Papers by E. Matthew Husband
Interference effects across the at-issue/not-at-issue divide: Agreement and NPI Licensing
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2021
Understanding language requires comprehenders to understand not only what speakers say, but what ... more Understanding language requires comprehenders to understand not only what speakers say, but what speakers might imply. Scalar items (e.g. some, numerals) often invite comprehenders to compute scalar implicatures, pragmatically strengthening the semantic meaning of scalar items by negating their stronger alternatives. Recent priming evidence suggests that scalar implicatures may share underlying mechanisms, priming both within and between implicature types. We report two experiments designed to extend these finding to or, which has an inclusive meaning that can be strengthened to an exclusive meaning, potentially via scalar implicature. Experiment 1 investigated or alongside some and numerals, holding the number of visual symbols constant. Experiment 2 reduced the visual complexity of Experiment 1. Both experiments found robust within-category priming, but failed to fully replicate or extend between-category priming effects. We discuss implications of these results with respect to visual manipulations and the potential fragility of priming across different categories of scalar implicature.
Semantics and Linguistic Theory, Aug 14, 2010
Whether a transitive stative predicate licenses an existential interpretation of its subject (EIS... more Whether a transitive stative predicate licenses an existential interpretation of its subject (EIS) depends on the type of object it has. While previous theories have related this to the object's ability to function as a topic, I present evidence that the quantized/homogeneous distinction between objects better captures EIS and propose an event composition analysis of EIS for transitive stative predicates. This analysis points to the aspectual nature of EIS and also illuminates other aspectual behaviors of stage-level/individual-level states.
Linguistik aktuell, Jun 8, 2012
NeuroImage, Jul 1, 2009
Introduction: Research in online composition of sentence meaning has traditionally relied on viol... more Introduction: Research in online composition of sentence meaning has traditionally relied on violation paradigms examining brain regions responsive to ungrammatical/nonsensical sentences. Over the past decade, however, research on sentence-level semantic processing has gained ground by studying coercion: grammatical/sensical sentences which assert meanings unexpressed by either their words or their syntactic structure [1]. The underlying neural correlates of this process are not well understood, though a recent MEG study suggested that coercion is supported by ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), a brain region outside of the traditional language network [2]. We report findings from an event-related fMRI study examining the neural correlates underlying complement coercion. Methods: Nineteen (7 male, age 20.5 ± 2.79 yrs) adults participated. Four sentence types were contrasted: coercion (finished), control (drank), semantic implausibility (displeased), and morphosyntax violation (drink), as demonstrated in this example:
Thematic separation in light of sentence comprehension
Language and Linguistics Compass, Jun 29, 2023
Thematic relations are traditionally analysed as projecting into derivations of sentence meanings... more Thematic relations are traditionally analysed as projecting into derivations of sentence meanings from the lexical content of verbs. Thematic separation, a natural outgrowth of event semantics, proposes an alternative to this tradition: thematic relations are introduced into derivations by verb‐independent elements and are, therefore, grammatically separate from the lexical content of verbs. Although critical to theories of meaning and lexical representation, the evidence for thematic separation has not been reckoned with widely in linguistic theory, and the consequent implications for psycholinguistic theories have not received proper consideration. This is surprising as the representations permitted by thematic separation comport quite well with evidence for pre‐verbal thematic interpretation during real‐time sentence comprehension. Psycholinguistic theories, therefore, stand to benefit from engagement with separationist alternatives to thematic relations, and may, in turn, shed light on the representations semantic theory should provide. After briefly defending the utility of events in semantic representation, this paper motivates thematic separation with evidence from the cumulative interpretations and adnominal modal adverbs; two cases where a semantic operator intervenes between a thematic relation and a verbal predicate. Psycholinguistic results investigating pre‐verbal thematic interpretation then follow, where thematic separation is argued to furnish theories with coherent incremental representations without commitment to specific verbal predicates. The timecourse of verb predictability is also shown to intersect with ongoing debates on the granularity of thematic relations, suggesting further connections between semantic and psycholinguistic theory to be explored.
