Denis Delfitto

• University Verona

In this study, we examine how implicit statistical learning (ISL) interacts with the cognitive bias of the alternation advantage in serial reaction time (SRT) tasks. Our aim was to disentangle perceptual from motor aspects of learning, as well as to shed light on the cognitive sources of this alternation effect. We developed a manual (Study 1) and...

We propose an analysis of copular structures of the type “DP is DP” based on the existence of a silent predicate of asymmetric identity. Our proposal is based on a cognitively grounded notion of identity as identification of one object on the basis of the properties of another. We argue that our proposal is preferable over Russell's view that the c...

While developmental dyslexia has been extensively studied in children, research on adults is still rather limited. This paper aims to bridge the gap in existing research by presenting the findings of a study that examined the reading and spelling skills of adults with dyslexia and assessed the effectiveness of a linguistic intervention designed to...

We review some of the most prominent challenges in the semantics and pragmatics of fictional names and propose a pragmatic theory of fictional names whereby understanding a fictional name requires imagining possible contexts of interpretation of the name. Similarly to other pragmatic approaches to fiction and fictional contexts, we maintain that fi...

In this contribution, we offer some new insights on the sources and nature of the free-choice (FC) reading found in disjunctive sentences containing a (deontic) modal. Notoriously, interpreting the sentence ‘You can speak to Bill or John’ with the meaning that you are free to speak to either of them involves a logical entailment that cannot be deri...

Syncopation – the occurrence of a musical event on a metrically weak position preceding a rest on a metrically strong position – represents an important challenge in the study of the mapping between rhythm and meter. In this contribution, we present the hypothesis that syncopation is an effective strategy to elicit the bootstrapping of a multi-laye...

The brief report examines the burgeoning interest in sustainable career development by discussing the role of employability of individuals with fragile literacy skills, i.e., second-language learners (L2), and individuals with developmental dyslexia (DD). Considering sustainable career development as the umbrella of practices facilitating individua...

There is an almost unanimous theoretical consensus according to which human languages are externalized as linear sequences of atomic units which are encoded according to specific hierarchical conditions. The nature of the interplay between the cognitive development of these hierarchical representations and their linearization on the string is howev...

In this contribution, we offer a contextualist analysis of names whereby a name N is used as a felicitous referential term in all and only those contexts of utterance in which N is intended to refer to a unique referent by all cognitive agents that are relevant in the context. This analysis has important across-the-board virtues. It reduces the dis...

Developmental Dyslexia is a lifelong condition characterized by reading and spelling deficits that persist into adulthood, negatively affecting the individual’s academic and professional careers. Although numerous studies have been conducted to assess the effectiveness of reading interventions in children, providing promising results, research on a...

This book offers original insights around a fascinating idea: Perception and the rest of cognition, crucially including language, are closer to each other than the Cartesian tradition dared to dream. By combining recent results in cognitive neuroscience, the philosophy of perception, and the syntax of natural language, the book demonstrates that th...

This paper investigates scalar implicatures (SIs) computation in dyslexia focusing on the role of the quantifier's semantic properties. We developed two protocols, a Statement Evaluation Task (SET) and a Truth Value Judgement Task, using two Italian quantifiers, alcuni (a cardinality quantifier) and qualche (a proportional quantifier), both corresp...

Natural languages – idioms such as English and Cantonese, Zulu and Amharic, Basque and Nicaraguan Sign Language – allow their speakers to convey meaning and transmit meaning to one another. But what is meaning exactly? What is this thing that words convey and speakers communicate? Few questions are as elusive as this. Yet, few features are as essen...

In this contribution, we argue that Moore's paradox has its roots in the semantics of first-person. We build up on some of Frege's concerns about the first-person, recently revived by Kripke as a criticism of the position according to which Kaplan's two-dimensional semantics is all is needed for an adequate semantics of the first-person. First, we...

In this chapter, we present and discuss two opposing views of linguistic meaning. The first view, which we call the view of meaning as something, maintains that there is such a thing as meaning. The second, which we call the view of meaning as nothing, maintains that there is no such a thing as meaning; meaning is the epiphenomenon of something mor...

With this chapter, we introduce the discussion of subjectivity in language. Wittgenstein’s private language argument demonstrates the logical impossibility of a language that is about private objects. Yet, it an intuition shared by most natural language speakers that language can be used, in practice, also to refer to their inner psychological live...

