In a recent paper, Jennifer Spenader, Frank Richter and Janina Radó extend previous experimental work by Frank and Janina on negative polarity items in German to parallel data in English. In two experiments they investigated the ability of native speakers to distinguish different groups of NPIs:
J. Spenader, F. Richter & J. Radó (2014): Experimental Investigations of Licensing Environments for NPIs in English. In: Jack Hoeksema & Dicky Gilbers (eds.): Black Book. A Festschrift in Honor of Frans Zwarts. University of Groningen, pp. 301-310
Assif Am-David published a monograph based on his dissertation “A semantic typology of definiteness”. This book explores the crosslinguistic distributional patterns of definiteness markers. A distinction is drawn between semantic definiteness and morpho-syntactic definiteness marking. The semantic components of definiteness are arranged, similar to semantic maps, and language-specifically assigned to definiteness markers. This model is based on the results of an empirical study of Q’ekchi’, Otomi, Maori and Basque. The choice of a suitable sample for a typological study is also discussed.
Bibliographic information:
Am-David, Assif (2014): A Semantic Typology of Definiteness. Lampert Academic Publishing.
Laura Kallmeyer and Frank Richter have a new paper out which investigates how Frame Semantics and type-logical semantics can be combined. It will be presented this summer at Formal Grammar 19 in Tübingen. A draft version is already available.
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