Diversion from the syntactic norm, as manifested in the absence of otherwise expected lexical and syntactic material, has been extensively studied in theoretical syntax. Such modifications are observed in headlines, telegrams, labels, and other specialized contexts, collectively referred to as “reduced” registers. Focusing on search queries, a type of reduced register, I propose that they are generated by a simpler grammar that lacks a full-fledged syntactic component. The analysis is couched in the Parallel Architecture framework, whose assumption of relative independence (...) of linguistic components—their parallelism—and the rejection of syntactocentrism are essential to explain properties of queries. (shrink)

This article continues the line of research that combines the paradigm of Critical Discourse Analysis with quantitative methods. We propose that Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, a software for automated text analysis widely used in social sciences, can enrich the CDA toolkit. The methodological advantage of LIWC is that its semantic categorization was developed and validated independently, which addresses the concerns about subjectivity. In two case studies we use LIWC to analyze the construction and representation of the ‘Other’ in mass (...) media. Study 1 focuses on the representation of Russia in The New York Times before and after its annexation of Crimea; Study 2 analyzes the change in sentiment toward Islam in NYT before and after 9/11. We find that in both cases the change in attitude is driven by an increase in negative emotion words rather than by a decrease in positive words. (shrink)

The present article deals with reported speech as an element of argumentation in the newspaper discourse of Great Britain viewed in the unity of its syntactic and semantic characteristics and argumentative functions. Theoretically, the research is based on the dialogic understanding of quotations, the dialogue theory by Bakhtin and contemporary argumentation theory. The proposed integral approach to reported speech combining linguistics with logic and argumentation theory revealed the relations between purely linguistic characteristics of reported speech with its functioning in argumentative (...) discourse of contemporary British press. (shrink)

Why, for a long time, was there no linguistic means to distinguish between the concepts experience and experiment in many European languages, such as Italian, French, and Russian? Was the Russian case influenced by French culture? This article addresses these issues. The most important finding of the study is that no idea of personal experience existed in Russian literature before the second half of the eighteenth century, and the word opyt was later borrowed from the scientific lexicon for expressing the (...) meaning of experience. This is the opposite of what happened in other European languages. This suggests that the concept of experiment is more basic in the Russian mentality. Experience grows from experiment but not vice versa. All these aspects of the semantic history of “experiment” and “experience” are illustrated with extensive textual citations found in the Russian National Corpus and in the electronic library of Institute of Russian Literature. (shrink)

Sometimes it is not easy to determine what constitutes the principal content of a given philosophical system. And by no means is it always possible to base oneself on the opinion of the very thinker in question. Thus, for example, there is Marx's valid comment, "What Spinoza believed to be the cornerstone of his system, and what actually constitutes that cornerstone, are two different things entirely." It is not always easy to find the "key" to the content of a system (...) in its history either, for the perception of ideas and the attitude to them bear the imprint of the given era and, as time passes, much changes in the way in which these ideas are understood. (shrink)

The paper deals with the problem of the social construction of the Self in socio-phenomenological perspective. I am trying to explore the idea, that the shortcomings of the so-called classical Self-models can be clearly explicit in the light of socio-phenomenological approach. Heuristic power of transcendentally phenomenological conception of the Ego and Alter Ego is examined as well as its further development in the framework of phenomenological tradition in the social sciences. Turning to postmodern tradition in the social thinking, I am (...) trying to argue, that significance of phenomenological approach to the problem of the social construction of the Self consists in the fact, that it mediates “classic” Self-theories in European social thinking and further developed radical forms of cognitive constructivism which paves the way to postmodern deconstruction. (shrink)

Interest in Slavophilism has undergone a notable resuscitation in recent decades in the Soviet literature. In the seventies and eighties, collections of works of some of the Slavophiles were published for the first time since the October Revolution. Books and articles on Slavophilism have appeared. Archival materials have been put into scholarly circulation, scholars find their attention being drawn to works of modern foreign authors on Slavophilism, and certain aspects of Slavophile views are often touched upon in current literary criticism. (...) We can agree with the conclusion drawn by I. A. Dudzinskaia in 1983 and shared by N. I. Tsimbaev, namely, that a review of the literature in the recent period "evidences a new stage in the study of Slavophilism." However, various aspects of Slavophilism have by no means been dealt with equally, and there are quite a number of disagreements among scholars in their assessments. (shrink)

