| Nina Kazanina, University of Bristol |
| Thu 01 Dec 2016, 16:10 - 17:00 |
| DSB 3.10/3.11 |
If you have a question about this talk, please contact: Mirjam Eiswirth (s1322502)
In this talk I will discuss issues arising during real time processing
of sentences that contain a negative marker. First, I will examine
negative sentences in Russian in which the negation changes the
grammatical case of the direct object from Accusative to Genitive (the
so-called ‘Genitive of Negation’), leading to a situation where the
object cannot be incorporated into the parsing tree using a default
parsing procedure. On the basis of reading time data I will argue that
the parser uses grammatical information in order to predict multiple
syntactic heads which in turn enables strictly incremental processing.
Second, I will discuss whether constructing the meaning of a negative
sentence is inherently more difficult than constructing the meaning of
an affirmative sentence. In particular, does interpreting a negative
sentence (e.g. ‘The top shelf does not contain a lamp.’) involve a
two-step process that first invokes the corresponding affirmative (The
top shelf contains a lamp.) and then negates it (NOT (The top shelf
contains the lamp))? I consider both cases in a more global context of
prediction in language processing.
Talk by Nina Kazanina, University of Bristol
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