Handout on Lexical Approaches to Argument Structure
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Hegemony, Coercion, and Their Teeth-Gritting Harmony: a Commentary on Power, Culture, and Sexuality in Franco's Spain
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Volume 33 2000 Hegemony, Coercion, and their Teeth-Gritting Harmony: A Commentary on Power, Culture, and Sexuality in Franco's Spain Ratna Kapur Centre for Feminist Legal Research Tayyab Mahmud Cleveland-Marshall College of Law Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjlr Part of the Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Comparative and Foreign Law Commons, Legal History Commons, and the Sexuality and the Law Commons Recommended Citation Ratna Kapur & Tayyab Mahmud, Hegemony, Coercion, and their Teeth-Gritting Harmony: A Commentary on Power, Culture, and Sexuality in Franco's Spain, 33 U. MICH. J. L. REFORM 411 (2000). Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjlr/vol33/iss3/9 This Response or Comment is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform by an authorized editor of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. SUMMER 2000] Hegemony, Coercion SPRING 2000] Hegemony, Coercion 411 HEGEMONY, COERCION, AND THEIR TEETH-GRITTING HARMONY: A COMMENTARY ON POWER, CULTURE, AND SEXUALITY IN FRANCO'S SPAIN Ratna Kapur* Tayyab Mahmud** Professor Gema P~rez-Sdinchez's article, Franco's Spain, Queer Na- tion?' focuses on the last years of Francisco Franco's fascist dictatorship and the early years of the young Spanish democracy, roughly from the late 1960's to the early 1980's.' The centerpiece of her article looks at how, through law, Franco's regime sought to define and contain what it considered dangerous social behavior, particularly homosexuality. -
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. -
2008. Pruning Some Branches from 'Branching Spacetimes'
CHAPTER 10 Pruning Some Branches from “Branching Spacetimes” John Earman* Abstract Discussions of branching time and branching spacetime have become com- mon in the philosophical literature. If properly understood, these concep- tions can be harmless. But they are sometimes used in the service of debat- able and even downright pernicious doctrines. The purpose of this chapter is to identify the pernicious branching and prune it back. 1. INTRODUCTION Talk of “branching time” and “branching spacetime” is wide spread in the philo- sophical literature. Such expressions, if properly understood, can be innocuous. But they are sometimes used in the service of debatable and even downright per- nicious doctrines. The purpose of this paper is to identify the pernicious branching and prune it back. Section 2 distinguishes three types of spacetime branching: individual branch- ing, ensemble branching, and Belnap branching. Individual branching, as the name indicates, involves a branching structure in individual spacetime models. It is argued that such branching is neither necessary nor sufficient for indeterminism, which is explicated in terms of the branching in the ensemble of spacetime mod- els satisfying the laws of physics. Belnap branching refers to the sort of branching used by the Belnap school of branching spacetimes. An attempt is made to sit- uate this sort of branching with respect to ensemble branching and individual branching. Section 3 is a sustained critique of various ways of trying to imple- ment individual branching for relativistic spacetimes. Conclusions are given in Section 4. * Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA The Ontology of Spacetime II © Elsevier BV ISSN 1871-1774, DOI: 10.1016/S1871-1774(08)00010-7 All rights reserved 187 188 Pruning Some Branches from “Branching Spacetimes” 2. -
Layers and Operators in Lakota1 Avelino Corral Esteban Universidad Autónoma De Madrid
Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 36 (2015), 1-33 Layers and operators in Lakota1 Avelino Corral Esteban Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Abstract Categories covering the expression of grammatical information such as aspect, negation, tense, mood, modality, etc., are crucial to the study of language universals. In this study, I will present an analysis of the syntax and semantics of these grammatical categories in Lakota within the Role and Reference Grammar framework (hereafter RRG) (Van Valin 1993, 2005; Van Valin and LaPolla 1997), a functional approach in which elements with a purely grammatical function are treated as ´operators`. Many languages mark Aspect-Tense- Mood/Modality information (henceforth ATM) either morphologically or syntactically. Unlike most Native American languages, which exhibit an extremely complex verbal morphological system indicating this grammatical information, Lakota, a Siouan language with a mildly synthetic / partially agglutinative morphology, expresses information relating to ATM through enclitics, auxiliary verbs and adverbs, rather than by coding it through verbal affixes. 1. Introduction The organisation of this paper is as follows: after a brief account of the most relevant morpho- syntactic features exhibited by Lakota, Section 2 attempts to shed light on the distinction between lexical words, enclitics and affixes through evidence obtained in the study of this language. Section 3 introduces the notion of ´operator` and explores the ATM system in Lakota using RRG´s theory of operator system. After a description of each grammatical category, an analysis of the linear order exhibited by the Lakota operators with respect to the nucleus of the clause are analysed in Section 4, showing that this ordering reflects the scope relations between the grammatical categories conveyed by these operators. -