In this chapter, we present a compositional analysis, in the framework of Montague grammar, of the meaning of the definite article and the noun phrases of which it is part—definite descriptions. The definite article is here analyzed as expressing a relation of quantification between two sets that identifies a single object. On the basis of this ana...

This chapter is a brief excursion into natural language syntax, the branch of linguistics that studies the grammar of natural language. We present and discuss the difference between two types of grammars, finite-state and phrase-structure grammars, and demonstrate that natural language grammars are phrase-structure grammars.

In this chapter, we demonstrate that the reference of proper names is also context-dependent. We do so by discussing a linguistic puzzle originally formulated by Frege. We then discuss how the meaning of proper names can be captured in a two-dimensional framework that distinguishes the dimensions of content and character. We conclude by briefly rev...

In this chapter, we discuss the possibility of accounting for the abstract dimension of linguistic meaning in the framework of Platonic idealism—the thesis that the external world encompasses an abstract dimension beyond its material one. We discuss how such a framework can be applied and, in fact, has been applied to natural language but we also d...

In this chapter, we introduce the thesis of meaning as perception by observing some parallels in the logical structure of linguistic meaning and perception. Both domains are grounded in the notions of object and property and a combinatorial procedure, corresponding to the mechanism of functional application, which produces de re propositions. We al...

In this chapter, we make use of the possible world semantics developed in the previous chapter to express three fundamental distinctions among propositions: (a) the distinction between necessary and contingent propositions; (b) the distinction between a priori and a posteriori propositions; and (c) the distinction between de re and de dicto proposi...

In this chapter, we introduce a definition of the notion of self-acquaintance that is based on the notion of acquaintance, which, in turn, is based on Russell’s distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. We rely on such definition to enrich Kaplan’s two-dimensional semantics so that it can capture the cognitive dime...

In this chapter, we illustrate the basic functioning of Richard Montague’s model-theoretic approach to natural language meaning by exemplifying it on a small set of expressions of English including proper names, intransitive verbs, and the declarative sentence that can be constructed from them. We provide a simple compositional account of the inter...

In this chapter, we further illustrate the thesis of meaning as perception by focusing on the domains of reference, propositional attitudes, and the implicit de se. We demonstrate that the thesis of meaning as perception offers the framework for addressing a number of linguistic puzzles including why linguistic reference is always bound to a cognit...

In this chapter, we introduce and discuss the notions of natural language and natural language meaning, as well as the main research question of the book: what is meaning?

In this chapter, we present a compositional analysis, in the framework of Montague grammar, of the meaning of transitive verbs and the declarative sentences to which they give rise. Pivotal to this result is the analysis of the characteristic function of the sets denoted by transitive verbs as functions of functions, that is, functions that are sat...

In this chapter, we introduce and discuss the modern scientific view of perception, whereby sensory systems are not mere physical transducers but systems of classification and interpretation of the external world, developed in the course of the human evolutionary history to serve the perceiver in the task of surviving in its environmental niche. We...

In the last chapter of this book, we discuss how the thesis of meaning as perception allows us to vindicate Wittgenstein’s insight that language is an action.

In this chapter, we provide a summary of the arguments we have reviewed in the course of part II against the thesis of semantic externalism. Together, these arguments point to a general deficiency of semantic externalism: its constitutional incapacity at accounting for the role linguistic meaning plays in the cognitive lives of speakers. Each argum...

In this chapter, we discuss some of the central problems with the analysis, which we have adopted in the previous chapter, of the meaning of declarative sentences as truth-values. To address these problems, we introduce the framework of possible world semantics, which we then exploit to formulate the notions of truth-conditions and proposition. By...

In this chapter, we introduce the notion of natural language metaphysics, the practice of identifying and studying the essential properties emerging from the study of natural language meaning. Montague’s approach to meaning and the developments that have occurred in the field since his first attempts provide us with insights concerning both the qua...

In this chapter, we illustrate the tradition image view of perception, canonically attributed to Descartes, whereby perception is the product of two fundamentally different and independent systems: the sensory system—conceived as a system of transduction that mechanically registers external energy patterns—and the conceptual system—conceived as a s...

In this chapter, we illustrate Wittgenstein’s notion of immunity to error through misidentification and, with it, the phenomenon of the implicit de se. We discuss the linguistic relevance of the phenomenon by presenting two cases of linguistic structures that unambiguously express implicit de se propositions—the gerundive complement of verbs of pro...

