Essays on the Semantics of Modality
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The Strategy of Case-Marking
Case marking strategies Helen de Hoop & Andrej Malchukov1 Radboud University Nijmegen DRAFT January 2006 Abstract Two strategies of case marking in natural languages are discussed. These are defined as two violable constraints whose effects are shown to converge in the case of differential object marking but diverge in the case of differential subject marking. The strength of the case bearing arguments will be shown to be of utmost importance for case marking as well as voice alternations. The strength of arguments can be viewed as a function of their discourse prominence. The analysis of the case marking patterns we find cross-linguistically is couched in a bidirectional OT analysis. 1. Assumptions In this section we wish to put forward our three basic assumptions: (1) In ergative-absolutive systems ergative case is assigned to the first argument x of a two-place relation R(x,y). (2) In nominative-accusative systems accusative case is assigned to the second argument y of a two-place relation R(x,y). (3) Morphologically unmarked case can be the absence of case. The first two assumptions deal with the linking between the first (highest) and second (lowest) argument in a transitive sentence and the type of case marking. For reasons of convenience, we will refer to these arguments quite sloppily as the subject and the object respectively, although we are aware of the fact that the labels subject and object may not be appropriate in all contexts, dependent on how they are actually defined. In many languages, ergative and accusative case are assigned only or mainly in transitive sentences, while in intransitive sentences ergative and accusative case are usually not assigned. -
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. -
A Cross-Cultural and Pragmatic Study of Felicity Conditions in the Same-Sex Marriage Discourse
Journal of Foreign Languages, Cultures and Civilizations June 2016, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 58-72 ISSN 2333-5882 (Print) 2333-5890 (Online) Copyright © The Author(s). All Rights Reserved. Published by American Research Institute for Policy Development DOI: 10.15640/jflcc.v4n1a7 URL: https://doi.org/10.15640/jflcc.v4n1a7 A Cross-Cultural and Pragmatic Study of Felicity Conditions in the Same-Sex Marriage Discourse Hashim Aliwy Mohammed Al-Husseini1 & Ghayth K. Shaker Al-Shaibani2 Abstract This paper investigates whether there are Felicity Conditions (FCs) for the same-sex marriage as being a contemporary practice of marriage relations in some countries. As such, the researchers adopt Austin’s (1962) Felicity Conditions (FCs) to examine if conditions of satisfaction are applicable to the same-sex marriage in Christian and Islamic cultures. The researchers focus on analysing and discussing the social, religious, and linguistic conventional procedures of the speech acts of marriage, specifically in the same-sex marriage discourse. We find out that same-sex marriage in Christianity is totally different from the traditional marriage with regard to the social, religious, and linguistic conventions. Consequently, we concluded that same-sex marriage discourse has no FCs in contrast to the traditional marriage in Christianity as well as marriage in Islam which has not changed in form and opposite sex marriage. Keyword: Felicity Conditions; homosexual relations; marriage speech acts; same-sex marriage discourse; conventional procedures 1. Introduction Trosborg (2010, p.3) stated that one can principally affirm that all pragmatic aspects, namely speech act theory and theory of politeness, may be liable to cross-cultural comparisons between two speech communities and/or two cultures. -
Performative Speech Act Verbs in Present Day English
PERFORMATIVE SPEECH ACT VERBS IN PRESENT DAY ENGLISH ELENA LÓPEZ ÁLVAREZ Universidad Complutense de Madrid RESUMEN. En esta contribución se estudian los actos performativos y su influencia en el inglés de hoy en día. A partir de las teorías de J. L. Austin, entre otros autores, se desarrolla un panorama de esta orientación de la filosofía del lenguaje de Austin. PALABRAS CLAVE. Actos performativos, enunciado performativo, inglés. ABSTRACT. This paper focuses on performative speech act verbs in present day English. Reading the theories of J. L. Austin, among others,. With the basis of authors as J. L. Austin, this paper develops a brief landscape about this orientation of Austin’s linguistic philosophy. KEY WORDS. Performative speech act verbs, performative utterance, English. 1. INTRODUCCIÓN 1.1. HISTORICAL THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 1.1.1. The beginnings: J.L. Austin The origin of performative speech acts as we know them today dates back to the William James Lectures, the linguistic-philosophical theories devised and delivered by J.L. Austin at Harvard University in 1955, and collected into a series of lectures entitled How to do things with words, posthumously published in 1962. Austin was one of the most influential philosophers of his time. In these lectures, he provided a thorough exploration of performative speech acts, which was an extremely innovative area of study in those days. In the following pages, Austin’s main ideas (together with some comments by other authors) will be presented. 1.1.1.1. Constative – performative distinction In these lectures, Austin begins by making a clear distinction between constative and performative utterances. -
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. -
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 -
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. -
Exclamatives, Normalcy Conditions and Common Ground
Revue de Sémantique et Pragmatique 40 | 2016 Exclamation et intersubjectivité Exclamatives, Normalcy Conditions and Common Ground Franz d’Avis Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rsp/279 DOI: 10.4000/rsp.279 ISSN: 2610-4377 Publisher Presses universitaires d'Orléans Printed version Date of publication: 1 March 2017 Number of pages: 17-34 ISSN: 1285-4093 Electronic reference Franz d’Avis, « Exclamatives, Normalcy Conditions and Common Ground », Revue de Sémantique et Pragmatique [Online], 40 | 2016, Online since 01 March 2018, connection on 10 December 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rsp/279 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/rsp.279 Revue de Sémantique et Pragmatique Revue de Sémantique et Pragmatique. 2016. Numéro 40. pp. 17-34. Exclamatives, Normalcy Conditions and Common Ground Franz d’Avis Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz 1. INTRODUCTION The starting point for the search for exclamative sentence types in a lan- guage is often the description of a certain function that utterances of sentences of that type would have. One formulation could be: With the use of an excla- mative sentence, a speaker expresses that the state of affairs described by a proposition given in the sentence is not in accordance with his expectations about the world.1 Exclamative utterances may include an emotional attitude on the part of the speaker, which is often described as surprise in the literature, cf. Altmann (1987, 1993a), Michaelis/Lambrecht (1996), d’Avis (2001), Michaelis (2001), Roguska (2008) and others. Surprise is an attitude that is based on the belief that something unexpected is the case, see from a psychological point of view Reisenzein (2000). -
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.