Coercion and Choice Under the Establishment Clause
Coercion and Choice Under the Establishment Clause Cynthia V. Ward* In recent Establishment Clause cases the Supreme Court has found nondenominational, state-sponsored prayers unconstitutionally “coercive” — although attendance at the events featuring the prayer was not required by the state; religious dissenters were free to choose not to say the challenged prayers; and dissenters who so chose, or who chose not to attend the events, suffered no state-enforced sanction. Part I of this Article lays out the historical background that gave rise to the coercion test, traces the development of that test in the Court’s case law, and isolates the core elements in the vision of coercion that animates the test. Part II proposes a new reading of coercion under the Establishment Clause that keeps faith with the conceptual boundaries of coercion while also responding to the particular constitutional concerns that gave rise to the coercion test and to the particular holdings in the Supreme Court cases that have deployed it. Finally, Part III suggests that the coercion test, as reconstructed, could be the basis for restoring internal coherence and external predictability to constitutional analysis under the Establishment Clause. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................. 1623 I. COERCION IN ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE JURISPRUDENCE................ 1627 A. The Lemon and Endorsement Tests.......................................... 1627 B. The Arrival of the Coercion Test ................................................ 1630 1. Allegheny, Lee, and Santa Fe.............................................. 1630 2. Coercion and the Pledge of Allegiance .......................... 1635 C. The Supreme Court’s Conception of Coercion: Four Burning Questions..................................................................... 1637 * Professor of Law, College of William and Mary. Many thanks to the William and Mary Law School for research support. -
Definiteness and Determinacy
Linguistics and Philosophy manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Definiteness and Determinacy Elizabeth Coppock · David Beaver the date of receipt and acceptance should be inserted later Abstract This paper distinguishes between definiteness and determinacy. Defi- niteness is seen as a morphological category which, in English, marks a (weak) uniqueness presupposition, while determinacy consists in denoting an individual. Definite descriptions are argued to be fundamentally predicative, presupposing uniqueness but not existence, and to acquire existential import through general type-shifting operations that apply not only to definites, but also indefinites and possessives. Through these shifts, argumental definite descriptions may become either determinate (and thus denote an individual) or indeterminate (functioning as an existential quantifier). The latter option is observed in examples like `Anna didn't give the only invited talk at the conference', which, on its indeterminate reading, implies that there is nothing in the extension of `only invited talk at the conference'. The paper also offers a resolution of the issue of whether posses- sives are inherently indefinite or definite, suggesting that, like indefinites, they do not mark definiteness lexically, but like definites, they typically yield determinate readings due to a general preference for the shifting operation that produces them. Keywords definiteness · descriptions · possessives · predicates · type-shifting We thank Dag Haug, Reinhard Muskens, Luca Crniˇc,Cleo Condoravdi, Lucas -
Cognitive Linguistics 2021; 32(2): 287–318
