Focus Fronting, Unexpectedness, and Evaluative Implicatures*
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Logophoricity in Finnish
Open Linguistics 2018; 4: 630–656 Research Article Elsi Kaiser* Effects of perspective-taking on pronominal reference to humans and animals: Logophoricity in Finnish https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2018-0031 Received December 19, 2017; accepted August 28, 2018 Abstract: This paper investigates the logophoric pronoun system of Finnish, with a focus on reference to animals, to further our understanding of the linguistic representation of non-human animals, how perspective-taking is signaled linguistically, and how this relates to features such as [+/-HUMAN]. In contexts where animals are grammatically [-HUMAN] but conceptualized as the perspectival center (whose thoughts, speech or mental state is being reported), can they be referred to with logophoric pronouns? Colloquial Finnish is claimed to have a logophoric pronoun which has the same form as the human-referring pronoun of standard Finnish, hän (she/he). This allows us to test whether a pronoun that may at first blush seem featurally specified to seek [+HUMAN] referents can be used for [-HUMAN] referents when they are logophoric. I used corpus data to compare the claim that hän is logophoric in both standard and colloquial Finnish vs. the claim that the two registers have different logophoric systems. I argue for a unified system where hän is logophoric in both registers, and moreover can be used for logophoric [-HUMAN] referents in both colloquial and standard Finnish. Thus, on its logophoric use, hän does not require its referent to be [+HUMAN]. Keywords: Finnish, logophoric pronouns, logophoricity, anti-logophoricity, animacy, non-human animals, perspective-taking, corpus 1 Introduction A key aspect of being human is our ability to think and reason about our own mental states as well as those of others, and to recognize that others’ perspectives, knowledge or mental states are distinct from our own, an ability known as Theory of Mind (term due to Premack & Woodruff 1978). -
On Binding Asymmetries in Dative Alternation Constructions in L2 Spanish
On Binding Asymmetries in Dative Alternation Constructions in L2 Spanish Silvia Perpiñán and Silvina Montrul University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1. Introduction Ditransitive verbs can take a direct object and an indirect object. In English and many other languages, the order of these objects can be altered, giving as a result the Dative Construction on the one hand (I sent a package to my parents) and the Double Object Construction, (I sent my parents a package, hereafter DOC), on the other. However, not all ditransitive verbs can participate in this alternation. The study of the English dative alternation has been a recurrent topic in the language acquisition literature. This argument-structure alternation is widely recognized as an exemplar of the poverty of stimulus problem: from a limited set of data in the input, the language acquirer must somehow determine which verbs allow the alternating syntactic forms and which ones do not: you can give money to someone and donate money to someone; you can also give someone money but you definitely cannot *donate someone money. Since Spanish, apparently, does not allow DOC (give someone money), L2 learners of Spanish whose mother tongue is English have to become aware of this restriction in Spanish, without negative evidence. However, it has been noticed by Demonte (1995) and Cuervo (2001) that Spanish has a DOC, which is not identical, but which shares syntactic and, crucially, interpretive restrictions with the English counterpart. Moreover, within the Spanish Dative Construction, the order of the objects can also be inverted without superficial morpho-syntactic differences, (Pablo mandó una carta a la niña ‘Pablo sent a letter to the girl’ vs. -
Minimal Pronouns, Logophoricity and Long-Distance Reflexivisation in Avar
Minimal pronouns, logophoricity and long-distance reflexivisation in Avar* Pavel Rudnev Revised version; 28th January 2015 Abstract This paper discusses two morphologically related anaphoric pronouns inAvar (Avar-Andic, Nakh-Daghestanian) and proposes that one of them should be treated as a minimal pronoun that receives its interpretation from a λ-operator situated on a phasal head whereas the other is a logophoric pro- noun denoting the author of the reported event. Keywords: reflexivity, logophoricity, binding, syntax, semantics, Avar 1 Introduction This paper has two aims. One is to make a descriptive contribution to the crosslin- guistic study of long-distance anaphoric dependencies by presenting an overview of the properties of two kinds of reflexive pronoun in Avar, a Nakh-Daghestanian language spoken natively by about 700,000 people mostly living in the North East Caucasian republic of Daghestan in the Russian Federation. The other goal is to highlight the relevance of the newly introduced data from an understudied lan- guage to the theoretical debate on the nature of reflexivity, long-distance anaphora and logophoricity. The issue at the heart of this paper is the unusual character of theanaphoric system in Avar, which is tripartite. (1) is intended as just a preview with more *The present material was presented at the Utrecht workshop The World of Reflexives in August 2011. I am grateful to the workshop’s audience and participants for their questions and comments. I am indebted to Eric Reuland and an anonymous reviewer for providing valuable feedback on the first draft, as well as to Yakov Testelets for numerous discussions of anaphora-related issues inAvar spanning several years. -
