Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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A Unified Analysis of Passives and Anticausatives
Get PDFStarting from the basic observation that, across languages, the anticausative variant of an alternating verb systematically involves morphological marking that is shared by passive verbs, the goal of this paper is to provide a uniform and formal account of these arguably two different construction types. The central claim that I put forward is that passives and anticausatives differ only with respect to the event-type features of the verb but both arise through the same operation, namely suppression by special morphology of a feature in v that encodes the ontological event type of the verb. Crucially, I argue for two syntactic primitives, namely act and cause, whereto I trace the passive/anticausative distinction. Passive constructions across languages are made compatible by relegating the differences to simple combinatorial properties of verb and prepositional types and their interactions with other event functors, which are in turn encoded differently morphologically across languages. New arguments are brought forward for a causative analysis of anticausatives. Agentive adverbials are examined, and doubt is cast on the usefulness of by-phrases as a diagnostic for argumenthood
Forking Paths and Polarity Items Licensing
Get PDFThere is an elegant account, proposed by Beaver and Condoravdi (2003), that assumes that the temporal connectives before and after are converses (i.e., they are analyzed by means of a unified lexical schema), and that explains away their different logical and veridical behavior appealing to other factors. There is an elegant explanation that connects the licensing of Polarity Items to informational strengthening requirements: Polarity Items are viewed as existentials that lead to a widening of the domain of quantification, and they are predicted to be legitimate only when this widening leads to a stronger statement (roughly, in downward monotone contexts). My plan is to connect these two approaches – by proposing an amendment in the definition Beaver and Condoravdi presented for before and after that is meant to account also for their Polarity Items licensing behavior
Remarks on Grimshaw’s Clausal Typology
Get PDFIn this paper the question is raised whether Grimshaw’s clause type feature [E] is necessary to capture Generalizations I and II. Generalization I follows directly from independently motivated presuppositions of surprise-predicates once the (nonstandard) assumption is made that polar interrogatives are singleton sets of proposition. The first part of this paper thus constitutes an argument for this approach to polar interrogatives. In fn. 9 we note that this approach to polar interrogatives also solves one of Krifka’s objections to the proposition set approach to questions – which constitutes a second argument. Generalization II also seems to be analyzable in terms of presuppositions, those of wonder-predicates and intensified questions. D’Avis’ intuition that intensified questions are defective appears to lead to a workable result once d’Avis specific implementation is abandoned. A new argument for this view comes from the fact that filters for presuppositions interact in the expected way with acceptability judgments. 
Attitudes Toward Degrees
Get PDFDegree modifiers of the type exemplified in the sentence “She was frustratingly late” are analyzed. These modifiers, which indicate that a propositional attitude – here frustration – holds with respect to the degree associated with the predicate – here lateness, are shown to have certain monotonicity entailments which are absent from simple adverbial attitude reports such as “Frustratingly, she was 10 minutes late.” These entailments account for an interesting puzzle concerning the semantics of the degree modifiers which arises when standard analyses of attitude predicates are combined with standard accounts of degree modification
Call Me Ishmael
Get PDFA careful study of naming constructions is essential for the understanding of the syntax and semantics of proper names. Cross-linguistic analysis of verbs of naming shows that they take a small clause complement and therefore argues that a proper name is essentially a nominal predicate, whose contents mentions the name itself. The indexicality of proper names in argument positions can be compositionally derived from their independently motivated internal complexity
Scope fo Focus Particles: Abstract Only in Korean
Get PDFThe focus particle man ‘only’ in Korean shows different scopal behavior depending upon ist syntactic environment. This non-uniform scope pattern cannot be accounted for if the particle is a scope-bearing element. This paper argues that the particle man is not a scope-bearing element, but an agreement morpheme that indicates the presence of a null head ONLY. Under this proposal, the particle man does not carry the exhaustive meaning of only, but the null head does. Therefore, it is the position of the ONLY head, not that of the particle, that determines the scope relation with respect to other quantificational elements. This paper also claims that there is a strong correlation between syntax and morphology (cf. Baker’s Mirror Principle). Thus, the relative order among the particle, case marker, and postposition reflects the hierarchy of corresponding functional heads. This helps detect the position of the ONLY head. The proposed analysis accounts for the scope patterns without making special stipulations about man-phrases
In the (Indicative or Subjunctive) Mood
Get PDFThe object of this paper is the analysis of the Indicative and Subjunctive morphological mood marking on embedded verbs, in Italian and in other Romance languages. The problem to be accounted for is why some predicates, like Verba dicendi, select for an Indicative mood clause, whereas others, like Modals, require a Subjunctive mood clause; and, moreover, why some governing verbs, like Epistemics, display interlinguistic variation, in that they are followed by a Subjunctive proposition in Italian, and by an Indicative one in French. My proposal is that mood marking on (a verb V in) a sentence ? signals what the relationship is between (the proposition expressed by) ? and the context in which that sentence gets evaluated. In a nutshell, the idea is that if ? displays Indicative mood, then it counts as assertible with respect to its input context; if it shows Subjunctive marking, it is non-assertible in its input context. The notion of (non- )assertibility is a pragmatic notion, and it is defined as the (violation/) satisfaction of the conditions that Stalnaker claimed that a sentence ought to meet in order to count as felicitous (i.e., informative) with respect to a context of conversation. I then review the paradigm of mood selection and show how the association between mood and this assertibility feature can correctly account for it
Verbklassen und Phrasenpartikeln
Get PDFIn unserem Artikel wollen wir die Interaktionen zwischen den Phasenpartikeln schon, noch, noch nicht, nicht mehr, den Verbklassen (Prozesse/Zustände vs. Achievements) und den Tempora Präsens und Perfekt untersuchen. Insbesondere interessiert uns, welche der temporalen Interaktionen sprachlich ausgedrückt werden können und warum. Nachdem im ersten Teil zum einen die Phasenpartikeln und die Daten genauer betrachtet werden, dient der zweite Teil vor allem einer ersten Modellierung der gefundenen temporalen Beziehungen
Semantic Change in Grammaticalization
Get PDFIn this paper, I want to establish semantic reanalysis as an independent mode of meaning change in language history. My point of departure will be cases of language change that have traditionally been classed as „grammaticalization“, on one hand because we will find very nice instances of semantic reanalysis particuarly in that field, and on the other hand because I think that the notion of semantic reanalysis that I propose can be particularly helpful in elucidating some hitherto poorly understood semantic changes in grammaticalization. In order to achive this double purpose, to characterise semantic reanalysis and to demonstrate its power as a tool of diachronic analysis, the paper is organized in the following way: I will first briefly present some cases of grammaticalization, focussing mainly on the meaning changes they involve. I will next give an overview over previous proposals as to what kind of semantic processes underlie these changes, arguing that neither of them is fully convincing. I will then demonstrate how the meaning side of the changes in question can be analysed as semantic reanalysis in semantic composition. Finally, I will evaluate the emerging picture with respect to the common observation that the meanings of words in grammaticalization just „fade away“ or „bleach“
Verbs In Conceptual Space
Get PDFIn his book ‘Conceptual Spaces’ Ga¨rdenfors (2000) sets out a framework for the representation of concepts and word meanings which defines semantic features as values on ordered property scales and arranges these scales as independent quality dimensions in a multidimensional coordinate system. The resulting representation of a concept is therefore a region in “conceptual space”. In this paper, we will briefly introduce this model, and then explore possible ways of adapting it to verb meanings