DOCSLIB.ORG

Projection and Inflection: a Study of Persian Phrase Structure

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Projection and Inflection: a Study of Persian Phrase Structure PROJECTION AND INFLECTION: A STUDY OF PERSIAN PHRASE STRUCTURE by Jila Ghomeshi A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Linguistics University of Toronto © Copyright by Jila Ghomeshi 1996 Projection and Inflection: A Study of Persian Phrase Structure Doctor of Philosophy, 1996 Jila Ghomeshi Department of Linguistics University of Toronto This thesis is based on the following pivotal assumptions about morphology and syntax: (a) that monosemy is desirable in grammar; (b) only inflectional and not derivational affixes can correspond to syntactic projections; (c) projection is driven by the features borne by lexical and functional categories; and (d) base-generated X0-adjunction is possible in the syntax. Starting with the distinction between inflectional and derivational affixes, the thesis is organized around the inflectional affixes of Persian and the range of constructions they occur in. First, in looking at the Ezafe vowel -e, it is argued that the distribution of this vowel is best accounted for if nouns do not project structure in Persian. This explains why no phrasal material occurs below the DP (Determiner Phrase). It is proposed that modifiers to the head noun occur in an X0-adjoined structure and that the Ezafe vowel is inserted at PF to identify potentially non-projecting heads as belonging to a single constituent. Turning to agreement in Persian, it is shown that the differences in the distribution of the pronominal enclitics and the agreement suffixes follow from morphological properties of these affixes. For example, the fact that the enclitics can only cooccur with null, definite, arguments while the subject agreement affixes can appear with any noun phrase is accounted for by subcategorization and case requirements of the affixes themselves. This analysis also explains the fact that the enclitics must occur outside subject agreement, even though they refer to the direct object. Further, the proposal that the pronominal enclitics identify pro in an argument position is shown to explain binding facts in Persian. Among the other inflectional morphemes considered in the thesis is the marker -râ which is shown to case-mark presupposed DPs in VP-adjoined position. It is argued that these DPs are construed as VP-level topics and a licensing condition is given to account for their occurrence. In general each of the language-particular constructions in Persian are shown to ii be accounted for by the morphological properties of the lexical items and inflectional morphemes involved. iii Acknowledgements I thought this would be the easiest and most pleasurable task involved in completing a dissertation. It is not. It's easy to think of people to thank, but it is hard to come up with the words to thank them. Difficulties aside, it gives me much pleasure to acknowledge many of the people who have had a positive influence on my life both academically and personally during the time that I have become a linguist. First, I would like to thank the two women who have had the most influence on my work, and on my life, during my graduate years. Elizabeth Cowper supervised my MA thesis and Diane Massam my PhD thesis. They have both generously given of their time and resources as my work has developed. It is hard to determine when and where the supervisory role of one stopped and the other began. Liz kept pushing me to believe in my ideas. Diane challenged me to think differently. I thank them for their rigour, for their integrity, for their willingness to let their students pursue their own interests and ideas, and for the positive example they set as women who teach and pursue research and at the same time have families and non-linguistic interests. My interest in linguistics started during my undergraduate years at York University. I would like to thank my first linguistics professors Sheila Embleton, Rob Fink, Ruth King, Ian Smith and Susan Ehrlich who all (in different ways) taught me much about linguistics and encouraged me to pursue graduate work. I would like to thank my fellow guinea pig (and sole classmate) in the rebuilding of U of T's PhD program, Carrie Dyck. I learned so much by simply observing her over the years. Tom Wilson, in addition to being a friend, was a valuable source of advice during the (more difficult) early years. Mirco Ghini's razor-sharp mind and wonderful laugh and Päivi Koskinen's steady flow of e-mail stories are treasured aspects of my PhD years. I am grateful for having had the opportunity to work on several SSHRC-funded syntax projects at the University of Toronto. The project meetings were an incredible forum for testing new ideas and for carrying out debates. My fellow students on these projects were as much my classmates as anyone else. I would like to thank Barb Brunson, Sarah Cummins, Elaine Gold, Regina Moorcroft, Zhang Ning and Hitay Yukseker for suffering through hours and hours of Persian data and for piquing my interest