Papers by Shannon Bryant
Proceedings of the 55th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 2020
Proceedings of the 37th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 2021
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, May 5, 2022
This paper presents experimental work on the relative naturalness of subject-oriented reflexives ... more This paper presents experimental work on the relative naturalness of subject-oriented reflexives (herself) and pronouns (her) in English locative prepositional phrases (e.g., Michele set a glass next to her/herself). Syntactic approaches to anaphor licensing have tended to focus on the lack of complementarity in such constructions; however, it has long been observed that preferences between forms may depend on verb meaning (change in location vs. perception vs. possession) and spatial relation (+contact vs.-contact), with very strong preferences reported in some cases. This study aims to clarify the extent to which these two factors shape anaphor choice. Results confirm that both play a significant role: reflexives are most natural in the expression of change in location and direct contact, while pronouns pattern oppositely. Importantly, preferences between forms are less stark than those found in constructions where syntactic constraints are assumed to render one form ungrammatical. I suggest that these findings favor an treatment of English anaphora that takes event structure into account.
Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
This article provides a solution to the long-standing puzzle of English anaphors within so-called... more This article provides a solution to the long-standing puzzle of English anaphors within so-called picture noun phrases, which superficially exhibit an exceptional binding behavior. In particular, picture noun anaphors seem, under certain conditions, to escape the locality conditions imposed by Condition A of Binding Theory. Previous proposals attribute such apparently exceptional behavior to various sources: the classical Binding Theory appeals to the possible presence of covert agents within NPs; predicate-based theories introduce the possibility of exemption from Condition A; others capitalize on possible homophony with (logophoric) pronouns. While all of these proposals provide valuable insight into some aspect of the puzzle, we show that they all fail to capture the full empirical picture. Based on a detailed examination of their behavior in various syntactic and interpretive conditions, we instead propose that English picture noun anaphors, like any other anaphor, systematicall...
Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 2021
Though languages show rich variation in the clausal embedding strategies employed in attitude rep... more Though languages show rich variation in the clausal embedding strategies employed in attitude reports, most mainstream formal semantic theories of attitudes assume that the clausal complement of an attitude verb contributes at least a proposition to the semantics. The goal of this paper is to contribute to the growing cross-linguistic perspective of attitudes by providing semantic analyses for the two embedding strategies found with attitude verbs in Oromo (Cushitic): verbal nominalization, and embedding under akka 'as'. We argue that Oromo exemplifies a system in which non-speech attitudes uniformly embed situations rather than propositions, thereby expanding the empirical landscape of attitude reports in two ways: (i) situations and propositions are both ontological primitives used by languages in the construction of attitude reports, and (ii) attitude verbs in languages like Oromo do the semantic heavy lifting, contributing the "proposition" to propositional att...
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America
This paper explores the clausal complementation strategies found in Oromo (Cushitic). Recent work... more This paper explores the clausal complementation strategies found in Oromo (Cushitic). Recent work by Wurmbrand and Lohninger (2019) suggests that languages distinguish three broad semantic categories of complement clauses, which are hierarchically ordered with respect to their syntactic complexity. Based on newly elicited data and examples from the literature, I propose that Oromo complement clauses also show this three-way split, lending support to Wurmbrand and Lohninger’s (2019) proposal. However, the distribution of clausal complement categories appears to diverge somewhat from what has been reported for other languages, suggesting some flexibility in the way certain states and events can be linguistically encoded. Situating Oromo within the typology of clausal complementation thus sheds light on the diversity of ways in which basic semantic building blocks may be incorporated into the expression of complex meanings and speaks to the import of understudied languages to typologic...
Thesis Chapters by Shannon Bryant
Harvard University, 2022
This thesis investigates the choice between reflexive pronouns (e.g., herself) and personal prono... more This thesis investigates the choice between reflexive pronouns (e.g., herself) and personal pronouns (e.g., her) in the expression of subject coreference in English locative prepositional phrases. A persistent puzzle for syntactic theories of pronoun licensing, commonly known as binding theories, it has long been observed that both pronoun forms are generally permissible, raising the question of how English users decide which form to choose. Addressing this question sheds light not only on the nature of syntactic constraints determining pronoun licensing possibilities, but also on the non-syntactic factors that conspire to push preferences in one direction or the other, in particular factors relating to the meaning of the sentences in which the pronouns are contained. The main empirical and theoretical contributions of this thesis are as follows. First, it reports two acceptability judgment experiments that clarify the extent to which preferences between subject-oriented pronoun forms in locative prepositional phrases depends on two factors previously suggested in the literature: the type of eventuality denoted by the sentencewhether possession, perception, or location change-and the type of spatial relation denoted by the locative prepositional phrase-whether it involves direct contact between figure and ground. Findings reveal that the reflexive is most natural in the expression of location change and direct contact while the personal pronoun patterns oppositely, resulting in an overall gradient preference pattern across locative prepositional phrase constructions. v
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Papers by Shannon Bryant
Thesis Chapters by Shannon Bryant