DOCSLIB.ORG

Roots of Modality Aynat Rubinstein University of Massachusetts Amherst, Fon [email protected]

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Roots of Modality Aynat Rubinstein University of Massachusetts Amherst, Fon Zi@Yahoo.Com University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Open Access Dissertations 9-2012 Roots of Modality Aynat Rubinstein University of Massachusetts Amherst, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations Part of the Linguistics Commons Recommended Citation Rubinstein, Aynat, "Roots of Modality" (2012). Open Access Dissertations. 623. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/623 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ROOTS OF MODALITY A Dissertation Presented by AYNAT RUBINSTEIN Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2012 Department of Linguistics c Copyright by Aynat Rubinstein 2012 All Rights Reserved ROOTS OF MODALITY A Dissertation Presented by AYNAT RUBINSTEIN Approved as to style and content by: Angelika Kratzer, Chair Rajesh Bhatt, Member Kai von Fintel, Member Robert A. Rothstein, Member Margaret Speas, Department Head Department of Linguistics To Eshel, Imma, and Yanir ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation is a landmark in a journey that started far away, on a mountain that is always green on the other side of the ocean. I am grateful to my parents, who raised me with love and wisdom, and an unwavering encouragement to pursue my dreams. I am grateful for my brother, who has been a pillar of strength throughout this journey. And I am grateful to the Nirim for making sure to send Eshel to the Scouts. I would not have made it to this moment without Eshel, and I thank him for every year and every hour of being together. I wish to express my deep and heartfelt gratitude to my advisor, Angelika Kratzer, and to Rajesh Bhatt, Kai von Fintel, and Robert Rothstein, my committee members. First and foremost, I thank Angelika – for being a wonderful teacher and guide, for challenging and encouraging me constantly, and for the many hours we spent together talking about modality. I will miss these dearly. I thank Rajesh for his optimism, and for making this study not just about English and not just about semantics. I thank Kai for his interest in this project and for inspiring discussions that taught me a great deal about how semantics should be done. Finally, I thank Bob for being such a careful reader, and for teaching me about Yiddish. I am grateful to have been raised intellectually in the village that is the Department of Linguistics at UMass Amherst. I thank Chris Potts for being a source of inspiration and encouragement since my very first semester in Amherst and, later, across the country from the West Coast. I thank Lyn Frazier for being a true teacher and mentor, and for sharing her knowledge and enthusiasm whenever I came through her door. To Valentine Hacquard I am indebted for teaching an exciting proseminar on modality and for supporting my first steps v in this field. John Kingston, Kyle Johnson, Peggy Speas, and Tom Roeper are to thank for playing important roles in shaping my broader interests as a linguist. I am especially grateful to Paul Portner – for reading parts of the dissertation and provid- ing thoughtful comments on the material in Chapter2, and for inspiring conversations about mood and modality. For stimulating discussions when they passed through South College, I thank Malte Zimmermann, Anna Szabolcsi, Philippe Schlenker, Roger Schwarzschild, Mar´ıa Arche, Pranav Anand, Floris Roelofsen, Hans Kamp, Chris Kennedy, Lisa Matthew- son, Ana Arregui, and Kyle Rawlins. My fellow students and colleagues are to thank for keeping my spirits up intellectually and otherwise during this journey. Thank you Amy Rose Deal, Annahita Farudi, Chris Davis, Karen Jesney, Kathryn Pruitt, Mar´ıa Biezma, and Masashi Hashimoto, for being such a great cohort. Thank you Cherlon Ussery, Andrew McKenzie, Florian Schwarz, Shai Cohen, Jan Anderssen, Ilaria Frana, Anne-Michelle Tessier, Keir Moulton, Mike Key, He- len Majewski, and Michael Becker for sharing your “higher class” and wisdom. Thank you Kathy Adamczyk, Tom Maxfield, and Sarah Vega-Liros for lending a hand and an ear on so many occasions. Thanks to Ruth Kramer for sharing the best coffee there is in D.C. as the final parts of the dissertation were written, and to Valentine Hacquard, Elena Her- burger, and Graham