in many other phenomena as they pursued their own research. I would like to thank Michael Rochemont for showing confidence in my abilities as a linguist at a most critical time. The struggle to try and convince him of my ideas has undoubtedy made my work stronger. He is also responsible for three of the best months of my linguistic life, the months I spent at UBC. There I benefitted greatly from talking with Strang Burton, Guy Carden, Henry Davis (thanks for the lecture on the Binding Theory), Hamida Demirdache and especially Rose-Marie Déchaine. iv I would like to thank the other members of my thesis committee: Yves Roberge, who has enriched my view of morphology, Elan Dresher, who has enriched my view of linguistics, Anne-Marie Brousseau, and Maria Subtelny. In addition, it was a pleasure to finally meet Simin Karimi who served as the external examiner. For many useful discussions and/or encouragement I would like to thank Ed Burstynsky, Andrew Carnie, Alana Johns, Keren Rice, Betsy Ritter, Carson Schütze, Ron Smyth, Michael Szamosi, and Arnold Zwicky. Additionally, though I had not met either during the writing of my dissertation I would like to acknowledge Simin Karimi and Vida Samiian. They were a constant source of inspiration to me by virtue of being Persian women who have written valuable dissertations on the Persian language. I gratefully acknowledge SSHRC doctoral fellowships 452-90-2534 and 753-91-0149, as well as the funding I received from being employed on SSHRC grants to Elizabeth Cowper, Diane Massam, and Michael Rochemont. The work carried out in completing this thesis was made possible by this support. Finally for the personal side, I would like to thank my dear friend Mary Daniel for first telling me to take a linguistics course and for many discussions we have had about linguistics (and other things) since then. Thanks to my brother Jean for, among other things, making me laugh. Thanks to Laurent Guardo for support and love this past year. Last but not least, thanks to my parents Farhang and Azar Ghomeshi. They are ultimately responsible for providing me with the desire and the means to indulge my intellectual curiousity to my heart's content. This thesis is dedicated to them. v Table of Contents Chapter 1 Introduction .............................................................................................1 1.0 Introduction..........................................................................................................1 1.1 Word Order in Modern Persian ...........................................................................3 1.2 Theoretical Assumptions .....................................................................................5 1.2.1 Monosemy................................................................................................5 1.2.2 Inflection vs. Derivation ..........................................................................6 1.2.3 Inflection and Syntax ...............................................................................8 1.2.4 Feature-Driven Projection........................................................................9 1.2.5 Constraints on Syntactic Configuration...................................................11 1.2.6 Referentiality, (In)definiteness, and Specificity ......................................14 1.3 Inflection vs. Derivation in Persian .....................................................................17 1.3.1 The Stress System in Persian and Stress-affecting Affixes .....................17 1.3.1.1 Nouns and Adjectives ...............................................................18 1.3.1.2 Verbs.........................................................................................19 1.3.2 Non Stress-affecting Affixes....................................................................21 1.3.3 Section Summary.....................................................................................22 1.4 Outline of the Thesis............................................................................................24 Chapter 2 The Ezafe Construction and Non-Projecting Nouns................................26 2.0 Introduction..........................................................................................................26 2.1 Descriptions of the Ezafe Construction ...............................................................29 2.2 Samiian's Analysis of the Ezafe Construction .....................................................35 2.3 Properties of the Ezafe Domain Within the Noun Phrase....................................38
Load more

Recommended publications
  • On Root Modality and Thematic Relations in Tagalog and English*
