UiL-OTS Yearbook 2005

The six papers in this volume represent work carried out by Ph.D. researchers from the institute. Several of the papers were also presented on the Uiltjesdagje in May 2005, the annual opportunity for Ph.D. researchers to present their work to one another within the department. The topics covered here include phonology, syntax, semantics and language processing.

Battaglini argues that discrepancies between logically determined inferences and the validity judgments of laymen about disjunctive statements can be explained by processing issues. It is therefore not necessary to revise the logical system in order to conform to laymen's judgments.

Keskin investigates accusative-assigning nouns in Turkish and demonstrates the inadequacy of three attempts proposed in the literature to account for this phenomenon.

Klimek proposes that pragmatic inferencing plays an important role in determining temporal relations in discourse in Slavic as well as in English, in spite of the comparatively rich aspectual morphology in Slavic languages.

Mahanta presents an optimality theoretic account of regressive vowel harmony in Assamese. She claims that harmony in certain derived environments results from the need to realize a morpheme in the input, which would otherwise be lost in the output, as a result of conflicting phonological constraints.

Sevcenco examines the conditions under which long distance binding can occur in Romanian. She shows that the anaphor must agree and check operator features first with the local and then with the long distance subject, and that focalization of the anaphor can aid the long distance interpretation.

Finally, Slioussar tackles the issue of scrambling in Russian, arguing against Bailyn's account of the phenomenon, to the effect that all such instances of scrambling have discourse-related effects.