P. Ia. Chaadaev continues to attract the attention of researchers of Russian thought. Some recent publications in our press justify the assertion that scholars are interested not only in this or that side of the views of "the philosopher of Basmannaia Street" but also in the very character of his mentality and its place in the history of Russian philosophical thought. Thus, Viacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov writes in his article "Chaadaev-Our Contemporary" [Chaadaev-nash sovremennik] : "There are several reasons why Chaadaev is (...) not at home in Russia and in the history of Russian thought. One of them is his extreme rationalism and logical orientation. He is the follower of Western European rationalism, mainly, I think, of the French rationalist tradition. For him the chief achievement of civilization is the syllogism, the deduction of logical conclusions from some kind of premises and he takes history to be a unified whole." The same problem of Chaadaevan mentality is raised by P.V. Kuznetsov in his article "The Metaphysical Narcissus: P. Ia. Chaadaev and the Fate of Philosophy in Russia" [Metafizicheskii nartsiss. P. Ia. Chaadaev i sud'ba filosofii v Rossii] , which contrasts Chaadaev's thought with the Eastern "apophatic consciousness.". (shrink)

The main claim of this paper is that a general theory of negative concord (NC) should allow for the possibility of NC involving scoping of a universal quantifier above negation. I propose that Greek NC instantiates this option. Greek n-words will be analyzed as polarity sensitive universal quantifiers which need negation in order to be licensed, but must raise above negation in order to yield the scoping ∀¬. This gives the correct interpretation of NC structures as general negative statements. The (...) effect is achieved by application of QR, and the account is fully compositional, as only sentence negation is the vehicle of logical negation ¬. Greek n-words are also compared to nwords in Romance, Slavic, and Hungarian. This analysis, if correct, has two important.. (shrink)

Limited distribution phenomena related to negation and negative polarity are usually thought of in terms of affectivity where affective is understood as negative or downward entailing. In this paper I propose an analysis of affective contexts as nonveridical and treat negative polarity as a manifestation of the more general phenomenon of sensitivity to (non)veridicality (which is, I argue, what affective dependencies boil down to). Empirical support for this analysis will be provided by a detailed examination of affective dependencies in Greek, (...) but the distribution of any will also be shown to follow from (non)veridicality. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the distribution and interpretation of free choice items (FCIs) in Greek, a language exhibiting a lexical paradigm of such items distinct from that of negative polarity items. Greek differs in this respect from English, which uniformly employs any. FCIs are grammatical only in certain contexts that can be characterized as nonveridical (Giannakidou 1998, 1999), and although they yield universal-like interpretations in certain structures, they are not, I argue, universal quantifiers. Evidence will be provided that FCIsare (...) indefinites; the quasi-universal effect is shown to be the result of binding by an operator with universal force. Additionally, the limited distribution of FCIs in non veridical contexts can be accounted for by analyzing them as indefinites which must always be interpreted in an intensional type. The difference between ``regular'' indefinites and FCIs, therefore, is reduced to a type difference which captures the fact that only the latter exhibit limited distribution: because of their intensional type, FCIs will be grammatical only in contexts providing alternatives (worlds or situations), and nonveridical contexts do exactly this. By contrast, FCIs are excluded from veridical and episodic contexts because these provide no alternatives and hence do not satisfy the lexical semantic requirement ofFCIs. The proposed analysis is supported by data from other languages as well (Spanish, Catalan,French) and has important consequences regarding the analysis of English any. If FCIs are not universal quantifiers but indefinites, then the usual ambiguity thesis (free choice any being universal, negative polarity any an existential) can no longer be maintained, at least not as one in terms of quantificational force. (shrink)

It has been widely accepted that Kant holds the “Opacity Thesis,” the claim that we cannot know the ultimate grounds of our actions. Understood in this way, I shall argue, the Opacity Thesis is at odds with Kant's account of practical self-consciousness, according to which I act from the (always potentially conscious) representation of principles of action and that, in particular, in acting from duty I act in consciousness of the moral law's determination of my will. The Opacity Thesis thus (...) threatens to render acting from duty unintelligible. To diffuse the threat, I argue, first, that we need not attribute the Opacity Thesis to Kant. Kant's concern with the ubiquity of moral self-opacity does not imply the strong skeptical conclusion that knowledge of the grounds of one's action is impossible. Second, I show how moral self-opacity in cases of morally bad action emerges from the intrinsic inability of representing oneself, insofar as one is pursuing the indeterminate end of “happiness.” Thus, moral self-opacity does not undermine the will's self-consciousness but is born of it. (shrink)

