MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEX Book Style Typeset with PDFLaTeX Size: 6x9 October 27, 2017 3:28pm Situations and Syntactic Structures MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEX Book Style Typeset with PDFLaTeX Size: 6x9 October 27, 2017 3:28pm MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEX Book Style Typeset with PDFLaTeX Size: 6x9 October 27, 2017 3:28pm Situations and Syntactic Structures Rethinking Auxiliaries and Order in English <optional edition> Gillian Ramchand The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEX Book Style Typeset with PDFLaTeX Size: 6x9 October 27, 2017 3:28pm c 2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any elec- tronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. For information about special quantity discounts, please email special [email protected]. This book was set in Syntax and Times Roman by the author. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data <Situations and Structure> / <Gillian Ramchandr> . p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN ???? 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEX Book Style Typeset with PDFLaTeX Size: 6x9 October 27, 2017 3:28pm MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEX Book Style Typeset with PDFLaTeX Size: 6x9 October 27, 2017 3:28pm MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEX Book Style Typeset with PDFLaTeX Size: 6x9 October 27, 2017 3:28pm Contents Preface xi 1 Introduction to Events and Situations in Grammar 1 1.1 Linguistic Generalizations and Constraints on the Syn-Sem Mapping3 1.2 Event Properties and Event Instantiations8 1.2.1 Philosophical Antecedents9 1.2.2 A Quotational Semantics for Natural Language 15 1.3 The Grammar of Auxiliation 22 1.3.1 Ordering 23 1.3.2 Lexical Specification and Polysemy 24 1.4 Morphology and Spanning 28 1.5 Roadmap 38 2 The Progressive in English 41 2.1 The Syntax of the Progressive: The Progressive is in the First Phase 42 2.1.1 Expletive Associates 43 2.1.2 VP fronting and pseudoclefts 44 2.1.3 British nonfinite do-substitution 45 2.2 The Semantics of the Progressive 49 2.3 The Present Proposal 59 2.3.1 The Progressive as an ‘Identifying State’ 60 2.3.2 Relating Event Properties to Situational Particulars 64 2.4 Conclusion 72 3 The Passive and its Participle 75 3.1 The Stative Participle in -en/ed 77 3.1.1 Event Implications 78 3.1.2 An Implementation in Terms of Reduced Spans 84 3.2 The Eventive Passive 95 3.2.1 Blocking 98 3.2.2 Interaction of Passive and Progressive within EvtP 104 MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEX Book Style Typeset with PDFLaTeX Size: 6x9 October 27, 2017 3:28pm viii Contents 3.2.3 Adjectivalization 107 4 The Participle, the Perfect and the Spatiotemporal Domain 113 4.1 Semantic Background to the English Perfect 116 4.1.1 Aktionsart Sensitivity 119 4.1.2 Temporal Modification and the Present Perfect Puzzle 121 4.1.3 Lifetime Effects and Current Relevance 122 4.2 The Proposal 124 4.2.1 Accounting for the Pragmatic/Lifetime Effects 129 4.2.2 Temporal Modification and the Perfect 133 4.3 Summary 137 5 Modals and the Spatiotemporal Domain 145 5.1 Introduction 145 5.2 What We Know: Syntax 147 5.2.1 Thematic Relations: ‘Raising’ vs.‘Control’ 151 5.2.2 Scope wrt to a Quantified Subject 152 5.2.3 Modals and Symmetric Predicates 153 5.2.4 Ordering and Typology 155 5.2.5 Taking Stock 158 5.3 Interaction with Negation 159 5.3.1 English Modals are Idiosyncratic 160 5.3.2 A Semantic Account of the Idiosyncrasy? 163 5.4 Semantic Properties of Modals 167 5.4.1 The Classical Theory 167 5.5 Circumstantial Modals as Modifiers of Spatiotemporal Properties 174 5.6 Conclusion 183 6 Modals and Generalized Anchoring 185 6.1 Temporal Properties of Modals 186 6.2 Epistemic Modals as Modifiers of Assertions 196 6.2.1 Aktionsart Sensitivity of Epistemic Modals 199 6.2.2 Modals Embedding the Perfect 203 6.3 Evidence for Choice among Live-Alternatives as Basic to Modal Meaning 206 6.3.1 Relation to Dynamic Modal Interpretations 206 6.3.2 The Semantic ‘weakness’ of Universal Modals. 