Katz, who joined in. I am also fortunate to have crossed academic and personal paths with Paula Menendez-Benito,´ Magda Oiry, E. Allyn Smith, Ofra Magidor, Reut Tsarfaty, Nora Boneh, Galit W. Sassoon, and Jennifer Rau. I hope our paths will cross again. During my graduate studies, I had the fortune to participate in two ESSLLI summer schools. Courses with Denis Bonnay, Craige Roberts, and Judith Tonhauser were partic- ularly important in broadening my horizons as a semanticist. In the Fall of 2009, I had the unique opportunity to visit the Academy of the Hebrew Language in Jerusalem and the Technion in Haifa. I thank Doron Rubinstein from the Academy and Alon Itai from the Technion for their hospitality and for providing me with excellent research environ- vi ments throughout my visit. I gratefully acknowledge a fellowship from the Department of Linguistics at UMass that made this visit possible. This work has roots in semantics and in discourse that can, and should, be traced back to Tel Aviv University. I am deeply grateful to Fred Landman and Rachel Giora, my teachers and mentors in Tel Aviv, and to Mira Ariel, Yoad Winter, Tal Siloni, Julia Horvath, Chuck Kisseberth, and Shuly Wintner, for supporting my entry into the world of linguistics. It took my father less than ten minutes to realize that Amherst and Northampton come pretty close to being paradise on Earth. In the past years, I met wonderful people and made good friends in the Valley. Thank you to Tim and Caroline for a first home in the Hadley farmlands, to Tom Sadlowski for the best food and conversation, to Ram and Kim, Joe, Arun, Misato, Kathryn and Ryan, Annahita, and Lena for their friendship. Thank you, Cherlon, for always being there and for reminding me how to navigate this world with taste. Thank you to my parents’ friends, who are now my own, for coming to visit and being my family away from home. To Sam Bahn, Beth Latz, Ephraim, Sherry, and the extended Isaac-Rosen clan. And finally, Anat, Noa, Limor, Amir, Einat, Lilach, Dahlia, Nitsan, Naama, and Yuval – it’s been way too long. The next leg of this journey will hopefully bring us closer together again. vii ABSTRACT ROOTS OF MODALITY SEPTEMBER 2012 AYNAT RUBINSTEIN B.Sc., TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY M.A., TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Angelika Kratzer This dissertation explores the interplay of grammar and context in the interpretation of modal words like ought, necessary, and need. The empirical foci of the discussion are patterns in the use of strong and weak necessity modals in conversation, and the interpreta- tion of syntactically and semantically versatile modals like need in the various grammatical configurations they appear in across languages. It is argued that a sensitivity to collective commitments in a conversation is necessary for understanding certain aspects of modal strength, in particular the traditional distinction between strong and weak necessity modals (exhibited by must and ought to in English). It is proposed that strong necessity modals can only reference priorities that are presupposed to be collectively committed to, whereas weak necessity modals are evaluated with respect to a mixed bag of priorities, crucially including ones that are presupposed not to be collectively committed to. A domain restriction approach to weak necessity is adopted, following a demonstration that it is superior to a number of probabilistic alternatives. viii Modal verbs and adjectives that take both infinitival and nominal complements are shown to pattern alike across languages in requiring a teleological, or goal-oriented in- terpretation when their complements are not infinitives (but rather noun phrases or certain Complementizer Phrases). This limitation is lifted with infinitival complements, showing that transitive configurations of certain intensional verbs are not semantically equivalent to the infinitival configurations of the same verbs. A result of this research is a fine grained analysis of the differences between closely related necessity modals and attitude verbs. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................... v ABSTRACT ............................................................. viii LIST OF TABLES........................................................ xiii LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................... xiv CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ...................................................... 1 1.1 What it means for a necessity modal to be weak..........................1 1.2 Microvariation among necessity modals.................................4 1.3 Grammatical restrictions on the expression of priority modality.............5 2. WEAK NECESSITY MODALS AND MODAL DISCOURSE ................ 8 2.1 Grades of necessity..................................................8 2.2 Theoretical approaches to weak necessity.............................. 10 2.2.1 The comparative