Acquaintance Inferences As Evidential Effects
The acquaintance inference as an evidential effect Abstract. Predications containing a special restricted class of predicates, like English tasty, tend to trigger an inference when asserted, to the effect that the speaker has had a spe- cific kind of `direct contact' with the subject of predication. This `acquaintance inference' has typically been treated as a hard-coded default effect, derived from the nature of the predicate together with the commitments incurred by assertion. This paper reevaluates the nature of this inference by examining its behavior in `Standard' Tibetan, a language that grammatically encodes perceptual evidentiality. In Tibetan, the acquaintance inference trig- gers not as a default, but rather when, and only when, marked by a perceptual evidential. The acquaintance inference is thus a grammaticized evidential effect in Tibetan, and so it cannot be a default effect in general cross-linguistically. An account is provided of how the semantics of the predicate and the commitment to perceptual evidentiality derive the in- ference in Tibetan, and it is suggested that the inference ought to be seen as an evidential effect generally, even in evidential-less languages, which invoke evidential notions without grammaticizing them. 1 Introduction: the acquaintance inference A certain restricted class of predicates, like English tasty, exhibit a special sort of behavior when used in predicative assertions. In particular, they require as a robust default that the speaker of the assertion has had direct contact of a specific sort with the subject of predication, as in (1). (1) This food is tasty. ,! The speaker has tasted the food. ,! The speaker liked the food's taste. -
Chapter 6 Mirativity and the Bulgarian Evidential System Elena Karagjosova Freie Universität Berlin
Chapter 6 Mirativity and the Bulgarian evidential system Elena Karagjosova Freie Universität Berlin This paper provides an account of the Bulgarian admirative construction andits place within the Bulgarian evidential system based on (i) new observations on the morphological, temporal, and evidential properties of the admirative, (ii) a criti- cal reexamination of existing approaches to the Bulgarian evidential system, and (iii) insights from a similar mirative construction in Spanish. I argue in particular that admirative sentences are assertions based on evidence of some sort (reporta- tive, inferential, or direct) which are contrasted against the set of beliefs held by the speaker up to the point of receiving the evidence; the speaker’s past beliefs entail a proposition that clashes with the assertion, triggering belief revision and resulting in a sense of surprise. I suggest an analysis of the admirative in terms of a mirative operator that captures the evidential, temporal, aspectual, and modal properties of the construction in a compositional fashion. The analysis suggests that although mirativity and evidentiality can be seen as separate semantic cate- gories, the Bulgarian admirative represents a cross-linguistically relevant case of a mirative extension of evidential verbal forms. Keywords: mirativity, evidentiality, fake past 1 Introduction The Bulgarian evidential system is an ongoing topic of discussion both withre- spect to its interpretation and its morphological buildup. In this paper, I focus on the currently poorly understood admirative construction. The analysis I present is based on largely unacknowledged observations and data involving the mor- phological structure, the syntactic environment, and the evidential meaning of the admirative. Elena Karagjosova. -
Argument Structure and Animacy Entailment
ARGUMENT STRUCTURE AND ANIMACY ENTAILMENT Seth A. Minkoff (Mariano Galvez University) 1. Introduction1 This paper delineates and accounts for restrictlons on the distribution of arguments whose thematic roles select them for animacy. An example of such an argument is the subject of (1) which, following standard accounts, must be animate on account of the selectional properties of the AGENT role assigned by "steal." (1) Mary stole the money. The effect of these selectional properties is attested by the unacceptability of the inanimate substitution in (2). (2) *The wind stole the money. I argue that this requirement of animacy, which I shall refer to as "animacy entailment", represents part of the AGENT thematic relation. Moreover, I assume that animacy entailment is a theoretically genuine part of any thematic relation that selects an animate argument. As I will show, this makes it possible to discern abstract syntactic principles constraining the generation of all such thematic rela tions. Another important property of the AGENT thematic role assigned to the subject position of (1), or rather of its animacy entailment, is reflected by the fact that there are sentences like (3), whose syntactic structures are identical to (1), but in which the thematic role of AGENT -or, more precisely, the animacy entailment- is optional. (3) Mary hit John. Here, the role of AGENT, or rather its animacy entailment, can be dispensed with entirely. For example, (3) could perfectly well describe a situation in Mary is asleep (1) I am grateful for all of the ways in which this article has benefited from the comments of Noam Chomsky, Ken Hale, Marco Haverkort, Carol Neidle, Orin Percus, and an anonymous reviewer. -