In this chapter, we introduce the class of expressions known as indexicals. These are expressions such as “I”, “you”, “here”, and “now” whose reference varies depending on their circumstances of use. We discuss the challenges these expressions raise for the theory of meaning as reference. We also introduce and discuss the descriptive theory of inde...

In this chapter we introduce and discuss Frege’s principle of compositionality, whereby the meaning of a complex linguistic expression E is a function of two elements: the individual meanings of the simple expressions occurring in E and the grammatical structure of E.

In this chapter, we present a compositional analysis, in the framework of Montague grammar, of the meaning of determiners, such as “every”, “no”, and “a”, and the declarative sentences of which they are part. Determiners are analyzed as expressing logical relations between properties. These relations, in a model-theory, can be further translated in...

In this chapter, we consider the implications for the thesis of semantic externalism of the finding that perspective and, with it, acquaintance are pervasive properties of natural language meaning. We shall see that acquaintance does entail an element of epistemic subjectivity but does not necessarily entail an element of ontological subjectivity,...

In this chapter, we introduce the notion of de se propositional attitude. This is a propositional attitude where the subject of the attitude unambiguously identifies the object of the attitude as herself. We illustrate this notion by presenting some of the linguistic structures that express it—in particular, control structures and logophoric pronou...

Without doubt, the notion of form—the intangible that remains when all that is meaningful is removed—is one of the pillars of the cultural revolution of the first half of the twentieth century. Malevich—and with him many other artists—used it to liberate art from the chains of the past; Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein to address the fundamental que...

In this chapter, we discuss the thesis of meaning as use and, more generally, the understanding of language as behavior that is often associated to Wittgenstein’s claims in his Philosophical Investigations. The thesis of language as use rejects the idea the language should be understood as a symbolic system of reference in favor of the idea that la...

In this chapter, we exploit Russell’s notion of acquaintance to model the notion of centered proposition—a proposition that provides both information about the properties of a state of affairs and information about the vantage point from which the state of affairs is acknowledged. This notion allows us to formulate satisfactory truth-conditions for...

In this chapter, we introduce the thesis of semantic externalism—the thesis, that is, that meaning is an object that belongs to the word of material things and, therefore, is not an object of a psychological nature.

In this chapter, we present linguistic evidence towards the conclusion that there is a fundamental difference between things as they are in the external world of material things and things as speakers talk about them. The facts of the language suggest, against the thesis of semantic externalism, that the reality referred to by natural language expr...

In this chapter, we introduce the notions of mathematical model and formal language and discuss the notion of a system of interpretation as a homomorphism between a formal language and a model.

Janus is among the oldest divinities venerated in ancient Rome. He is also amongst the most original, as he is one of the few Roman gods that was not imported from the Greek pantheon but descends from an autochthonous tradition. Janus is canonically regarded as the god of transitions. In fact, he is typically depicted as having two faces oriented t...

In this chapter, we introduce Kaplan’s framework for the interpretation of indexicals. In particular, we extend our current model of interpretation to encompass the notion of context of utterance—as a set of coordinates identifying speaker, place and time of utterance, and addressee(s). On the basis of this framework we also distinguish two related...

In this chapter, we illustrate a theory of verbs of propositional attitudes such as “believe” and “hope” that is based on the possible world semantics developed in the previous chapters. The theory, based on the original logical framework of Jaakko Hintikka maintains that verbs of propositional attitudes express relations between a cognitive agent...

In this chapter, we discuss the implications of the phenomenon of the implicit de se for the model of interpretation of natural language. In particular, we demonstrate that, if we wish to account for the implicit de se while maintaining that the first-person is a referring term, we must submit to the idea that the first-person refers to a Cartesian...

In this paper we probe the interaction between sequential and hierarchical learning by investigating implicit learning in a group of school-aged children. We administered a serial reaction time task, in the form of a modified Simon Task in which the stimuli were organised following the rules of two distinct artificial grammars, specifically Lindenm...

Nonword repetition is typically impaired in dyslexia. Conversely, native-like performance is early achieved by bilingual children whose second language has a simple phonotactic system, like Italian. Our study aimed at comparing the performance of monolingual and bilingual children with and without dyslexia in a nonword repetition task modeled after...

This paper presents an experimental study investigating artificial grammar learning in monolingual and bilingual children, with and without dyslexia, using an original methodology. We administered a serial reaction time task, in the form of a modified Simon task, in which the sequence of the stimuli was manipulated according to the rules of a simpl...

