Structural Topic and Focus Without Movement1 1 Introduction 2 Word

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Structural Topic and Focus Without Movement1 1 Introduction 2 Word 1 Structural Topic and Focus without Movement Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King Introduction One of the challenges in presenting a syntactic analysis of free word order languages like Urdu and Turkish lies in motivating the various p ossible p ermutations of a given sentence For ex ample diering word orders have b een motivated in terms of case theory adjunction or head movement eg Maha jan Within a Minimalist approach a p ossible analysis could even b e p osited in terms of an optional scramble feature which must b e checked M uller Alternatively in declarative constraintbased theories like LexicalFunctional Grammar word order p ermutations have b een taken to b e merely a statement ab out a language particular constituentstructure exibility Grammatical functions are disso ciated from word order and are co ded in terms of functionalstructure see eg T Mohanan and Butt on HindiUrdu However a deep er explanation and understanding of word order eects in these languages elude these approaches 2 3 We prop ose to analyze the free word order in Urdu and Turkish as basegenerated p ossi bilities which reect diering information structures of a sentence We prop ose that the varied word orders are optional from a purely syntactic p oint of view they are not motivated by case or agreement Instead they are motivated b oth by semantic factors such as sp ecic vs non sp ecic interpretations and discourse considerations such as topic and fo cus In particular we investigate an intriguing interaction b etween preverbal structural fo cus and the nonsp ecic interpretation of preverbal ob jects in Urdu and Turkish Word Order and Discourse Functions Urdu and Turkish are rightheaded SOV languages However unlike in Japanese or Korean the surface order of elements is not strictly headnal so a sentence with a sub ject verb and ob ject can have all six p ossible orders We take the p osition that languages like Urdu and Turkish are discourse congurational in that discourse functions are enco ded syntactically and thus aect word order E Kiss The various word orders in Turkish and Urdu primarily have a pragmatic eect in that they express diering ways of conveying some particular information Gambhir Erguvanl Homan As such in order to determine the syntax and phrase structure of these languages it is necessary to analyze how discourse functions are licensed ie which p ositions corresp ond to which discourse function interpretations of the arguments found there Theoretical Considerations Vallduv for Catalan and English and King for Russian argue that the traditional bipartite divisions of a sentence drawn in terms of topicfocus themerheme old informationnew information are b est understo o d in terms of a tripartite distinction Vallduv 1 We would like to acknowledge the invaluable help we received from Beryl Homan Umit Turan and Tara Mohanan in their willingness to answer questions ab out Turkish and Urdu data and for their enthusiastic partic ipation in discussions ab out fo cus topic and incorp oration in general We would also like to thank Jo e Eskenazi Veerle van Geenhoven Michael Inman Louise McNally Chris Pi non Peter Sells Rob ert Underhill and the audiences at the LSA and a Stanford University Collo quium for comments and valuable input 2 The South Asian language Urdu is closely related to Hindi which is mostly sp oken in India In this pap er we primarily draw our data from the dialect of Urdu sp oken in Lahore Pakistan and the dialect of Hindisp eaking informants from New Delhi India 3 The data and claims for Turkish are taken mainly from Homan who bases her ndings on a corpus gleaned from the childes database Mac Whinney and Snow transcrib ed collo quial sp eech and contem p orary novels Further data is taken from Kornlt and additional eldwork conducted indep endently denes the relevant notions in new terms in order to avoid p otential confusion with existing terminologies He views the information structure of a sentence as instructions to the hearer on how to up date hisher current knowledge store He couches the idea of a knowledge store in terms of a Heimian collection of lecards Heim The focus part of a sentence can b e seen as an instruction to up date a given lecard or to add an entirely new one The ground represents the information that is already known However a distinction is made b etween the kind of information that represents a link and the kind that is contained in the tail The link p oints the hearer to the le card that is to b e up dated while the tail further sp ecies how the new information ts onto the given le card Here we will refer to the link as topic and the tail as background Choi prop oses an extension of Vallduvs system whereby there is a fourway distinc 4 tion based on two features New and Prominent Following Choi we assume that the information structure must b e further divided and make the following prop osal based on her two features Topic and fo cus share the discourse function feature Prominent which dierentiate them from their relatively less prominent pairs background and completive information resp ec tively Completive information and fo cus share the feature New since they b oth introduce new information into the discourse While fo cuss ma jor function is to ll the informational gap 5 b etween the sp eaker and the hearer completive information provides information which is new to the hearer and hence New but which is not of primary imp ortance to the information structure of the discourse at hand and hence Prom New fo cus Prom completive information Prom New topic Prom background information Prom In this pap er we incorp orate the extension of Vallduvs prop osal into the structural approach to topic and fo cus E Kiss King The remainder of this section