On the Grammar of Negation
Please provide footnote text Chapter 2 On the Grammar of Negation 2.1 Functional Perspectives on Negation Negation can be described from several different points of view, and various descriptions may reach diverging conclusions as to whether a proposition is negative or not. A question without a negated predicate, for example, may be interpreted as negative from a pragmatic point of view (rhetorical ques- tion), while a clause with constituent negation, e.g. The soul is non-mortal, is an affirmative predication from an orthodox Aristotelian point of view.1 However, common to most if not all descriptions is that negation is generally approached from the viewpoint of affirmation.2 With regard to the formal expression, “the negative always receives overt expression while positive usually has zero expression” (Greenberg 1966: 50). Furthermore, the negative morpheme tends to come as close to the finite ele- ment of the clause as possible (Dahl 1979: 92). The reason seems to be that ne- gation is intimately connected with finiteness. This relationship will be further explored in section 2.2. To be sure, negation of the predicate, or verb phrase negation, is the most common type of negation in natural language (Givón 2001, 1: 382). Generally, verb phrase negation only negates the asserted and not the presup- posed part of the corresponding affirmation. Typically then, the subject of the predication is excluded from negation. This type of negation, in its unmarked form, has wide scope over the predicate, such that the scope of negation in a clause John didn’t kill the goat may be paraphrased as ‘he did not kill the goat.’ However, while in propositional logic, negation is an operation that simply re- verses the logical value of a proposition, negative clauses in natural language rarely reverse the logical value only. -
Compositional and Lexical Semantics • Compositional Semantics: The
Compositional and lexical semantics Compositional semantics: the construction • of meaning (generally expressed as logic) based on syntax. This lecture: – Semantics with FS grammars Lexical semantics: the meaning of • individual words. This lecture: – lexical semantic relations and WordNet – one technique for word sense disambiguation 1 Simple compositional semantics in feature structures Semantics is built up along with syntax • Subcategorization `slot' filling instantiates • syntax Formally equivalent to logical • representations (below: predicate calculus with no quantifiers) Alternative FS encodings possible • 2 Objective: obtain the following semantics for they like fish: pron(x) (like v(x; y) fish n(y)) ^ ^ Feature structure encoding: 2 PRED and 3 6 7 6 7 6 7 6 2 PRED 3 7 6 pron 7 6 ARG1 7 6 6 7 7 6 6 ARG1 1 7 7 6 6 7 7 6 6 7 7 6 6 7 7 6 4 5 7 6 7 6 7 6 2 3 7 6 PRED and 7 6 7 6 6 7 7 6 6 7 7 6 6 7 7 6 6 2 3 7 7 6 6 PRED like v 7 7 6 6 7 7 6 6 6 7 7 7 6 6 ARG1 6 ARG1 1 7 7 7 6 6 6 7 7 7 6 6 6 7 7 7 6 6 6 7 7 7 6 ARG2 6 6 ARG2 2 7 7 7 6 6 6 7 7 7 6 6 6 7 7 7 6 6 6 7 7 7 6 6 4 5 7 7 6 6 7 7 6 6 7 7 6 6 2 3 7 7 6 6 PRED fish n 7 7 6 6 ARG2 7 7 6 6 6 7 7 7 6 6 6 ARG 2 7 7 7 6 6 6 1 7 7 7 6 6 6 7 7 7 6 6 6 7 7 7 6 6 4 5 7 7 6 6 7 7 6 4 5 7 6 7 4 5 3 Noun entry 2 3 2 CAT noun 3 6 HEAD 7 6 7 6 6 AGR 7 7 6 6 7 7 6 6 7 7 6 4 5 7 6 7 6 COMP 7 6 filled 7 6 7 fish 6 7 6 SPR filled 7 6 7 6 7 6 7 6 INDEX 1 7 6 2 3 7 6 7 6 SEM 7 6 6 PRED fish n 7 7 6 6 7 7 6 6 7 7 6 6 ARG 1 7 7 6 6 1 7 7 6 6 7 7 6 6 7 7 6 4 5 7 4 5 Corresponds to fish(x) where the INDEX • points to the characteristic variable of the noun (that is x). -
Serial Verb Constructions Revisited: a Case Study from Koro
Serial Verb Constructions Revisited: A Case Study from Koro By Jessica Cleary-Kemp A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Associate Professor Lev D. Michael, Chair Assistant Professor Peter S. Jenks Professor William F. Hanks Summer 2015 © Copyright by Jessica Cleary-Kemp All Rights Reserved Abstract Serial Verb Constructions Revisited: A Case Study from Koro by Jessica Cleary-Kemp Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics University of California, Berkeley Associate Professor Lev D. Michael, Chair In this dissertation a methodology for identifying and analyzing serial verb constructions (SVCs) is developed, and its application is exemplified through an analysis of SVCs in Koro, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. SVCs involve two main verbs that form a single predicate and share at least one of their arguments. In addition, they have shared values for tense, aspect, and mood, and they denote a single event. The unique syntactic and semantic properties of SVCs present a number of theoretical challenges, and thus they have invited great interest from syntacticians and typologists alike. But characterizing the nature of SVCs and making generalizations about the typology of serializing languages has proven difficult. There is still debate about both the surface properties of SVCs and their underlying syntactic structure. The current work addresses some of these issues by approaching serialization from two angles: the typological and the language-specific. On the typological front, it refines the definition of ‘SVC’ and develops a principled set of cross-linguistically applicable diagnostics. -