Load more

Recommended publications
  • 1 Semantics in Generative Grammar. by Irene Heim & Angelika Kratzer
    Semantics in generative grammar. By Irene Heim & Angelika Kratzer. Malden & Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Pp. ix, 324. Introduction to natural language semantics. By Henriëtte de Swart. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1998. Pp. xiv, 257. Although there aren’t that many text books on formal semantics, their average quality is quite good, and these two recent additions don’t lower the standard by any means. ‘Semantics in generative grammar’ (SGG) is the more innovative of the two. As its title indicates, SGG focuses its attention on the syntax/semantics interface, with particular emphasis on quantification and anaphora. These two subjects are discussed in considerable detail, while many others receive only a cursory treatment or are not addressed at all. We learn from the preface that this was a deliberate choice: ‘We want to help students develop the ability for semantic analysis, and, in view of this goal, we think that exploring a few topics in detail is more effective than offering a bird’s-eye view of everything.’ (p. ix) Having enjoyed the results of Heim and Kratzer’s explorations, I can only agree with this judgment. SGG falls into three main parts. The first part introduces the two notions that are at the heart of the formal semantics enterprise, viz. truth conditions and compositionality, and then goes on to develop a compositional truth- conditional semantics for a core fragment of English. The second part discusses variable binding and quantification, and the third part is an in-depth discussion of anaphora. All these developments are kept within an extensional framework. 06-09-1999 1 Intensional phenomena are addressed only briefly, in the last chapter of the book.
    [Show full text]
  • 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]
  • Making a Pronoun: Fake Indexicals As Windows Into the Properties of Pronouns Angelika Kratzer
    University of Massachusetts Amherst From the SelectedWorks of Angelika Kratzer 2009 Making a Pronoun: Fake Indexicals as Windows into the Properties of Pronouns Angelika Kratzer Available at: https://works.bepress.com/angelika_kratzer/ 6/ Making a Pronoun: Fake Indexicals as Windows into the Properties of Pronouns Angelika Kratzer This article argues that natural languages have two binding strategies that create two types of bound variable pronouns. Pronouns of the first type, which include local fake indexicals, reflexives, relative pronouns, and PRO, may be born with a ‘‘defective’’ feature set. They can ac- quire the features they are missing (if any) from verbal functional heads carrying standard ␭-operators that bind them. Pronouns of the second type, which include long-distance fake indexicals, are born fully specified and receive their interpretations via context-shifting ␭-operators (Cable 2005). Both binding strategies are freely available and not subject to syntactic constraints. Local anaphora emerges under the assumption that feature transmission and morphophonological spell-out are limited to small windows of operation, possibly the phases of Chomsky 2001. If pronouns can be born underspecified, we need an account of what the possible initial features of a pronoun can be and how it acquires the features it may be missing. The article develops such an account by deriving a space of possible paradigms for referen- tial and bound variable pronouns from the semantics of pronominal features. The result is a theory of pronouns that predicts the typology and individual characteristics of both referential and bound variable pronouns. Keywords: agreement, fake indexicals, local anaphora, long-distance anaphora, meaning of pronominal features, typology of pronouns 1 Fake Indexicals and Minimal Pronouns Referential and bound variable pronouns tend to look the same.