Kant’s account of the feeling of moral respect has notoriously puzzled interpreters: on the one hand, moral action is supposed to be autonomous and, in particular, free of the mediation of any feeling on the other hand, the subject’s grasp of the law somehow involves the feeling of moral respect. I argue that moral respect for Kant is not, pace both the ‘intellectualists’ and ‘affectivists,’ an effect of the determination of the will by the law – whether it be a (...) mere effect or the motivating cause of action – but is instead identical to it. Drawing on Kant’s general account of feeling as the awareness of how representations and their objects harm or benefit our own powers, I argue that the identity between moral respect and the determination to action contains two elements. Moral respect is, first, a form of practical self-consciousness which constitutes the subject’s recognition of the moral law and thus of herself as intrinsically bound by it, i. e., as a moral agent. Second, respect is a capacity for receptive awareness of particular features of our environment as well as other persons insofar as they benefit and harm us as moral agents. Thereby moral respect affords us awareness in concreto of particular, morally-conditioned ends. In this way moral respect provides the key for a Kantian account of genuinely free practical receptivity. (shrink)

This volume contains a selection of contributions to the workshop 'Linguistic realization of evidentiality in European languages', held at the 30th Annual ...

Despite the ubiquity of uncertainty, scientific attention has focused primarily on probabilistic approaches, which predominantly rely on the assumption that uncertainty can be measured and expressed numerically. At the same time, the increasing amount of research from a range of areas including psychology, economics, and sociology testify that in the real world, people’s understanding of risky and uncertain situations cannot be satisfactorily explained in probabilistic and decision-theoretical terms. In this article, we offer a theoretical overview of an alternative approach to (...) uncertainty developed in the framework of the ecological rationality research program. We first trace the origins of the ecological approach to uncertainty in Simon’s bounded rationality and Brunswik’s lens model framework and then proceed by outlining a theoretical view of uncertainty that ensues from the ecological rationality approach. We argue that the ecological concept of uncertainty relies on a systemic view of uncertainty that features it as a property of the organism–environment system. We also show how simple heuristics can deal with unmeasurable uncertainty and in what cases ignoring probabilities emerges as a proper response to uncertainty. (shrink)

Nudging is considered a promising approach for behavioural change. At the same time, nudging has raised ethical concerns, specifically in relation to the impact of nudges on autonomous choice. A complexity is that in this debate authors may appeal to different understandings or dimensions of autonomy. Clarifying the different conceptualisations of autonomy in ethical debates around nudging would help to advance our understanding of the ethics of nudging. A literature review of these considerations was conducted in order to identify and (...) differentiate between the conceptualisations of autonomy. In 33 articles on the ethics of nudging, we identified 280 autonomy considerations, which we labelled with 790 unique autonomy codes and grouped under 61 unique super-codes. Finally, we formulated three general conceptualisations of autonomy. Freedom of choice refers to the availability of options and the environment in which individuals have to make choices. Agency involves an individual's capacity to deliberate and determine what to choose. Self-constitution relates to someone's identity and self-chosen goals. In the debate about the ethics of nudging, authors refer to different senses of autonomy. Clarifying these conceptualisations contributes to a better understanding of how nudges can undermine or, on the other hand, strengthen autonomy. (shrink)