This study investigates the derivation of scalar implicatures in Chinese children with reading difficulties (RD). Twenty-four children with RD (mean age 9 years and 8 months), 20 age-matched typical readers (mean age 9 years and 10 months), 20 six-year-old children and 20 five-year-old children were tested with the comprehension of sentences with s...

This contribution addresses the issue of one of the instances of non-standard negation, the so-called expletive negation (EN). Though it discusses data from a variety of languages, it mainly concentrates on Italian, proposing that the behavior of EN in comparative, exclamative and temporal clauses warrants an analysis of EN in terms of an operator...

In this contribution, we address the issues concerning the semantic value of Wittgenstein’s subject “I”, as in (i) “I have a toothache”, resulting from the use of predicates that involve first-person knowledge of the mental states to which they refer. As is well-known, these contexts give rise to the phenomenon of ‘immunity to error through misiden...

This volume presents eleven papers on the acquisition of Romance, most of them presented at the Romance Turn VIII, held in Bellaterra, Catalonia, Spain, in September 2016. Part I of the volume is devoted to passives and related constructions. The results unveil domains in comprehension in which children are adult-like, and other domains where there...

Clitic production is reported to be challenging for impaired children, suffering from dyslexia or SLI, and for early second language learners too. On the contrary, research has not directly investigated the relation between dyslexia, bilingualism and clitic production. The aim of our study is that of addressing this topic, by analyzing the performa...

The aim of this work is to investigate how bilingual children perform with respect to monolingual children in a task eliciting direct object clitic pronouns in Italian. Clitic production is considered a good clinical marker for Italian monolingual children suffering from specific language impairment (SLI) (Bortolini et al. 2006). Moreover, this tas...

In this contribution, we offer an original analysis of the relation between control structures, de se readings and Immunity to Error through Misidentification. We propose that control structures are the result of an operation of Thematic Overwriting (TO), which conflates two thematic roles into one and delivers a logical representation whereby two...

It has been shown that morphological skills are particularly enhanced in bilingual children, whereas they are compromised in dyslexics. The aim of this work is that of investigating how bilingualism interacts with dyslexia in a task measuring the subject’s morphological abilities, to verify if the advantage typically found in bilingualism arises al...

In this contribution, it is argued that the optionally realized instances of sentential negation that correspond to so-called ‘expletive’ negation in comparative and temporal clauses of Italian are essentially the same instances of ‘covert’ negation that license Free Choice ANY in English according to the theoretical framework on negation developed...

Bare nouns (BNs) are noun phrases that are not introduced by a determiner. They have constituted a central case study into the logical form of natural language and one of the most challenging empirical domains for generally accepted hypotheses on the syntax/semantics interface. The main challenge they pose is in identifying the syntactic conditions...

Adverbs are one of the familiar categories of traditional grammar. Traditionally, adverbs are regarded as modifiers of verbs, in comparison with adjectives, which are regarded as modifiers of names. This view, however, runs into problems of both a syntactic and a semantic nature. On one hand, adverbs modify not only verbs but also predicates belong...

Alessandro Capone, The pragmatics of indirect reports: Socio-philosophical considerations (Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 8). Heidelberg: Springer, 2016. Pp. xii + 364. - Denis Delfitto, Gaetano Fiorin

In this study, we present the results of an original experimental protocol designed to assess the performance in a pluralization task of 52 Italian children divided into two groups: 24 children with developmental dyslexia (mean age 10.0 years old) and 28 typically developing children (mean age 9.11 years old). Our task, inspired by Berko’s Wug Test...

Recent experimental results suggest that negation is particularly challenging for children with reading difficulties. This study looks at how young poor readers, speakers of Mandarin Chinese, comprehend affirmative and negative sentences as compared with a group of age-matched typical readers. Forty-four Chinese children were tested with a truth va...

Kazanina and Phillips (Cognition (2007) 105:65−102) distinguish two accounts of the progressive and imperfective: the ‘perspective-based’ approach and the ‘event-based’ approach. The event-based approach maintains that imperfective and perfective refer to different classes of events. The perspective-based approach maintains that imperfective and pe...

In this contribution we will address the main puzzling empirical issues that have been formulated around Free Indirect Discourse (FID): the constraints on the use of first person pronouns and of proper names (as well as of definite descriptions), the reasons why different grammatical features (person, gender, number) give rise to presuppositions th...