The Content of Pronouns: Evidence from Focus
The Content of Pronouns: Evidence from Focus VIi Sauerland Tiibingen University Thispaper is part of an effort to learn something about the semantics of pronominals from their focus properties. At present, I believe to have evidence substantiating the following two claims: Claim 1 is that Bound Pronominals can be hidden definite descriptions, but probably need not necessarily be. Claim 2 is that donkey anaphora must be hidden definite descriptions. The evidence for Claim 1 comes from a new analysis of cases with focus on bound pronouns such as (1) that also featured in earlier work of mine (Sauerland 1998, 1999). (1) On Monday, every boy called his mother. On TUESday, every TEAcher called hislHIS mother. In particular, I show parallels of focus on bound pronouns and bound definite de scriptions (epithets). The evidence for Claim 2 comes from cases like (2) where focus seems to be obligatory. (2) a. Every girl who came by car parked it in the lot. b. Every girl who came by bike parked #it/ITin the lot. 1 Bound Pronouns can DitTer in Meaning 1.1 Necessary_ConditioYLf or the Licensing of Fo cus The results of this paper are compatible with Schwarzschild's (1999) theory of focus. For convenience, however, I use the licensing condition in (3). This is only a necessary condition, not a sufficientcondition for focus licensing. Schwarzschild's (1999) theory entails that condition (3) is necessarily fulfilled for a focussed XP unless there's no YP dominating XP or the YP immediately dominating XP is also focussed.! (3) A focus on XP is licensed only if there are a Fo cus Domain constituent FD dominating XP and a Fo cus Antecedent constituent FA in the preceding © 2000 by Uli Sauerland Brendan Jackson and Tanya Matthews (eds), SALT X 167-1 84, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. -
Journal of Linguistics the Meanings of Focus
Journal of Linguistics http://journals.cambridge.org/LIN Additional services for Journal of Linguistics: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here The meanings of focus: The significance of an interpretationbased category in crosslinguistic analysis DEJAN MATIĆ and DANIEL WEDGWOOD Journal of Linguistics / FirstView Article / January 2006, pp 1 37 DOI: 10.1017/S0022226712000345, Published online: 31 October 2012 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0022226712000345 How to cite this article: DEJAN MATIĆ and DANIEL WEDGWOOD The meanings of focus: The significance of an interpretationbased category in crosslinguistic analysis. Journal of Linguistics, Available on CJO 2012 doi:10.1017/S0022226712000345 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/LIN, IP address: 192.87.79.51 on 13 Nov 2012 J. Linguistics, Page 1 of 37. f Cambridge University Press 2012 doi:10.1017/S0022226712000345 The meanings of focus: The significance of an interpretation-based category in cross-linguistic analysis1 DEJAN MATIC´ Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen DANIEL WEDGWOOD (Received 16 March 2011; revised 23 August 2012) Focus is regularly treated as a cross-linguistically stable category that is merely manifested by different structural means in different languages, such that a common focus feature may be realised through, for example, a morpheme in one language and syntactic movement in another. We demonstrate this conception of focus to be unsustainable on both theoretical and empirical grounds, invoking fundamental argumentation regarding the notions of focus and linguistic category, alongside data from a wide range of languages. -
Big Questions Topic Analysis
“Science leaves no room for free will." 1 The “Big Questions” debate series—made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation—gives students the opportunity to think critically about the place of humanity in the natural world by asking them to analyze and debate the best arguments on each side of a series of topics at the intersection of human nature, science, and ethical life. The 2016-2017 Big Questions topic is, “Science leaves no room for free will.” This topic analysis will serve as a brief introduction to this year’s topic. It is intended primarily to familiarize you with the core interpretive questions raised by our topic. In other words, it is intended to help you understand exactly what questions are being raised by the topic, what the primary areas of debate will be, and what students will need to prove in order to successfully affirm or negate the topic. Secondarily, this analysis briefly reviews some of the most common and interesting arguments in favor of each side of the topic. In subsequent topic analyses, we will zero in on particular arguments on both sides of the topic, treating them in further depth. The aim here is only to point you in various directions for further research. Toward that end, an initial bibliography of sources for further research is also included. The sources included were selected primarily on the basis of being approachable and clear—but still intellectually rigorous—texts for introducing students to this year’s topic. Defining the terms of the debate When we approach a new topic for debate, a good first step is to define the terms of the topic.