The main focus of this article is the occurrence of some polarity items (PIs) in the complements of emotive factive verbs and only. This fact has been taken as a challenge to the semantic approach to PIs (Linebarger 1980), because only and factive verbs are not downward entailing (DE). A modification of the classical DE account is proposed by introducing the notion of nonveridicality (Zwarts 1995, Giannakidou 1998, 1999, 2001) as the one crucial for PI sanctioning. To motivate this move, (...) it is first shown that two solutions in the direction of weakening classical monotonicity do not work: Strawson DE (von Fintel 1999) and weak DE (Hoeksema 1986). Weakening DE systematically either overgenerates or undergenerates, in either case failing to characterize the correct set of licensers. Nonveridicality is introduced as a conservative extension of DE and is shown to account for PIs also in contexts that are not DE (i.e. questions, modal verbs, imperatives, directive propositional attitudes). This theory, augmented with the premise that certain PIs (i.e. the liberal class represented by any) are subject to a weaker polarity dependency identified not as LICENSING but as RESCUING by nonveridicality, explains the occurrence of this particular class with only and emotive factive verbs. Crosslinguistic comparisons illustrate that the occurrence of PIs with only and emotive factives is not a general phenomenon, and further support the dual nature of polarity dependency and the semantic characterization of the elements that license or rescue PIs. (shrink)

This paper explores the role that the scalar properties and presuppositions of even play in creating polarity sensitive even meanings crosslinguistically (henceforth EVEN). I discuss the behavior of three lexically distinct Greek counterparts of even in positive, negative, subjunctive sentences, and polar questions. These items are shown to be polarity sensitive, and a three-way distinction is posited between a positive polarity (akomi ke), a negative polarity (oute), and a ‘flexible scale’even(esto) which does not introduce likelihood, but is associated with scales (...) made salient by the context. The analysis is a refinement of Rooth’s original idea that negative polarity is involved in the interpretation of English even, and establishes further that the “negative” polarity domain of EVEN includes a sensitivity that is not strictly speaking negative (flexible scale esto). The distributional restrictions of EVEN items are shown to follow from distinct presuppositions (positive polarity and flexible scale EVEN), or from their lexical featural specification (negative polarity EVEN), a result that squares neatly with the fact that ill-formedness is systematic pragmatic deviance in the former case but robust ungrammaticality in the latter. This result supports the by now widely accepted view that polarity dependencies are not of uniform nature, and that we need to distinguish presupposition failures (which are weaker and possibly.. (shrink)

While the impassibility debate has traditionally been construed in terms of whether God suffers, recent philosophy of religion has interpreted it in terms of whether God has emotions more generally. This article surveys the philosophical literature on divine im/passibility over the last 25 years, outlining major arguments for and against the idea that God has emotions. It argues that questions about the nature and value of emotions are at the heart of the im/passibility debate. More specifically, it suggests that presuppositions (...) about the dichotomy between emotions and reason (or the ‘heart and the head’) have negatively impacted the debate. It contends that the debate can only move forward in response to serious reflection on our affects as we experience them, aided by historical and anthropological as well as contemporary philosophical perspectives. (shrink)

Contemporary debates on God’s emotionality are divided between two extremes. Impassibilists deny God’s emotionality on the basis of God’s omniscience, omnipotence and incorporeality. Passibilists seem to break with tradition by affirming divine emotionality, often focusing on the idea that God suffers with us. Contemporary philosophy of emotion reflects this divide. Some philosophers argue that emotions are voluntary and intelligent mental events, making them potentially compatible with omniscience and omnipotence. Others claim that emotions are involuntary and basically physiological, rendering them inconsistent (...) with traditional divine attributes. Thinking Through Feeling: God, Emotion and Passibility creates a three-way conversation between the debate in theology, contemporary philosophy of emotion, and pre-modern (particularly Augustinian and Thomist) conceptions of human affective experience. It also provides an exploration of the intelligence and value of the emotions of compassion, anger and jealousy. (shrink)

There are two main approaches in the phenomenological understanding of the unconscious. The first explores the intentional theory of the unconscious, while the second develops a non-representational way of understanding consciousness and the unconscious. This paper aims to outline a general theoretical framework for the non-representational approach to the unconscious within the phenomenological tradition. In order to do so, I focus on three relevant theories: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, Thomas Fuchs’ phenomenology of body memory, and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of (...) affectivity. Both Merleau-Ponty and Fuchs understand the unconscious as a “sedimented practical schema” of subjective being in the world. This sedimented unconscious contributes to the way we implicitly interpret reality, fill in the gaps of uncertainty, and invest our social interactions with meaning. Husserl, however, approaches the unconscious in terms of affective non-vivacity, as a sphere of sedimentation and the horizon of the distant past which stays affectively connected to the living present. Drawing on these ideas, I argue that these two accounts can reinforce one another and provide the ground for a phenomenological understanding of the unconscious in terms of the horizontal dimension of subjective experience and a non-representational relation to the past. (shrink)