Cognitive Linguistics 2021; 32(2): 287–318 Lucia Busso*, Florent Perek and Alessandro Lenci Constructional associations trump lexical associations in processing valency coercion https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2020-0050 Received May 14, 2020; accepted February 6, 2021; published online March 12, 2021 Abstract: The paper investigates the interaction of lexical and constructional meaning in valency coercion processing, and the effect of (in)compatibility be- tween verb and construction for its successful resolution (Perek, Florent & Martin Hilpert. 2014. Constructional tolerance: Cross-linguistic differences in the acceptability of non-conventional uses of constructions. Constructions and Frames 6(2). 266–304; Yoon, Soyeon. 2019. Coercion and language change: A usage-based approach. Linguistic Research 36(1). 111–139). We present an online experiment on valency coercion (the first one on Italian), by means of a semantic priming protocol inspired by Johnson, Matt A. & Adele E. Goldberg. 2013. Evidence for automatic accessing of constructional meaning: Jabberwocky sentences prime associated verbs. Language & Cognitive Processes 28(10). 1439–1452. We test priming effects with a lexical decision task which presents different target verbs preceded by coercion instances of four Italian argument structure constructions, which serve as primes. Three types of verbs serve as target: lexical associate (LA), construction associate (CA), and unrelated (U) verbs. LAs are semantically similar to the main verb of the prime sentence, whereas CAs are prototypical verbs associated to the prime construction. U verbs serve as a mean of comparison for the two categories of interest. Results confirm that processing of valency coercion requires an integra- tion of both lexical and constructional semantics. -
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. -
Pronominal Deixis in East Caucasian Stability and Renewals
PRONOMINAL DEIXIS IN EAST CAUCASIAN STABILITY AND RENEWALS Gilles Authier EPHE, PSL Online course on East Caucasian languages HSE University Linguistic Convergence Laboratory Deixis 1) person (speaker vs adressee), 2) space (distance, mono‐ or polycentric), 3) time ‘Did you write this (yesterday)?’ (Temporal deixis in East Caucasian is, like in European languages, marked by bound morphems on verbs, and adverbs) 2 locus of deixis: matter for a series of lectures Free words Personal pronouns I, you, we Demonstratives this / that (up/level/down) Adverbs there (up/level/down) Copula / predicatives is / enter / comes / goes (up/level/down) Bound elements Person markers go‐es verbal ‘satellites’ and affixes go in / en‐ter (up/level/down) Flagging (cases) on/at/under, etc 3 Outlines What I will speak about: Diachrony 1) demonstratives: grouping, branching based on innovations 2) personal pronouns: branching based on innovations, avoidance‐based replacements, (analogy), with a focus on clusivity What I will not have time to speak about: synchronic systems ‐ morphology ‐ grammaticalization ‐ morphosyntax ‐ syntax 4 1) E‐C demonstrative (pronouns) Adnominal vs pronominal demonstratives usually the same in EC (exception: Kryz pronoun u‐ / am / a‐ vs adnominal lu‐ / lam / la‐) The systems are not uniform across the family, with some languages or branches showing simple, horizontal systems (but at least three roots are used ‐ no ‘minimal’ systems). while others have elevational distinctions 5 a horizontal system: Nakh Chechen Ingush Tsova‐Tush / Batsbi PROX MED / 3 DIST PROX MED / 3 DIST PROX MED DIST / 3 hara i / iza dʕora jer ɨz dʕāra‐D‐ar e is o only distance / person oriented (grammars not always clear on this) higher: laqara lower: laxara 6 Horizontal systems are geographically (and phylogenetically) peripheral: Peripheral features = retentions.. -
Entity and Event Coercion in a Symbolic Theory of Syntax Laura A
Entity and Event Coercion in a Symbolic Theory of Syntax Laura A. Michaelis University of Colorado at Boulder 1. Introduction Where does sentence meaning come from? Leaving aside the inference strategies targeted by the Gricean paradigm, formal models of the syntax-semantics interface have supplied a single answer to this question: the words of the sentence and the frames which those words project. Since word combination in formal theory is inextricably tied to phrase building, the drivers of sentence semantics are not simply words but, more particularly, the heads of syntactic projections. The assumption that the licensing of sisterhood relations is the unique privilege of lexical heads is woven into the formal conventions of formal theory, e.g., phrase-structure rules like those in (1), in which the ‘optionality’ of complements, specifiers and adjuncts is defined over a set of lexical classes distinguished by their projection behaviors: (1) a. VP → V (NP) (PP) b. NP → (determiner) N Models of sentence meaning based on lexical projection provide a straightforward picture of the syntax-semantics interface: while words determine WHAT a sentence means, rules of morphosyntactic combination determine HOW a sentence means. While rules of syntactic combination assemble heads and their dependent elements into phrases, they play no role in either the licensing or construal of arguments. It is apparent, however, that the syntax-semantics mapping is less tidy than the foregoing statement would imply. In particular, the identification of licensors with syntactic heads cannot always be maintained. This is shown by the following examples, in which the projection properties of the boldfaced items are distorted in various ways. -
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.