Maria Polinsky
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View article: Weak crossover in Spanish relative clauses
Weak crossover in Spanish relative clauses Open
We investigate the status of weak crossover violations (WCO) in Spanish restrictive relative clauses. Claims in the literature lead to the expectation that Spanish does not show sensitivity to WCO in this context; however, ours is the firs…
View article: The antipassive and verbal projections
The antipassive and verbal projections Open
This paper presents and analyzes antipassive constructions in the Mayan language Kaqchikel. Through various syntactic tests, we show that antipassive constructions differ from both active transitive and Agent Focus structures in that they …
View article: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Once I Caught a Fish Alive: Numerical Phrases in Child and Adult Heritage Russian
One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Once I Caught a Fish Alive: Numerical Phrases in Child and Adult Heritage Russian Open
This paper investigates the production of numerically-quantified phrases (NQPs) by monolingual and bilingual speakers of Russian, with Hebrew as the dominant language for the latter group. Russian NQPs exhibit a complex system of noun form…
View article: Cross-linguistic influence, limited input, or working-memory limitations: The morphosyntax of agreement and concord in Heritage Russian
Cross-linguistic influence, limited input, or working-memory limitations: The morphosyntax of agreement and concord in Heritage Russian Open
This study investigated the morphosyntax of adjectival concord in case and number and subject-verb person agreement by monolingual and bilingual speakers of Russian. The main focus of the study is on the potential factors that may trigger …
View article: Cross-linguistic influence meets diminished input: A comparative study of heritage Russian in contact with Hebrew and English
Cross-linguistic influence meets diminished input: A comparative study of heritage Russian in contact with Hebrew and English Open
While it is known that heritage speakers diverge from the homeland baseline, there is still no consensus on the mechanisms triggering this divergence. We investigate the impact of two potential factors shaping adult heritage language (HL) …
View article: Some remarks on Spanish in the bilingual world
Some remarks on Spanish in the bilingual world Open
The core goal of this article consists of raising new questions about the status of Spanish in bilingual contexts. The starting point is that we observe tremendous variance in the repertoire, competence, and use of Spanish by bilinguals ac…
View article: Language-Internal Reanalysis of Clitic Placement in Heritage Grammars Reduces the Cost of Computation: Evidence from Bulgarian
Language-Internal Reanalysis of Clitic Placement in Heritage Grammars Reduces the Cost of Computation: Evidence from Bulgarian Open
The study offers novel evidence on the grammar and processing of clitic placement in heritage languages. Building on earlier findings of divergent clitic placement in heritage European Portuguese and Serbian, this study extends this line o…
View article: Unsupervised Stem-based Cross-lingual Part-of-Speech Tagging for Morphologically Rich Low-Resource Languages
Unsupervised Stem-based Cross-lingual Part-of-Speech Tagging for Morphologically Rich Low-Resource Languages Open
Ramy Eskander, Cass Lowry, Sujay Khandagale, Judith Klavans, Maria Polinsky, Smaranda Muresan. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. …
View article: Language history on fast forward: Innovations in heritage languages and diachronic change
Language history on fast forward: Innovations in heritage languages and diachronic change Open
There has been a substantial amount of research on heritage language acquisition and diachronic change. Although recent work has increasingly pointed to parallels between those two areas, it remains unclear how systematic these are. In thi…
View article: Cognitive and linguistic factors affecting subject/object asymmetry: An eye-tracking study of prenominal relative clauses in Korean
Cognitive and linguistic factors affecting subject/object asymmetry: An eye-tracking study of prenominal relative clauses in Korean Open
: Object relatives (ORs) have been reported to cause heavier processing loads than subject relatives (SRs) in both pre- and postnominal position (prenominal relatives: Miyamoto & Nakamura 2003, Kwon 2008, Ueno & Garnsey 2008; postnominal r…
View article: Russian noun pluralization in bilingual children: Evidence from four countries. Part 2. Quantitative analysis
Russian noun pluralization in bilingual children: Evidence from four countries. Part 2. Quantitative analysis Open
In several countries Russian is spoken by a considerable percentage of the population. The Russian language has been influenced by a number of different languages from throughout the world. As a result, it is crucial to look into how the f…
View article: Minimally-Supervised Morphological Segmentation using Adaptor Grammars with Linguistic Priors
Minimally-Supervised Morphological Segmentation using Adaptor Grammars with Linguistic Priors Open
With the increasing interest in low-resource languages, unsupervised morphological segmentation has become an active area of research, where approaches based on Adaptor Grammars achieve state-of-the-art results.We demonstrate the power of …
View article: Russian noun pluralization in bilingual children: Evidence from four countries. Part 1. Qualitative analysis