We offer an analysis of future morphemes as epistemic operators. The main empirical motivation comes from the fact that future morphemes have systematic purely epistemic readings—not only in Greek and Italian, but also in Dutch, German, and English will. The existence of epistemic readings suggests that the future expressions quantify over epistemic, not metaphysical alternatives. We provide a unified analysis for epistemic and predictive readings as epistemic necessity, and the shift between the two is determined compositionally by the lower tense. (...) Our account thus acknowledges a systematic interaction between modality and tense—but the future itself is a pure modal, not a mixed temporal/modal operator. We show that the modal base of the future is nonveridical, i.e. it includes p and ¬p worlds, parallel to epistemic modals such as must, and present arguments that future morphemes are a category that stands in between epistemic modals and predicates of personal taste. We identify, finally, a subclass of epistemic futures which are ratificational, and argue that will is a member of this class. (shrink)

Moralising accounts of depression include the idea that depression is a sin or the result of sin, and/or that it is the result of demonic possession which has occurred because of moral or spiritual failure. Increasingly some Christian communities, understandably concerned about the debilitating effects these views have on people with depression, have adopted secular folk psychiatry’s ‘medicalising’ campaign, emphasising that depression is an illness for which, like (so-called) physical illnesses, experients should not be held responsible. This paper argues that (...) both moralising and medicalising models of depression are intellectually and practically (pastorally and therapeutically) problematic, gesturing towards more promising emphases. (shrink)

Polarity phenomena in language are pervasive and quite diverse. A quite familiar polarity item (PI) is any. Any a PI because it exhibits limited distribution: it is ungrammatical in positive sentences, but becomes fine with negation, in questions, with modal verbs, and in the scope of downward entailing quantifiers like few.

The evidence on gender discrimination in lending remains controversial. To capture gender biases in banks’ loan allocations, we observe the impact on the applicants of a microfinance institution and exploit the natural experiment of a regulatory change imposing a strict EUR 10,000 loan ceiling on microcredit. Descriptive statistics indicate that the presence of the ceiling is associated both with bank-MFI co-financing and with harsher treatment of female borrowers. To investigate causal links, we develop an econometric approach that addresses the concerns (...) of selection biases, multicollinearity, and endogeneity. Our empirical findings suggest that the change in the MFI’s gender-related attitude was triggered by banks through co-financing. Hence, we speculate that co-financing pushes ceiling-constrained MFIs to import whatever biases in loan granting that the banks are prone to. Overall, this paper stresses that apparently benign regulations such as loan ceilings can significantly harm the women’s empowerment efforts made by MFIs. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the syntax-semantics of subjunctive clauses in (Modern) Greek. These clauses are headed by the particle na and contain a dependent verbal form with no formal mood features: the perfective nonpast (PNP). I propose that the semantics of na is temporal: it introduces the variable now (n) into the syntax. This is necessary because the apparent present tense in the PNP cannot introduce n. The PNP, instead, contains a dependent time variable. This variable cannot be interpreted (...) as a free variable – hence it cannot be identified with the utterance time of the context. This analysis relies on two premises. One is the (quite influential) idea that pronouns and tenses are analogous creatures (Partee 1973, 1984, Heim 1998, Kratzer 1998, and others). The other premise is that at least some polarity items are expressions that contain variables that cannot be interpreted deictically (Giannakidou 1998, 2001). In the present work I suggest to enlarge the domain of phenomena that can receive a unified treatment across individuals, worlds, and tenses, and treat the subjunctive mood as a non-deictic time, thus an instance of a polarity dependency of the temporal kind. It is my hope that the analysis proposed here for the PNP can be used to analyze verbal subjunctives in Romance languages, and perhaps also infinitival forms in English, but investigation of this question will have be left for the future. (shrink)