    Proceedings of SALT 26: 775–794, 2016 On root modality and thematic relations in Tagalog and English* Maayan Abenina-Adar Nikos Angelopoulos UCLA UCLA Abstract The literature on modality discusses how context and grammar interact to produce different flavors of necessity primarily in connection with functional modals e.g., English auxiliaries. In contrast, the grammatical properties of lexical modals (i.e., thematic verbs) are less understood. In this paper, we use the Tagalog necessity modal kailangan and English need as a case study in the syntax-semantics of lexical modals. Kailangan and need enter two structures, which we call ‘thematic’ and ‘impersonal’. We show that when they establish a thematic dependency with a subject, they express necessity in light of this subject’s priorities, and in the absence of an overt thematic subject, they express necessity in light of priorities endorsed by the speaker. To account for this, we propose a single lexical entry for kailangan / need that uniformly selects for a ‘needer’ argument. In thematic constructions, the needer is the overt subject, and in impersonal constructions, it is an implicit speaker-bound pronoun. Keywords: modality, thematic relations, Tagalog, syntax-semantics interface 1 Introduction In this paper, we observe that English need and its Tagalog counterpart, kailangan, express two different types of necessity depending on the syntactic structure they enter. We show that thematic constructions like (1) express necessities in light of priorities of the thematic subject, i.e., John, whereas impersonal constructions like (2) express necessities in light of priorities of the speaker. (1) John needs there to be food left over.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 English Subjectless Tagged Sentences Paul Kay Department Of
    1 English subjectless tagged sentences Paul Kay Department of Linguistics University of California Berkeley, CA 94720 [email protected] 2 Abstract A colloquial English sentence like Fooled us, didn't they? contains a finite main verb but no expressed subject. The identity of the missing subject of fooled is recovered from the tag subject they: compare Fooled us, didn't she?, Fooled us, didn't you? This paper argues (1) that such subjectless tagged sentences (STSs) pose a problem for grammatical approaches based on movement and empty categories and (2) that STSs receive a revealing analysis as part of a finely articulated family of tagged sentence constructions when viewed within a non-derivational, constructional, multiple-inheritance-based approach.* *I would like to thank Peter Culicover, Liliane Haegeman, Charles Fillmore Andreas Kathol and Richard Oehrle for comments on previous versions of this paper, as well as an anonymous reviewer for Language. They have doubtless offered more good advice than I have accepted. 3 0. Introduction. It has been argued from several points of view that whatever can be done with empty categories (ecs) can be done without them (Ades and Steedman 1982, Gazdar et al. 1984, Kaplan and Zaenen 1989, Pollard and Sag 1994 chapter 9, Sag and Fodor 1994, Kay and Fillmore 1999, Sag 1999). It has also been argued that, because there is no hard evidence for their existence, linguistic theory would be better off dispensing with these unobservable entities (Pickering and Barry 1991, Sag and Fodor 1994, Sag 1999).1 The present paper purports to take the argument one step further by showing that there are things that can be done without empty categories that cannot be done with them, at least not with any of the ecs currently available.
    [Show full text]
  • The Perceptual Origin of Thematic Relations
    On the Acquisition of Lexical Entries: The Perceptual Origin of Thematic Relations James Pustejovsky Department of Computer Science Brandeis University Waltham, MA 02254 617-736-2709 jamesp~br andeis.csnet-relay Abstract that the conceptual abstraction of thematic information does not develop arbitrarily but along a given, predictable path; namely, a developmental path that starts with tan- This paper describes a computational model of concept gible perceptual predicates (e.g. spatial, causative) to acquisition for natural language. We develop a theory later form the more abstract mental and cognitive predi- of lexical semantics, the Eztended Aspect Calculus, which cates. In this view thematic relations are actually sets of together with a ~maxkedness theory" for thematic rela- thematic properties, related by a partial ordering. This tions, constrains what a possible word meaning can be. effectively establishes a maxkedness theory for thematic This is based on the supposition that predicates from the roles that a learning system must adhere to in the acqui- perceptual domain axe the primitives for more abstract sition of lexical entries for a larlguage. relations. We then describe an implementation of this We will discuss two computational methods for model, TULLY, which mirrors the stages of lexical acqui- concept development in natural language: sition for children. (1) F~ature Relaxation of particular features of the ar- guments to a verb. This is performed by a con- straint propagation method. I. Introduction (2) Thematic Decoupling of semantically incorporated In this paper we describe a computational model of con- information from the verb. cept acquisition for natural language making use of po- When these two learning techniques are combined with sitive-only data, modelled on a theory of lexical seman- the model of lexical semantics adopted here, the stages tics.
