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The Semantics of Modification: Adjectives, Nouns, and Order

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The Semantics of Modification: Adjectives, Nouns, and Order The semantics of modification: Adjectives, nouns, and order by Timothy James Leffel A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Linguistics New York University September, 2014 Professor Chris Barker this thesis is dedicated to Rags, the finest four-legged friend a fool could ever hope to have. miss you pup <3 iii Acknowledgments I always hoped my dissertation acknowledgments would be long and poetic and profoundly meaningful to all the people I have intellectual and personal debts to. But I’ve been writing a lot lately and my gas tank is running on E. So instead they are going to be short(ish!) and formulaic but hopefully still meaningful. Thanks Dad, for exposing me to logic and philosophy and the pursuit of knowledge at such a young age—I look back fondly on the dinners you spent scrawling syllogisms on napkins and paper tablecloths to teach me propositional logic. As you can see, I haven’t forgotten modus ponens! Thanks Mom, for always making me do my math homework as a kid, despite my claims that I hated it. Like you and especially your parents, I eventually learned that math is a beautiful thing—I just had to find the right kind. Thanks Amy, for making me a proud big brother. You are an intelligent, strong, and principled young woman. I doubt if many people look up to their younger siblings, but I do. I especially appreciate you keeping Mom and Dad sane over the years, in spite of my erratic and sometimes worry-inducing behavior. You’re the best! Thanks George Schumm, for talking me down from dropping your modal logic class freshman year. I’ll never forget your advice (and I paraphrase): “just because something’s hard or you don’t understand it right away doesn’t mean you can’t figure it out with enough hard work. Hell, you and me could sit down and figure out quantum mechanics if we had to; it’d just take a lot of time and be really hard.” Thanks Carl Pollard, for showing me the exciting connections between logic and language. No doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t be a linguist today were it not for the time and effort you invested in me as a young college student. Thanks Chris Barker, for being an advisor, mentor, and friend to me over the last five years. Thanks for the stimulating discussions, consistently solid and thoughtful advice (both professional and personal), comments on papers, excellent dinners/drinks at your place (thanks also to Svetlana for that!), and for guidance through the ups and downs of grad school. No one is born knowing how to write a thesis or how to act in various professional environments, but thanks to your dedication and help I think that I am well on my way. Looking forward to interacting with you for years to come, as a (near) colleague but ultimately still as your student. Don’t think I could have done it without you. Thanks Anna Szabolcsi, for serving on every committee I’ve had at NYU, for delivering extremely thought-provoking feedback on every major project I’ve done here, for teaching some of the most exciting seminars I’ve been a part of, and for the vision of what NYU semantics could be that you must have come here with years ago. I can’t imagine a better environment in which to receive my semantics training. It’s iv been really really real. Thanks Philippe Schlenker, for being so generous with your (seemingly limitless) time and resources and energy. I truly admire your ability to be several places at the same time and to provide great input on everything every student you’ve encountered has ever written (including the projects of mine you’ve directed or committee-d!). The field is lucky to have someone like you who’s willing to challenge basic assumptions and seriously entertain exotic ideas with such intellectual rigor. Thanks Liina Pylkkanen,¨ for initiating our collaboration on RestrMod, for teaching me how to convert an idea into a behavioral experiment, for helping me to understand in a much deeper and more hands-on way the nature of scientific progress, for all the input you’ve given on my dissertation project, and for your role in the amazing post-graduate opportunity I’m now embarking on. Couldn’t be happier with it! Thanks Marcin Morzycki, for providing shockingly (in a very good way) thorough commentary and feedback on my dissertation, all without ever having met you in person. I’m looking forward to that changing very soon—see you around the world of semantics! Thanks also to everyone else—audiences, colleagues, etc.