In this paper we reconsider the issue of free choice and the role of the wh-morphology employed in it. We show that the property of being an interrogative wh-word alone is not sufficient for free choice, and that semantic and sometimes even morphological definiteness is a pre-requisite for some free choice items (FCIs) in certain languages, e.g. in Greek and Mandarin Chinese. We propose a theory that explains the polarity behaviour of FCIs cross-linguistically, and allows indefinite (Giannakidou 2001) as well (...) as definite-like FCIs. The difference is manifested as a lexical distinction in English between any (indefinite) and wh-ever (definite); in Greek it appears as a choice between a FCI nominal modifier (taking an NP argument), which illustrates the indefinite option, and a FC free relative illustrating the definite one. We provide a compositional analysis of Greek FCIs in both incarnations, and derive in a parallel manner the Chinese FCIs. Here the definite versus indefinite alternation is manifested in the presence or absence of dōu, which we take to express the maximality operator. It is thus shown that what we see in the morphology of FCIs in Greek is reflected in syntax in Chinese. Our analysis has important consequences for the class of so-called wh-indeterminates. In the context of current proposals, free choiceness is taken to come routinely from interrogative semantics, and wh-indeterminates are treated as question words which can freely become FCIs (Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002). Our results from Mandarin and Greek emphasize that wh-indeterminates do not form a uniform class in this respect, and that interrogative semantics alone cannot predict either sensitivity of free choice to definiteness, or the polarity behaviour of FCIs. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a striking parallel between Greek and Korean in the formation and interpretation of metalinguistic comparatives. The initial observation is that both languages show an empirical contrast between “regular” comparative and metalinguistic comparative realized in (a) the form of a designated metalinguistic comparative MORE; and (b) in the form of THAN employed. We propose (building on our earlier analyses in Giannakidou and Stavrou 2009, Giannakidou and Yoon 2009) that the metalinguistic comparative is perspectival, i.e. it introduces (...) the point of view of an individual towards a sentence, and argue that the individual expresses invariably an attitude of preference: she prefers one sentence (the sentence itself, or the proposition it expresses) in a given context over another. The preference may come out as completely negative in certain cases, and this is manifested as yet another lexicalization in Korean (charari), which selects nuni-THAN, which itself carries a negative expressive index (in the sense of Potts 2007), we will claim. Expressive negativity is not equivalent to negation in syntax, as nuni alone cannot license NPIs that need negation. If our analysis is correct, it has one important implication that goes beyond just the metalinguistic comparatives in the individual languages we are considering. It allows the generalization that metalinguistic functions in language are indeed part of the grammar. In particular, they are reflexes of grammaticalization of perspective and subjective mode, on a par with predicates of personal taste discussed by Lasersohn 2005, 2008, 2009, mood choice, and similar phenomena. In comparatives, subjective mode is manifested as an ordering of preference. (shrink)

Dieser Band bietet eine Auswahl der Beiträge der Tagung "Modalität und Evidentialität", die vom 31. Mai bis 2. Juni 2010 an der Leibniz Universität Hannover stattfand, sowie weitere einschlägige Aufsätze. Die Tagung führte die Tradition der Treffen des Arbeitskreises "Modalität im Deutschen" fort und nahm mit dem Schwerpunkt "Modalität und Evidentialität" ein in der Linguistik aktuelles und intensiv diskutiertes Thema auf. Evidentialität, d.h. die sprachliche Kennzeichnung der Informationsquellen für Äußerungen, und Modalität sind eng verwandt, weshalb sich der Band intensiv mit (...) grundsätzlichen Fragen nach dem Verhältnis zwischen diesen beiden Kategorien befasst. Es wird gefragt, ob und wie die semantisch-funktionalen Domänen Modalität und Evidentialität und ihre Realisierungsformen im Deutschen (und in anderen Sprachen) voneinander zu unterscheiden sind und wie genau ihr Verhältnis zueinander am besten beschrieben werden kann. Über die Frage der kategoriellen Einordnung hinaus werden auch synchrone und diachrone Aspekte der Grammatikalisierung evidentieller und modaler Ausdrucksmittel sowie funktionale Differenzierungen in textsortenspezifischen und kontrastiven Blickwinkeln erörtert und so das Spektrum relevanter Probleme in diesem Feld bearbeitet. Die spezifischen Erkenntnisse zum Deutschen, die dieser Band bietet, sind bedeutsam für die germanistische sprachwissenschaftliche Forschung und auch für die Grammatikschreibung des Deutschen, die der Evidentialität bislang keine angemessene Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt hat. (shrink)