    [Show full text]
  • Sequence-Of-Tense and the Features of Finite Tenses Karen Zagona University of Washington*
    Sequence-of-tense and the Features of Finite Tenses Karen Zagona University of Washington* Abstract Sequence-of-tense (SOT) is often described as a (past) tense verb form that does not correspond to a semantically interpretable tense. Since SOT clauses behave in other respects like finite clauses, the question arises as to whether the syntactic category Tense has to be distinguished from the functional category tense. I claim that SOT clauses do in fact contain interpretable PRESENT tense. The “past” form is analyzed as a manifestation of agreement with the (matrix past) controller of the SOT clause evaluation time. One implication of this analysis is that finite verb forms should be analyzed as representing features that correspond to functional categories higher in clause structure, including those of the clausal left periphery. SOT morphology then sheds light on the existence of a series of finer- grained functional heads that contribute to tense construal, and to verbal paradigms. These include Tense, Modality and Force. 1. Introduction The phenomenon of sequence-of-tense (SOT) poses several challenges for the standard assumption that a “past tense” verb form signals the presence of a functional category in clause structure with an interpretable ‘past’ value. SOT is illustrated by the ‘simultaneous’ reading of sentence (1): (1) Terry believed that Sue was pregnant. a. The time of Sue’s pregnancy precedes time of Terry’s belief (precedence) b. The time of Sue’ pregnancy overlaps time of Terry’s belief (simultaneity) For the ‘precedence’ reading in (1a), the embedded clause tense is semantically transparent in the sense that the past form was corresponds to a past ordering relation (relative to the time of Terry’s belief).
    [Show full text]
  • Topic Structures in Chinese Author(S): Xu Liejiong and D
    Linguistic Society of America Topic Structures in Chinese Author(s): Xu Liejiong and D. Terence Langendoen Source: Language, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Mar., 1985), pp. 1-27 Published by: Linguistic Society of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/413419 Accessed: 11/05/2009 22:37 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=lsa. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Linguistic Society of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Language. http://www.jstor.org TOPIC STRUCTURES IN CHINESE Xu LIEJIONG D.
    [Show full text]
  • Empty Categories in LFG
    Empty categories in LFG Judith Berman University of Stuttgart Pro ceedings of the LFG Conference University of California San Diego Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King Editors CSLI Publications httpwwwcslistanfordedupublications I am grateful to Christian Fortmann Gert Web elhuth Hub ert Haider Joan Bresnan Miriam Butt Steve Berman and Werner Frey for helpful comments and discussion This researchwas supp orted by the DFG Graduiertenkolleg Linguistische Grundlagen fur die Sprachverarb eitung at the University of Stuttgart LFG JBerman Empty Categories in LFG This pap er is concerned with the question whether there is any necessity and evidence for empty categories sp ecically traces in German Following the analysis of weak crossover in Bresnan b and Choi it is shown that the German weak crossover data can b e captured correctly if it is assumed that a topicalized constituent has to b e linked with an empty category in its lo cal domain its minimal clause only in the case of long distance dep endencies The empty category is indep endently motivated by a lo cality requirement on function sp ecication which is empirically supp orted by the fact that free word order in German is restricted to the lo cal clause It is further shown that the empty category cannot o ccupy the canonical p osition of the antecedent Instead it is claimed based on work byFrey that the sp ecier p osition of the functional category is the only p osition in which the empty category is licensed The resulting analysis not only accounts for the weak crossover data
    [Show full text]
  • A Study of European, Persian, and Arabic Loans in Standard Sorani
    A Study of European, Persian, and Arabic Loans in Standard Sorani Jafar Hasanpoor Doctoral dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Iranian languages presented at Uppsala University 1999. ABSTRACT Hasanpoor, J. 1999: A Study of European, Persian and Arabic Loans in Standard Sorani. Reports on Asian and African Studies (RAAS) 1. XX pp. Uppsala. ISBN 91-506-1353-7. This dissertation examines processes of lexical borrowing in the Sorani standard of the Kurdish language, spoken in Iraq, Iran, and the Kurdish diaspora. Borrowing, a form of language contact, occurs on all levels of language structure. In the pre-standard literary Kurdish (Kirmanci and Sorani) which emerged in the pre-modern period, borrowing from Arabic and Persian was a means of developing a distinct literary and linguistic tradition. By contrast, in standard Sorani and Kirmanci, borrowing from the state languages, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, is treated as a form of domination, a threat to the language, character, culture, and national distinctness of the Kurdish nation. The response to borrowing is purification through coinage, internal borrowing, and other means of extending the lexical resources of the language. As a subordinate language, Sorani is subjected to varying degrees of linguistic repression, and this has not allowed it to develop freely. Since Sorani speakers have been educated only in Persian (Iran), or predominantly in Arabic, European loans in Sorani are generally indirect borrowings from Persian and Arabic (Iraq). These loans constitute a major source for lexical modernisation. The study provides wordlists of European loanwords used by Hêmin and other codifiers of Sorani.