How robust are effects of semantic and phonological prediction during language comprehension? A visual world eye-tracking study
IEICE technical report. Speech, Jul 15, 2017
Prediction is often assumed to play a crucial role during language comprehension. While some theo... more Prediction is often assumed to play a crucial role during language comprehension. While some theories propose that prediction robustly affects at all levels of linguistic representation, empirical evidence suggests that the circumstances under which linguistic predictions occur appear to be limited, particularly when comparing prediction of phonological information to semantic information. To more directly explore these limits, we compared effects of semantic and phonological prediction in a visual world eye-tracking study. Participants heard sentences where the target word was either predictable (e.g., “That dog looks so happy, wagging its tail ...”) or unpredictable (“If there is one, click on the picture of the tail.”), while viewing objects that corresponded to either the target word (tail), a semantic competitor word (paw), a phonological competitor word (table), or an unrelated word (daisy). Target and semantic competitor objects attracted more fixations than unrelated objects well before the target word onset in predictable sentences and not in unpredictable sentences, suggesting that participants predicted semantic information. However, there were no predictive eye movements for phonological competitor objects. The results suggest that phonological prediction is not as robust as semantic prediction.
Illusory licensing from inaccessible antecedents in presuppositional dependency
5. Some Structural Analogies between Existential Interpretation and Telicity
Syntax and Semantics, Apr 8, 2012
Event (De)composition
The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics
Grammatical theories of event structure have broadly proposed that event representations are deco... more Grammatical theories of event structure have broadly proposed that event representations are decomposed and articulated in a variety of different constituents across a sentence. These theories raise questions for sentence comprehension: how are cues to these disparate components recognized and put back together to construct a complete and coherent representation of the event under discussion? Such questions are made all the more complex during real-time processing as these components arrive one after another in quick succession, and yet studies show that speakers are highly sensitive to these cues and use them to guide interpretation in a rapid and highly incremental fashion. The chapter examines studies from the psycholinguistic literature with a focus on three aspects of event structure: manner and result verbal meanings, temporal boundaries of events, and the encoding of event participants.
Glossa Psycholinguistics
The idea that comprehenders predict upcoming linguistic content has become core to many theories ... more The idea that comprehenders predict upcoming linguistic content has become core to many theories of language processing. Experimental studies exploiting morphosyntactic and phonotactic constraints on a word form preceding a high cloze target word have been key to underpinning predictive accounts of comprehension, but investigating these tight sequential contrasts with traditional behavioral methods is difficult. The maze task, with its more focal measure of incremental processing, may provide a cheap and easy methodology to study early cues to prediction. An experiment investigating the a/an contrast (DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, 2005; Nieuwland, et al., 2018) using A-maze (Boyce, Futrell, & Levy, 2020) finds that unexpected articles, as well as nouns, elicit slower focal response times. Response times are also shown to be inversely related to noun cloze probabilities, with slower responders showing larger effects of expectation. This study demonstrates that the maze task can be sensiti...
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, May 5, 2022
Cross-linguistically, no language has a dedicated generic article. To address why this is, I deco... more Cross-linguistically, no language has a dedicated generic article. To address why this is, I decompose GEN into its quantificational and modal components and locate them inside nominal structure. Adopting an event licensing analysis of pre-and post-verbal bare subjects in Modern Hebrew, I use the restriction of preverbal bare subjects to generic interpretations and unacceptability of pre-verbal bare singulars to argue that the quantificational component of GEN is best analyzed as a D-quantifier. Evidence from adnominal conditionals further identifies a modal source for GEN within the nominal, which I suggest is adjectival and derived from a reduced relative clause source. I propose that the formation of generic articles is blocked by the non-local (e.g. non-spanning) relationship between these quantificational and modal components. Keywords. adnominal conditionals; event licensing; generic interpretation; modality; strong/weak nominals * I would like to thank the 2021 Hilary Term Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics Faculty Brown Bag and the audience of the Syntax III (In-Person) panel at the LSA 2022 Annual Meeting for their questions and comments on earlier presentations of this work. Note that much of the data from Modern Hebrew is drawn from Borer (2005a,b).
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
Prediction in language comprehension has become a key mechanism in recent psycholinguistic theory... more Prediction in language comprehension has become a key mechanism in recent psycholinguistic theory, with evidence from lexical prediction as a primary source. Less work has focused on whether comprehenders also make structural predictions above the lexical level. Previous research shows that processing is facilitated for syntactic structures which are predictable based on context; however, there is so far no direct evidence that speakers formulate structural predictions ahead of encountering input. We investigated whether subject noun animacy cues comprehenders to predict different verb phrase (VP) structures, with the incompatibility between a low animacy subject and an Agent interpretation of transitives/unergative VPs predicting a derived (passive/unaccusative) VP structure, using Italian auxiliaries. Native Italian speakers read sentences with subject nouns varying from high to low animacy followed by the auxiliary avereHAVE, which is compatible with underived VPs, or essereBE, which is compatible with derived VPs. The auxiliary avereHAVE elicited greater frontal negativity when preceded by a subject noun with lower animacy. The auxiliary essereBE elicited no differential ERP given subject animacy. We propose that this frontal negativity reflects violation of a structural prediction, with amplitude reflecting the strength of initial commitment or difficulty in revising a predicted structure. Differences between auxiliaries are proposed to follow from the more specific distribution of avereHAVE. We argue that this evidence unambiguously supports a predictive mechanism for phrase-level structure.
