Research Projects
Broadening the grammatical perspectives on Argument Ellipsis
Prof. Idan Landau
Funded by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), Grant No. 495/20, 2020–2025
Null arguments come in many varieties, one of which is Argument Ellipsis (AE) – a full constituent which is syntactically projected and semantically interpreted, but remains unpronounced. The properties of AE have been mostly studied in East Asian languages, but not much beyond. In this research, we investigate AE in Hebrew, attempting to answer the following questions: What kind of arguments can or cannot be elided? Are the constraints syntactic, semantic, or both? Do non-nominal arguments (PPs and CPs) undergo ellipsis? How can this possibility be reliably distinguished from other strategies (i.e., implicit arguments)? And what is ultimately the crosslinguistic parameter that determines whether a given language displays AE or not?
Encoding and retrieval in sentence processing errors: Comparing Hebrew and English
Prof. Aya Meltzer-Asscher in collaboration with Prof. Brian Dillon (University of Massachusetts)
Funded by BSF-NSF, Grant No. 2021719
To understand language, we need to relate different, sometimes distant, elements in the sentence. For example, in the sentence “The boy who met the nice neighbors is smiling”, we need to create a dependency between the subject – “the boy” – and the verb “is smiling”. To do that, we need to use intricate memory representations. One of the goals of psycholinguistic research is to characterize the memory mechanisms enabling these processes, and in order to achieve this, it is interesting to observe when, and why, these processes fail. For example, it is well-known that speakers occasionally produce erroneous sentences such as “The boy who met the nice neighbors are smiling”, and comprehenders fail to notice such errors. In this project we investigate the processing of sentences with agreement errors, in Hebrew and in English, in order to understand what causes processing failures – memory encoding or retrieval – and what role the language’s grammar plays in these processes.
Varieties of plural predication
Dr. Moshe Bar-Lev
Funded by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), Grant No. 789/24
Natural language allows us to attribute properties to specific individuals, as in the singular predication ״Dina smiled״; it also allows us to attribute properties to groups of individuals (pluralities), as in the plural predication ״Dina and Rina smiled״ or ״the kids smiled״. Certain properties of predication which are manifested with plural predication are difficult to discern or entirely disappear with singular predication, e.g., distributivity (exemplified by the inference from ״Rina and Dina smiled״ that Rina smiled and Dina smiled) and homogeneity (exemplified by the inference from ״Rina and Dina didn’t smile״ that neither Rina nor Dina smiled). The goal of this project is then to probe into the nature of predication by exploring the variation between predicates with respect to homogeneity and distributivity (among other things), as a way to achieve a better understanding of the nature of predication.