    [Show full text]
  • The Recovery of Thematic Role Structure During Noun-Noun Interpretation
    Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 2006, 13 (3), 423-428 The recovery of thematic role structure during noun–noun interpretation TODD R. FERRETTI Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada and CHRISTINA L. GAGNÉ University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada We examined how people use their knowledge of events to recover thematic role structure dur- ing the interpretation of noun–noun phrases. All phrases included one noun that was a good-agent/ poor-patient ( prosecutor) in a particular event (accuse), and the other noun was a good-patient/poor-agent (defendant) for the same event. If people interpret the noun–noun phrases by inverting the nouns and ap- plying a thematic relation (see Downing, 1977; Levi, 1978), phrases should be interpreted more easily when the head nouns typically are good agents and the modifiers are good patients for specific events. Two experiments supported these predictions. Furthermore, the results indicated that in the less pre- ferred thematic order (agent–patient), people often generated interpretations in which the modifiers became the focus of the interpretations. This finding suggests that violating thematic role preferences is one constraint on when the inversion process occurs during noun–noun interpretation. Thematic roles represent the semantic roles played by event-specific knowledge is used during noun phrase in- nouns in relation to the events denoted by verbs in sen- terpretation comes from research examining phrases that tences (Fillmore, 1968). For example, for the event arrest, have participle modifiers (Ferretti, Gagné, & McRae, 2003; cop plays the agent role, and crook plays the patient role. Gagné & Murphy, 1996; Potter & Faulconer, 1979; Springer Earlier approaches posited that thematic role information & Murphy, 1992).
    [Show full text]
  • Minimum of English Grammar Glossary
    Glossary, Further Definitions and Abbreviations Accusative (See Case) Adjective/Phrase A word/category which often denotes states or well being (e.g., happy, sad), and which can often take an adverb suffix {-ly}(e.g., sad>sadly) or prefix {un-} (e.g., unhappy). Adjectives merge with and modify nouns to form adjective phrases (AdjP) (e.g, red shoes, sad boy, little news). Adverb/Phrase A word/category which often denotes manner (e.g., greatly, quickly, softly). Adverbs merge with and modify verbs to form adverb phrases (e.g., softly spoke, quickly ran). In English, most Adverbs end with the suffix {-ly}. Affix A grammatical morpheme which inflects onto a stem and cannot stand alone as an individual word. A Bound morpheme is a morpheme that must attach to a word stem. A Free morpheme, on the other hand, may stand alone as a free word (e.g., the word visit in re-visit is a free morpheme (and hence a word). The {re-} portion of the word is a prefix and thus bound. A prefix attaches at the beginning of the word, an infix to the middle, and a suffix attaches at the end. Agreement When the Person/Number features of a verb match that of its subject: a Verb-to-Subject relationship of grammatical features. For example, the verb like-s projects {s} due to its 3rd person/singular features matched to the subject John (e.g., John likes syntax). Anaphor An anaphor is an expression (e.g., himself) which cannot have independent reference, but which must take its reference from an antecedent (e.g., He hurt himself)— where himself refers back to He.
