Maziar Toosarvandani

With Ivy Sichel. To appear, Linguistic Inquiry.

We introduce a novel locality violation and its repair in Sierra Zapotec: an object pronoun cannot cliticize when the subject is a lexical DP. This locality effect differs from more familiar ones (e.g., superiority) because the lexical DP does not move. We argue that it is nonetheless able to Agree, consistent with the idea that locality conditions apply to Agree, rather than to a separate movement component. We develop an account in which pronouns and lexical DPs interact with the same probe because they share featural content. In particular, we suggest that the person domain extends to include non-pronominal DPs, so that all nominals are specified for a feature we call δ (to resonate with DP); all and only personal pronouns are specified for π. This account requires a departure from Chomsky's (2000, 2001) classical system of featural co-variation (Agree). A functional head must be able to participate in overprobing, interacting with a goal even though its requirements would appear to be met. We introduce a probe activation model for Agree, in which, after applying once, the operation can but not need apply again. We also consider two other mechanisms recently proposed to derive overprobing — Deal's (2015, 2020) "insatiable probes" and Coon & Keine's (to appear) "feature gluttony" — though neither is able to account for the locality pattern.

Within formal semantics, languages with no exponent of tense, or with optional tense, have begun to be incorporated into the theory of temporality only in the last couple decades. This article traces the development of their study, identifying empirical arguments that arbitrate between competing analyses of tenselessness. How future and past reference is established for root clauses, both in information-seeking exchanges and in narratives, requires differentiating at least three types of tenseless languages. Their temporal systems vary in whether they make use of a topic time, distinct from the eventuality and utterance times, and how they do so. While human language seems to allow for some variation in the temporal interpretation of tenseless clauses, it remains to be seen how constrained this variation is.

With Morwenna Hoeks and Amanda Rysling. To appear, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Linguistic focus triggers the activation of contrastive alternatives to the expression in focus (Braun & Tagliapietra, 2010). Priming studies, which did not manipulate the discourse context of sentences containing foci, have suggested a two-stage model of how alternatives are considered in real-time comprehension: first, semantic associates are activated as in normal word recognition, and then alternatives that contrast appropriately with a focus are selected from among them (Husband and Ferreira, 2015). Reading, memory, and visual world studies, however, have shown that comprehenders also utilize discourse information and world knowledge to identify alternatives (Fraundorf et al., 2013; Kim et al., 2015; Sedivy, 2002). This article considers two extensions of Husband and Ferreira’s (2015) model that take discourse information into account: one in which discourse information is only used at a late stage to select appropriate alternatives after semantic associates are primed, and one in which discourse information may itself be used to activate alternatives during earlier processing stages. Under the first, purely selection-based model, any effect of the discourse (in)appropriateness of alternatives should not be contemporaneous with effects of semantic association, because discourse information should be used only in the selection process, after an initial candidate set has been activated. Three incremental comprehension studies using the Maze task do not support these predictions. The results indicated contemporaneous effects of discourse information and semantic association on comprehension of potential alternatives, pointing instead to a model with effects of discourse at an early stage of activation. Comprehenders access discourse information to differentiate among potential alternatives, whose activation does not depend exclusively on semantic associate priming.

With Kelsey Sasaki, Steven Foley, Jed Pizarro-Guevara, Fe Silva-Robles, and Matt Wagers.