    [Show full text]
  • Scope Or Pseudoscope? Are There Wide-Scope Indefinites?1
    1 Scope or Pseudoscope? Are there Wide-Scope Indefinites?1 Angelika Kratzer, University of Massachusetts at Amherst March 1997 1. The starting point: Fodor and Sag My story begins with a famous example by Janet Fodor and Ivan Sag 2: The Fodor and Sag example (1) Each teacher overheard the rumor that a student of mine had been called before the dean. (1) has a reading where the indefinite NP a student of mine has scope within the that - clause. What the teachers overheard might have been: “A student of Angelika’s was called before the dean”. This reading is expected if indefinite NPs are quantifiers, and quantifier scope is confined to some local domain. (1) has another reading where a student of mine seems to have widest scope, scope even wider than each teacher. There might have been a student of mine, say Sanders, and each teacher overheard the rumor that Sanders was called before the dean. Fodor and Sag argue that this is not an instance of scope. If indefinite NPs seem to have anomalous scope properties, they are not true quantifiers. The apparent wide-scope reading of a student of mine in (1) is really a referential reading. Indefinite NPs, then, are ambiguous between quantificational and referential readings. If they are quantificational, their scope cannot exceed some local domain. If they are referential, they do not have scope at all. They may be easily confused with widest scope existentials, however. Sentence (1) is important for Fodor and Sag’s argument since it offers a third scope possibility for the indefinite NP that doesn’t seem to be there.
    [Show full text]
  • Quantification, Misc
    QUANTIFICATION, MISC. A Dissertation Presented by JAN ANDERSSEN Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2011 Linguistics c Copyright by Jan Anderssen 2011 All rights reserved QUANTIFICATION, MISC. A Dissertation Presented by JAN ANDERSSEN Approved as to style and content by Angelika Kratzer, Chair Lyn Frazier, Member Christopher Potts, Member Charles Clifton, Jr., Member John J. McCarthy Head of Department Linguistics ACKNOWLEDGMENTS That I have finished this dissertation is in large parts due to the guidance, patience, and encouragement of my committee members. It amazes me how tirelessly they have cleared all the stumbling blocks I sometimes threw in my own way. I am indebted first and foremost to my Doktormutter, Angelika Kratzer. My views on linguistics, and semantics in particular are shaped by Angelika’s writing, teaching, and advising. The introductory classes that I took with Angelika during my visiting year at UMass were the main reason for me to apply there without hesitation. I have never regretted this. What I have learned extends beyond the linguistic horizon. I was fortunate to have an outstanding dissertation committee, and I am very grateful to Lyn Frazier, Chris Potts, and Chuck Clifton for being on my committee, and for being generous with their time and feedback throughout not only the time of my dissertation writing, but the entire time I have known them. That I have enjoyed these years in graduate school no matter how frustrating the work might have seemed at times is entirely due to a great many good friends near and far.
    [Show full text]
  • Representing-Time-An-Essay-On-Temporality-As
    Representing Time To commemorate the centenary of J. E. McTaggart’s ‘The unreality of time’ (1908) Representing Time: An Essay on Temporality as Modality K. M. JASZCZOLT 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # K. M. Jaszczolt 2009 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book
    [Show full text]
  • Epistemic Modality and Evidentiality in Gitksan at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface By
    Epistemic Modality and Evidentiality in Gitksan at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface by Tyler Roy Gösta Peterson B.Mus., University of British Columbia, 1999 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (Linguistics) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) April, 2010 c Tyler Roy Gösta Peterson 2010 Abstract The aim of this dissertation is to provide an empirically driven, theoretically informed investigation of how speakers of Gitksan, a Tsimshianic language spoken in the northwest coast of Canada, express knowledge about the world around them. There are three main goals that motivate this investigation, summarized below: (1) (i.) To provide the first detailed description of the evidential and modal system in Gitksan. (ii.) To provide a formal semantic and pragmatic account of this system that adequately explains the meanings of the modals and evidentials, as well as how they are used in discourse. (iii.) To identify and examine the specific properties the Gitksan evidential/modal system brings to bear on current theories of semantics and pragmatics, as well as the consequences this analysis has on the study of modality and evidentiality cross-linguistically. In addition to documenting the evidential and modal meanings in Gitksan, I test and work through a variety of theoretical tools from the literature designed to investigate evidentiality and modality in a language. This begins by determining what level of mean- ing the individual evidentials in Gitksan operate on. The current state of research into the connection between evidentiality and epistemic modality has identified two different types of evidentials defined by the level of meaning they operate on: propositional and illocutionary evidentials.