Free indirect discourse has traditionally been described as a form of reported speech or thought. It seems to be a mixture of both direct discourse (in allowing exclamatives, interrogatives, etc.) and indirect discourse (in following sequences of tenses and pronouns). It has been the object of more interest from literary theorists than from linguis...

In this article, we formulate a hypothesis about the interface conditions that regulate the interaction between the logical form of exclamative sentences (mediated by their syntax), and the semantics of the exclamative speech act. We argue that it is exactly these interface conditions that enable different kinds of exclamatives (belonging to differ...

In his work on attitudes de se, James Higginbotham has observed that the silent subject of the infinitival complements of verbs such as remember and imagine is (i) unambiguously de se and (ii) immune to error through misidentification relatively to the subject of the matrix clause. In this article, we review and criticize Higginbotham’s reflexive a...

According to recent proposals in formal syntax, the left-most position in the C(omplementizer)-layer is dedicated to the representation of the context of utterance (call this hypothesis LP). This idea has had little impact on semantic theories of indexicals. The reason is that indexicals are regarded, after Kaplan's (1989) Logic of Demonstratives (...

This contribution proposes an analysis of expletive negation in German temporal clauses (bevor-clauses). It confirms Krifka's (2010) insight that expletive negation is interpreted in bevor-clauses, and that what is required to derive the correct truth-conditions for these doublenegation sentences is a view of compositionality in which semantic and...

This article aims at clarifying the role of person at the interface between syntax and the interpretive systems. We argue that first person interpretations of third person pronouns (de se readings) stem from the option of leaving the referential index underspecified on the pronoun, thus accounting for the interplay of this phenomenon with the anaph...

In this article we compare three classes of nominal constructions: Bemba so-called 'associative nominals', a class of nominal constructions found in several Bantu languages (though we will essentially concentrate on Bemba), Italian so-called 'prepositional compounds' (or 'phrasal com-pounds'), a class of nominal constructions common to other Romanc...

1. WHAT IS DEVELOPMENTAL DYSLEXIA? THE WORKING MEMORY DEFICIT HYPOTHESIS Developmental Dyslexia is a learning based disability that interferes in particular with the acquisition of language. One of the most easily detectable symptoms of dyslexia, to which this disorder actually owes its name, is the failure to properly acquire reading and spelling...

The annual conference series ‘Going Romance’ has developed into a major European discussion forum where ideas about language and linguistics and about Romance languages in particular are put in an inter­active perspective, giving room to both universality and Romance-internal variation. The current volume contains a selection of the papers that wer...

This chapter deals with the relevance of some cases of prepositionless genitives in Romance for a general theory of genitive assignment. It examines the peculiar properties of a specific class of Italian N+N compounds, identifying in the juxtaposition genitives of Old French, Occitan, and crucially Old Italian, the possible diachronic antecedent fo...

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This contribution proposes a view of linguistic semantics as a set of mental computations defined on a suitably restricted inventory of interpreted features borrowed from conceptual structures external to the language organ. These features enter both a lexical and a syntactic computation. Semantic universals can be identified regarding the nature o...

In this contribution, we intend to offer an interesting exemplification of the kind of positive interaction that may arise between acquisition studies and linguistic theory. Starting from a full range of comparative studies showing the presence of a delay in the acquisition of the interpretive properties of non-reflexive pronominals and the absence...

Recent work on the acquisition of the binding conditions suggests that pronominal clitics (PCs) encode the presence of an unsaturated argument position. In other words, PC-constructions encode functional abstraction: the argument position related to the PC is re-opened. This interpretation represents a radical departure from traditional analyses (i...

This contribution deals with the relation existing between the Chomskyan program in linguistics and the theory of meaning. In particular, it tries to individuate the intellectual sources and the deep motivations of Chomsky's ambivalence towards a theory of meaning. In doing so, it also tries to elucidate some controversial aspects of the most recen...

In this contribution, we offer a survey of some of the canonical topics in adverbial syntax, examining the challenges posed by the ambiguous status of adverbs and adverbial phrases to syntactic theorizing. The challenge consists especially in the fact that many of the most fertile notions elaborated by the theory of syntax within the generative par...

A large variety of morphosyntactic processes appears to correlate with a 'specific'/non-existential interpretation of the constituents involved, providing evidence for the hypothesis that 'specificity' is syntactically encoded. This paper discusses some possible implementations of this general insight. It argues against the view that syntactic oper...