    [Show full text]
  • Aug 3 1 1990 Ubraries ,% Abstract
    NEGATION IN SYNTAX: ON THE NATURE OF FUNCTIONAL CATEGORIES AND PROJECTIONS by MIREN ITZIAR LAKA MUGARZA B.A. University of the Basque Country (1985) M.A. University of the Basque Country (1986) SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS & PHILOSOPHY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT.OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN LINGUISTICS at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY August, 1990 c Miren Itziar Laka Mugarza The author hereby grants to M.I.T. permission to reproduce and to distribute copies of this thesis document in whole or in part Signature of Author Department of Linguilstics & Philosophy Certified by A .. ....- - r S-, Keneth Hale Thesis Supervisor Accepted by . M Wayne O'0Neil OMTASSACHUIEIT Departamen al Committee AUG 3 1 1990 UBRARIES ,% ABSTRACT. The central concern of this work is the syntactic nature of negation in Universal Grammar, and its relation to other functional elements in the Syntax. The study argues that negation is not a syntactic category on its own; rather, it is one of the values of a more abstract syntactic category, named E, which includes other sentence operators, such as affirmation and emphasis (Chapter 2). It is also argued that the syntactic feature [negation] surfaces in other syntactic categories besides E. In particular, the existence of (N] (negative) Complementizers is defended; this acounts for a range of phenomena in various languages: across-the-clause licensing of Negative Polarity Items in English, the ditribution of the -nik complementizer in Basque, and the nature of Dubitative Subjunctive in Romance (Chapter 3). Chapter I argues for the existence of a universal requirement that inflectional heads such as negation (E) must be c-commanded by the syntactic head Tense at S- structure.
    [Show full text]
  • Full Page Photo
    International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature ISSN 2200-3592 (Print), ISSN 2200-3452 (Online) Vol. 4 No. 4; July 2015 Flourishing Creativity & Literacy Australian International Academic Centre, Australia Establishing the Thematic Structure and Investigating the most Prominent Theta Roles Used in Sindhi Language Zahid Ali Veesar (Corresponding author) Faculty of Linguistics, University of Malaya, Malaysia E-mail: [email protected] Kais Amir Kadhim Faculty of Linguistics, University of Malaya, Malaysia E-mail: [email protected] Sridevi Sriniwass Faculty of Linguistics, University of Malaya, Malaysia E-mail: [email protected] Received: 07-12- 2014 Accepted: 21-02- 2015 Advance Access Published: February 2015 Published: 01-07- 2015 doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.4n.4p.216 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.4n.4p.216 Abstract This study focuses on the thematic structure of the Sindhi verbs to find theta roles in the Sindhi language. The study tries to answer the research questions; “What are the thematic structures of Sindhi verbs?” and “What are the prominent theta roles in the Sindhi language?” It examines the argument/thematic structure of Sindhi verbs and also finds the theta roles assigned by the Sindhi verbs to their arguments along with the most prominent theta roles used in the Sindhi language. The data come from the two interviews taken from two young native Sindhi speakers, which consist of 2 hours conversation having 1,669 sentences in natural spoken version of the Sindhi language. Towards the end, it has been found that the Sindhi language has certain theta roles which are assigned by the verbs to their arguments in sentences.
    [Show full text]
  • Theta-Roles and Lexicon Theta-Criterion, Projection Principle, Extended Projection Principle
    Theta-Roles and Lexicon Theta-Criterion, Projection Principle, Extended Projection Principle Ling 322 Read Syntax, Ch. 8 (Lecture notes based on Andrew Carnie’s notes) 1 Overgeneration of X-bar Theory • X-bar Schema XP (YP) X X (ZP) • Overgeneration (1) a. The linguist loves wheat beer. b. The linguist laughed. (2) a. * The linguist loves. b. * The linguist laughed the philosopher. Sometimes an object is required, and sometimes it is not. What is responsible for this? 2 Using the Lexicon to Constrain X-bar Theory • Whether an object is required or not is a property of the particular verb. • Information about particular properties of verbs is contained in our mental dictionary – Lexicon. • Lexicon stores information about particular words. – pronunciation of word – morphological irregularities – meaning of word – requirements about other words they occur with 3 Argument Structure • (Fregean) Predicate:Defines the relation between the individuals being talked about and the real world, as well as each other. Argument: The central entities (including abstract ones) participating in the relation. The linguist loves wheat beer argument predicate argument • Argument Structure: specifies the number of arguments a predicate requires. (Adjuncts are never counted in the list of arguments.) intransitives, transitives, ditransitives • Subcategorization Restriction: Predicates control the category of arguments. (3) a. I asked a question. I asked if you know the professor. b. I hit the ball. *I hit that you knew the answer. • Selectional Restriction: Predicates limit the semantic properties of arguments. (4) a. # The bolt of lightening killed the rock. b. # My toothbrush loves raisins. 4 Thematic Relations Defines semantic role a participant plays in the situation described by the predicate.
    [Show full text]