—for the collectively invaluable input you’ve given me on this and all my other research projects. Vielen Dank to Malte Zimmermann and the SFB 632 folks—that research group is really something special. I’m extremely grateful that you took me on for a while; I learned a lot about languages and the world during my time in Berlin/Potsdam. See you guys around! Thanks to all my grad student pals from NYU. You guys have greatly enriched the last five years of my life. Special thanks to my first-year class, and to Sally, Simon, Mike, Jeremy, and Dylan, a few of the folks from whom I’ve benefited most intellectually in addition to personally. Thanks also to numerous other NYU professors, students, and visitors—it would take forever to name you all so I’ll just say you know who you are. Wouldn’t have been the same being in the department without each one of you :) And last but far from least, thanks to my friends. Gabe, Zach, Ryan, Danny, Jon, so many more I want to name but can’t without violating my own pet peeve of acknowledgments containing very long lists of names. My Westerville crew, 15th/Lakeview boys, COJ buddies, Berlin people, my friends in New York. Johnny, you’ve never had a younger sibling and I’ve never had an older one—I imagine the friendship we’ve developed in the last five years approximates what it feels like to have a big brother. Thanks for making our household such a great environment for both work and play. Special thanks to Dootza, for your love and encouragement and perseverance and patience with me and your loyalty and your giggles and your intellect and your ability to turn my frown upside down. Love you bb <3 v Dissertation Abstract This dissertation motivates, defines, and applies a simple but general theory of nominal modification for natural languages. Chapter 2 presents two sub-theories that jointly constitute the bulk of the proposal: the first specifies a morpho-semantics for nouns and inflectional features. In a sentence, it says that lexical count nouns denote predicates of kinds, and that the composition of inflectional features with a noun converts the noun’s kind-based meaning into a predicate of individuals, the extension of which reflects whether that noun is singular or plural, masculine or feminine, etc. The second sub-theory specifies the syntactic structure of nominal modification. Non-appositive modifiers are integrated into nominals either via adjunction to the nominal head prior to the introduction of inflectional features (head-adjunction); or via adjunction to the inflected noun, whose denotation has already been converted into a predicate of individuals (phrasal adjunction). Directionality parameters are proposed for each kind of adjunction: in English, head-adjunction is to the left only, while phrasal adjunction is bi-directional; in Italian head-adjunction is bi-directional while phrasal adjunction is to the right only. As with all parametric theories, typological predictions can be extracted from the analysis. The theory of Chapter 2 is applied to a selection of modification-related phenomena in the remainder of the dissertation, focusing on “Bolinger contrasts” and the approach to modification in DP that they have inspired. This approach, “the two-domains theory,” provides indispensable basic insights, but I argue is in need of more concrete and well-motivated semantic foundations. Through detailed investigation of the restrictive/non-restrictive opposition in nominal modifiers (Chapter 3), the direct/implicit relative opposition in certain modal attributive adjectives (Chapter 4), and a selection of additional modification-related puzzles (Chapter 5), I aim to establish the theory in Chapter 2 as a concrete, principled, and cross-linguistically adaptable framework for analysis of the lexical- and morpho-semantics of nouns, and of noun phrase-internal composition. By accounting for the distribution of (some) Bolinger contrasts with a more conservative set of assumptions, specific grammatical enrichments and silent elements postulated by two-domains theories are rendered largely unnecessary. While data from English are examined most thoroughly throughout, the general architecture of the theory I propose can be instantiated to yield a theory of modification for any language. In Chapters 3 and 5, discourse coherence relations are argued to play an essential role in certain quasi-grammatical phenomena related to modification, suggesting that the study of modification requires attention to discourse-level pragmatic processes. vi Contents Acknowledgments . iv Dissertation Abstract . vi 1 Introduction 1 1.0 What this dissertation is about . .1 1.1 Bolinger contrasts and “two-domains” theories . .2 1.1.1 The core data patterns . .2 1.1.2 Existing approaches: the dual source model and the notion of “two domains” . .6 1.1.3 Preview: simulating two domains without dual sources . .8 1.2 Theoretical assumptions and formal preliminaries . .9 1.2.1 Syntactic assumptions .
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