Investigating shared and distinct mechanisms in semantic and syntactic enrichment: a priming study
Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 2022
Aspectual verbs (e.g. <i>begin</i>) and intensional verbs (e.g. <i>want</i&g... more Aspectual verbs (e.g. <i>begin</i>) and intensional verbs (e.g. <i>want</i>) can both take entity-denoting NPs as a complement (<i>begin/want the book</i>) and acquire an implicit meaning (e.g. <i>reading</i>). Linguistic theory posits that such enriched implicit meanings can be acquired either by semantic enrichment with aspectual verbs or by syntactic enrichment with intensional verbs. To investigate whether semantic and syntactic enrichment share enrichment operations, we conducted a structural priming study. Experiment 1 repeated the verb on prime and target trials and found evidence for enrichment priming for both verb types. Experiment 2 crossed the verb type and found no evidence for priming. These results suggest that enrichment operations are distinct for aspectual and intensional verbs. However, Experiment 3 repeated Experiment 1 without lexical boost and found no enrichment priming within the verb type. Thus, producing an enriched structure may not robustly activate enrichment structures, leaving open questions concerning shared mechanisms.
Memory Retrieval in the Processing of Anaphoric Presuppositions
Quantity from a stative point of view
Lingua, 2015
In normal everyday speech, speakers occasionally become disfluent, mis-speak, and then correct th... more In normal everyday speech, speakers occasionally become disfluent, mis-speak, and then correct their utterances mid-sentence. While these errors and repairs seem to be a natural case of language performance, language competence also plays an intimate role in shaping their ultimate form. Drawing on and extending insights from Levelt (1983, 1989), this paper argues that self-repairs are a species of right node raising. I demonstrate that self-repairs share many of the properties of right node raising constructions, with the resumption behaving like the shared material of right node raising. I also suggest that self-repairs may illuminate the current theoretical bind seen in the analysis of right node raising by supporting recent proposals that favor a sparse representation for right node raising constructions.
LSA Annual Meeting Extended Abstracts, 2011
The scale structure of adjectives, whether an adjective measures on an open or closed scale, has ... more The scale structure of adjectives, whether an adjective measures on an open or closed scale, has certain grammatical consequences and is traditionally captured by encoding scale structure into an adjective’s lexical representation and projecting it into the grammar. However, adjectives can exhibit scalar variability, suggesting that scale structure is not projected from the lexicon, but instead is constructed by the adjective’s structural environment. I review a recent analysis of adjectival scale structure, observing that an economy condition with a single pos morpheme requires polysemy for these variable-behavior adjectives, and propose that splitting the pos morpheme and severing scale structure from the adjective captures scalar variability within a unified lexical entry without economy.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2011
Previous research regarding the neural basis of semantic composition has relied heavily on violat... more Previous research regarding the neural basis of semantic composition has relied heavily on violation paradigms, which often compare implausible sentences that violate world knowledge to plausible sentences that do not violate world knowledge. This comparison is problematic as it may involve extralinguistic operations such as contextual repair and processes that ultimately lead to the rejection of an anomalous sentence, and these processes may not be part of the core language system. Also, it is unclear if violations of world knowledge actually affect the linguistic operations for semantic composition. Here, we compared two types of sentences that were grammatical, plausible, and acceptable and differed only in the number of semantic operations required for comprehension without the confound of implausible sentences. Specifically, we compared complement coercion sentences (the novelist began the book), which require an extra compositional operation to arrive at their meaning, to cont...
Stative Quantity
Suppose functional morphology is freely combined in the syntax, subject only to a universal hiera... more Suppose functional morphology is freely combined in the syntax, subject only to a universal hierarchy of projection, and suppose previous work in the syntax of aspect. Functional morphemes which give rise to quantity interpretations then should combine with a multitude of categories, including nominals and events (B orer, 2005a, b) but also adjectives, states, and possibly others. The interpretation of quantity in each of these domains may appear different: count/mass in nominals, telicity in events, but also closed/open scales in ...
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Papers by E. Matthew Husband