Numerous languages permit an NP that is not selected by the verb to be added to a clause, with several different possible interpretations. We divide such nonselected arguments into possessor, benefactive, attitude holder, and affected experiencer categories, on the basis of syntactic and semantic differences between them. We propose a formal analysis of the affected experiencer construction. In our account, a syntactic head Aff(ect) introduces the experiencer argument, and adds a conventional implicature to the effect that any event of the type denoted by its syntactic sister is the source of the experiencer's psychological experience. Hence, our proposal involves two tiers of meaning: the at-issue meaning of the sentence, and some not-atissue meaning (an implicature). A syntactic head can introduce material on both tiers. Additionally, we allow two parameters of variation: (i) the height of the attachment of Aff, and (ii) how much of the semantics is at-issue and how much is an implicature. We show that these two parameters account for the attested variation across our sample of languages, as well as the significant commonalities among them. Our analysis also accounts for significant differences between affected experiencers and the other types of non-selected arguments, and we also note a generalization to the effect that purely not-at-issue non-selected arguments can only be weak or clitic pronouns.
Patients diagnosed with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) often show two symptoms early on: the inability to navigate space effectively and a deterioration of their language skills, especially on semantic tasks. In this work, I look at whether the inability to navigate space is reflected in the spontaneous speech of DAT patients. Through a corpus analysis of narratives by DAT and control participants, I investigate the hypothesis that DAT patients provide less spatial information than healthy controls (mirroring the decline of effective spatial reasoning in language production). This hypothesis was not supported for locative/stative descriptions using in, on, and at; both groups included this information equally often. However, significant differences between the groups were found for the inclusion of the spatial terms left and right as well directional/dynamic spatial information indicated by into, onto, from, and to. This difference between locative/stative and directional/dynamic spatial information has not previously been reported. I argue that it aligns with Chatterjee's (2008) proposal of the relational features of spatial language and that these features can be differently affected in DAT patients, aligning it with the spatial navigation impairment in these participants.
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