Russian noun pluralization in bilingual children: Evidence from four countries. Part 1. Qualitative analysis Open
The Russian language is confronted with a variety of other languages from around the world on the individual level. Russian is spoken by a large proportion of the population in some countries. As a result, it is necessary to investigate ho…
View article: The Sound Pattern of Heritage Spanish: An Exploratory Study on the Effects of a Classroom Experience
The Sound Pattern of Heritage Spanish: An Exploratory Study on the Effects of a Classroom Experience Open
While heritage Spanish phonetics and phonology and classroom experiences have received increased attention in recent years, these areas have yet to converge. Furthermore, most research in these realms is cross-sectional, ignoring individua…
View article: Collocations and near-native competence: Lexical strategies of heritage speakers of Russian
Collocations and near-native competence: Lexical strategies of heritage speakers of Russian Open
This paper presents an exploratory study on the use of frequency-based probabilistic word combinations in Heritage Russian. The data used in the study are drawn from three small corpora of narratives, representing the language of Russian h…
View article: Form-Focused Instruction in the Heritage Language Classroom: Toward Research-Informed Heritage Language Pedagogy
Form-Focused Instruction in the Heritage Language Classroom: Toward Research-Informed Heritage Language Pedagogy Open
In the context of adult second language teaching, heritage language speakers have been recognized as a special group of language learners, whose experience with their home language, as well as their motivations for (re)learning it, differ …
View article: Headedness and the Lexicon: The Case of Verb-to-Noun Ratios
Headedness and the Lexicon: The Case of Verb-to-Noun Ratios Open
This paper takes a well-known observation as its starting point, that is, languages vary with respect to headedness, with the standard head-initial and head-final types well attested. Is there a connection between headedness and the size o…
View article: Structural priming and the phrasal/clausal distinction: The case of concealed questions
Structural priming and the phrasal/clausal distinction: The case of concealed questions Open
This paper investigates whether structural priming is sensitive to the phrasal vs. clausal nature of the constructions it tests.To that end, we examine NPs that receive a question-like interpretation when embedded under certain predicates.…
View article: The <i>Agreement Theta Generalization</i>
The <i>Agreement Theta Generalization</i> Open
In this paper, we propose a new generalization concerning the structural relationship between a head that agrees with a DP in φ-features and the predicate that assigns the (first) thematic role to that DP: the Agreement Theta Generalizatio…
View article: In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish
In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish Open
This paper investigates the morphosyntax of number and gender agreement in English-dominant heritage speakers of Spanish. Our study builds on the experimental paradigm of agreement attraction developed by Fuchs et al. (2015) and elicits re…
View article: “South Caucasian Chalk Circle 2”
“South Caucasian Chalk Circle 2” Open
From 3 through 14 September, the Ilia State University (Tbilisi, Georgia) hosted an international conference and a summer school “South Caucasian Chalk Circle 2” (SCCC-2), co-organized by Maria Polinsky (University of Maryland), Léa Nash (…
View article: Silence is difficult: On missing elements in bilingual grammars
Silence is difficult: On missing elements in bilingual grammars Open
Near-native speakers (heritage speakers and adult second language learners alike) experience difficulty in interpreting and producing linguistic constructions that contain morphologically null elements. We dub this phenomenon the Silent Pr…
View article: Deterrence and the Optimal Use of Prison, Parole, and Probation
Deterrence and the Optimal Use of Prison, Parole, and Probation Open
In this article we derive the mix of criminal sanctions-choosing among prison, parole, and probation-that achieves any target level of deterrence at least cost.We assume that prison has higher disutility and higher cost per unit time than …
View article: Cross-linguistic scope ambiguity: When two systems meet
Cross-linguistic scope ambiguity: When two systems meet Open
Accurately recognizing and resolving ambiguity is a hallmark of linguistic ability. English is a language with scope ambiguities in doubly-quantified sentences like A shark ate every pirate; this sentence can either describe a scenario wit…
View article: Subrogation and the Theory of Insurance When Suits Can Be Brought for Losses Suffered
Subrogation and the Theory of Insurance When Suits Can Be Brought for Losses Suffered Open
The theory of insurance is considered here when an insured individual may be able to sue another party for the losses that the insured suffered-and thus when an insured has a potential source of compensation in addition to insurance covera…
View article: Prison Work Programs in a Model of Deterrence
Prison Work Programs in a Model of Deterrence Open
This article considers the social desirability of prison work programs in a model in which the function of imprisonment is to deter crime.Two types of prison work programs are studiedvoluntary ones and mandatory ones.A voluntary work progr…