207 6.3.3 The Puzzle of Deontic Modality and its interaction with Disjunction. (The Paradox of Free Choice Disjunction (Ross 1941)) 209 6.4 Conclusion 210 7 Summary and Future Prospects 215 7.1 Architecture and Semantic Zones 215 7.2 Insertion: Lexical vs. Functional Items 219 MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEX Book Style Typeset with PDFLaTeX Size: 6x9 October 27, 2017 3:28pm 7.3 Summary of the Pieces 221 7.4 Auxiliary Ordering Revisited 226 7.5 Open Questions and Further Research 228 7.5.1 The Nominal Domain 228 7.5.2 On the Universal vs. the Language Specific 229 7.5.3 The Future and the Search for Explanations 230 Bibliography 231 MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEX Book Style Typeset with PDFLaTeX Size: 6x9 October 27, 2017 3:28pm MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEX Book Style Typeset with PDFLaTeX Size: 6x9 October 27, 2017 3:28pm Preface In some ways I have been writing this book in my head for twenty years, work- ing on various aspects of the syntax and semantics of the verbal extended pro- jection in English and other languages. The immediate impetus came from the collaborative paper I wrote with Peter Svenonius on reconciling minimal- ist and cartographic approaches to phrase structure (Ramchand and Svenonius 2014), and I knew that the compositional semantics component of that paper was a huge promissory note that had to be redeemed if the enterprise were to succeed. The present book is motivated by a conviction about what the rela- tionship between phrase structure and semantic interpretation should look like, a conviction I found that many shared, but which was rather difficult to actu- ally implement. Implementing the intuition required some radical changes to the assumed semantic ontology for natural language, ones which I believe are more in line with internalist intuitions (cf. Chomsky 1995, Pietroski 2005), without giving up on a system that grounds interpretation in truth. The formal semantic framework I have in mind to underpin the kind of system I propose is a version of Kit Fine’s truthmaker semantics (Fine 2014), using situations as exact verifiers for natural language clauses. The system is quite different from the kind of semantics that takes worlds as its foundation, and in which, instead, possible and impossible situations are primitives of the ontology. The intuition that is important to me is that the syntax of natural languages gives evidence on the meaning side for a natural language ontology which might be quite dif- ferent from the one that seems most compelling from a purely metaphysical point of view. Like Fine, (and Moltmann 2018) I am more concerned with how language puts meaning together than with how truthmakers are connected to a metaphysics of the real world (if indeed such a thing is even possible). One crucial innovation in the system requires reifying the linguistic sym- bol itself as an object in the ontology. I do not think this is a ‘trick’, but in fact simply acknowledges a feature of the natural language system that is very important— self referentiality and a deep indexicality (relativization to MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEX Book Style Typeset with PDFLaTeX Size: 6x9 October 27, 2017 3:28pm xii Preface the particular speaker) which I believe has desirable consequences that extend far beyond the scope of the present monograph. The first few chapters of this book were written while I was on sabbatical at the University of Edinburgh in the second half of 2015. I thank the University of Tromsø for its generous sabbatical provision, and its support of pure theo- retical research, and the University of Edinburgh for being a welcoming host. In the early stages of writing I benefitted a great deal from correspondence with Lucas Champollion, and to discussions with Ronnie Cann to whom I am very grateful. I would also like to thank audiences at the LOT Winter School in Nijmegen in January 2017 and to audiences at a mini course at the Univer- sity of Budapest in February 2017. I would like to thank Marcel den Dikken and Eva Dekány for inviting me to teach at the latter event. I also benefitted from discussion and feedback at Daniel Altshuler’s UMass semantics semi- nar in Spring 2017. I would further like to thank Daniel Altshuler personally and Miriam Butt for very useful detailed comments on an intermediate draft, and Sergey Minor for invaluable and detailed feedback on the whole prefinal manuscript. Special thanks go to Robert Henderson for turning up in Tromsø in late 2016 and giving a talk at our colloquium series on ideophones, which contributed the final piece of the puzzle. I remember that eureka moment very well when I realised that the exoticism of ideophones was just ‘the truth stand- ing on its head to get attention’. A big thank you goes to my colleagues at the University of Tromsø and in particular the CASTLFish milieu (Tarald Tarald- sen, Antonio Fábregas, Sergey Minor, Peter Svenonius and Björn Lundquist deserving special mention in this regard), for reacting and commenting on all things related to syntax and morphology, for providing the intellectual frame for the kinds of questions I find myself asking, and for providing standards for the kinds of answers that satisfy.