    [Show full text]
  • Minimal Pronouns1
    1 Minimal Pronouns1 Fake Indexicals as Windows into the Properties of Bound Variable Pronouns Angelika Kratzer University of Massachusetts at Amherst June 2006 Abstract The paper challenges the widely accepted belief that the relation between a bound variable pronoun and its antecedent is not necessarily submitted to locality constraints. It argues that the locality constraints for bound variable pronouns that are not explicitly marked as such are often hard to detect because of (a) alternative strategies that produce the illusion of true bound variable interpretations and (b) language specific spell-out noise that obscures the presence of agreement chains. To identify and control for those interfering factors, the paper focuses on ‘fake indexicals’, 1st or 2nd person pronouns with bound variable interpretations. Following up on Kratzer (1998), I argue that (non-logophoric) fake indexicals are born with an incomplete set of features and acquire the remaining features via chains of local agreement relations established in the syntax. If fake indexicals are born with an incomplete set of features, we need a principled account of what those features are. The paper derives such an account from a semantic theory of pronominal features that is in line with contemporary typological work on possible pronominal paradigms. Keywords: agreement, bound variable pronouns, fake indexicals, meaning of pronominal features, pronominal ambiguity, typologogy of pronouns. 1 . I received much appreciated feedback from audiences in Paris (CSSP, September 2005), at UC Santa Cruz (November 2005), the University of Saarbrücken (workshop on DPs and QPs, December 2005), the University of Tokyo (SALT XIII, March 2006), and the University of Tromsø (workshop on decomposition, May 2006).
    [Show full text]
  • University of Groningen Expressions of Epistemic Modality in Mainland
    University of Groningen Expressions of epistemic modality in Mainland Scandinavian Beijering, Karin IMPORTANT NOTE: You are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's PDF) if you wish to cite from it. Please check the document version below. Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Publication date: 2012 Link to publication in University of Groningen/UMCG research database Citation for published version (APA): Beijering, K. (2012). Expressions of epistemic modality in Mainland Scandinavian Groningen: s.n. Copyright Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Take-down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Downloaded from the University of Groningen/UMCG research database (Pure): http://www.rug.nl/research/portal. For technical reasons the number of authors shown on this cover page is limited to 10 maximum. Download date: 11-02-2018 Expressions of epistemic modality in Mainland Scandinavian A study into the lexicalization-grammaticalization-pragmaticalization interface KARIN BEIJERING The research reported on in this thesis has been carried out under the auspices of the Netherlands National Graduate School of Linguistics (LOT – Landelijke Onderzoekschool Taalwetenschap) and the Center for Language and Cognition Groningen (CLCG) of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen. Publication of this dissertation was financially supported by the University of Groningen.
    [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]
  • Modality and the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface
    Modality and the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface Anna Papafragou Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Ph.D. University College London 1998 (LONDON) To my family with love and gratitude Abstract This thesis explores certain aspects of the structure of lexical semantics and its interaction with pragmatic processes of utterance comprehension, using as a case-study a sample of the English modal verbs. Contrary to previous polysemy-based accounts, I propose and defend a unitary semantic account of the English modals, and I give a relevance-theoretic explanation of the construction of their admissible (mainly, root and epistemic) contextual interpretations. Departing from previous accounts of modality, I propose a link between epistemic modality and metarepresentation, and treat the emergence of epistemic modal markers as a result of the development of the human theory of mind. In support of my central contention that the English modals are semantically univocal, I reanalyse a range of arguments employed by previous polysemy-based approaches. These arguments involve the distributional properties of the modals, their relationship to truth-conditional content, the status of so-called speech-act modality, and the historical development of epistemic meanings: it turns out that none of these domains can offer reasons to abandon the univocal semantic analysis of the English modals. Furthermore, I argue that the priority of root over epistemic meanings in language acquisition is predicted by the link between epistemic modality and metarepresentation. Finally, data from a cognitive disorder (autism) are considered in the light of the metarepresentation hypothesis about epistemic modality. The discussion of modality has a number of implications for the concept of polysemy.
    [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]