgment: Licensing of Negative Polarity Items, Scalar Readings, and Focus
Langue
en
Article de revue
Ce document a été publié dans
Frontiers in Psychology. 2018, vol. 9, p. 59
Frontiers Media
Résumé en anglais
This paper reviews a series of experimental studies that address what we call "interface judgment," which is the complex judgment involving integration from multiple levels of grammatical representation such as the ...Lire la suite >
This paper reviews a series of experimental studies that address what we call "interface judgment," which is the complex judgment involving integration from multiple levels of grammatical representation such as the syntax-semantics and prosody-semantics interface. We first discuss the results from the ERP literature connected to NPI licensing in different languages, paying particular attention to the N400 and the P600 as neural correlates of this specific phenomenon and focusing on the study by Xiang et al. (2016). The results of this study show evidence that there are two distinct NPI licensing mechanisms, i.e., licensing and rescuing, in line with Giannakidou (1998, 2006). Then we discuss an acceptability judgment task on Greek NPIs which supports the negativity as a scale hypothesis (Zwarts, 1995, 1996; Giannakidou, 1998). For the semantics-prosody interface judgment, we discuss two types of findings on two different phenomena and languages: (i) the study by Giannakidou and Yoon (2016) on scalar and non-scalar NPIs in Greek and Korean, which serves as the foundation for Chatzikonstantinou's (2016) study of production data showing distinct prosodic properties in emphatic (scalar) and non-emphatic (non-scalar) Greek NPIs; (ii) a (production and perception) study by Etxeberria and Irurtzun (2015) on the prosodic disambiguation of the scalar/non-scalar readings of sentences containing the focus particle "ere" in Basque. The main conclusion of the paper is that experimental methods of the kind discussed in the paper are useful in establishing physical, quantitative correlates of interface judgment.< Réduire
Mots clés en anglais
negative polarity items
scalar items
interface judgment
prosody
FOCUS
Origine
Importé de halUnités de recherche