discusses how Turkish and Urdu enco de these discourse functions Topic In Urdu and Turkish the rst element in an utterance is interpreted as topic Topics o ccur in clause initial p osition in matrix clauses as in and in clauses with complementizers as in 6 a hassanko naadyaane toi dii T HassanMDat NadyaFErg toeeFNom givePerfFSg To Hassan Nadya gave toee Urdu b bu kitab Hasan bana verdi T this b o okAcc HasanNom IDat givePastSg This b o ok Hasan gave to me Turkish 4 Chois use of these features is dierent than ours in that her division of fo cus dierentiates b etween con trastive focus and completive focus as in i We do not discuss contrastive fo cus in this pap er i S fo cus ground fo cus New contrastive Prom completive Prom ground New topic Prom background Prom 5 This is what is often refered to as newinformation and presentational fo cus Dik et al Ro chemont Ro chemont and Culicover 6 The in the Urdu examples is intended to enco de that the case markers act more like clitics than b ound morphemes T Mohanan which are indicated by h a anjumne dek aa ki hassanko naadyaane toi T T AnjumFErg seePerfMSg that HassanMDat NadyaFErg toeeFNom dii givePerfFSg Anjum saw that to Hassan Nadya gave toee Urdu b Zeynep cocuklar b enim okula goturdugumu biliyor T ZeynepNom childPlAcc IGen schoolDat takeGerSgAcc knowProgSg Zeynep knows that the children I to ok to school Turkish We prop ose that these topics b e represented in a p osition which is situated ab ove the default p osition of the arguments In particular the topicalized constituent is in Sp ecIP compare Bresnan and King for Russian Dwivedi for Hindi In sentences like those in and in which a nonsub ject argument is topicalized its app earance in Sp ecIP results in noncanonical word order in which the nonsub ject argument precedes the sub ject On the other hand sentences such as in which the sub ject is in initial p osition can have two structures naadyaane hassanko toi dii (T ) NadyaFErg HassanMDat toeeFNom givePerfFSg Nadya gave toee to Hassan Urdu 0 0 naadyaane ::: ::: No topic Topic naadyaane IP IP I I The rst and dominant reading is one in which the sub ject is topicalized and hence is in Sp ecIP Since the sub ject already precedes the other nonsub ject arguments this movement do es not result in an overt dierence in word order although it must appp ear in Sp ecIP in order for the sub ject to b e licensed as a topic The second reading is one in which the sub ject is not in Sp ecIP and hence is not interpreted as a topic In this case has no topic or has a nonovert continuing topic from a previous utterance in the discourse Focus Focuss ma jor function is to ll the informational gap b etween the sp eaker and the hearer and hence provides new information relevant for the discourse structure If there is only one fo cused constituent in the sentence then it must app ear immediately preverbally This is illustrated in 7 for Urdu and for Turkish We prop ose that fo cus is licensed in Sp ecVP As discussed in section ?? this licensing interacts with that of nonsp ecic ob jects a naadyaane hassanko toi dii F NadyaFErg HassanMDat toeeFNom givePerfFSg Nadya gave TOFFEE to Hassan Urdu b naadyaane hassanko toi dii F NadyaFErg HassanMDat toeeFNom givePerfFSg Nadya gave toee to HASSAN Urdu bu kitab Hasan bana verdi T F this b o okAcc HasanNom IDat givePastSg This b o ok Hasan gave to ME Turkish In addition to the preverbal fo cus p osition in situ fo cusing of a phrase is p ossible when there are multiple fo ci This in situ fo cus is always a case of contrastive fo cus relative to the preverbal fo cus as illustrated in i In this example the fo cus on Hassan is only p ermissible in a context in which Hassan is contrasted with another p ossible recipient We will not consider
Recommended publications
  • 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).
    [Show full text]
  • 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.
    [Show full text]
  • Downloaded from Brill.Com09/25/2021 11:36:06AM Via Free Access Hybridity Versus Revivability 41
    HYBRIDITY VERSUS REVIVABILITY: MULTIPLE CAUSATION, FORMS AND PATTERNS Ghil‘ad Zuckermann Associate Professor and ARC Discovery Fellow in Linguistics The University of Queensland, Australia Abstract The aim of this article is to suggest that due to the ubiquitous multiple causation, the revival of a no-longer spoken language is unlikely without cross-fertilization from the revivalists’ mother tongue(s). Thus, one should expect revival efforts to result in a language with a hybridic genetic and typological character. The article highlights salient morphological constructions and categories, illustrating the difficulty in determining a single source for the grammar of Israeli, somewhat misleadingly a.k.a. ‘Modern Hebrew’. The European impact in these features is apparent inter alia in structure, semantics or productivity. Multiple causation is manifested in the Congruence Principle, according to which if a feature exists in more than one contributing language, it is more likely to persist in the emerging language. Consequently, the reality of linguistic genesis is far more complex than a simple family tree system allows. ‘Revived’ languages are unlikely to have a single parent. The multisourced nature of Israeli and the role of the Congruence Principle in its genesis have implications for historical linguistics, language planning and the study of language, culture and identity. “Linguistic and social factors are closely interrelated in the development of language change. Explanations which are confined to one or the other aspect, no matter how well constructed, will fail to account for the rich body of regularities that can be observed in empirical studies of language behavior.” Weinreich, Labov & Herzog 1968: 188.
    [Show full text]
  • BUILDING a LEXICAL FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR for TURKISH By
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Sabanci University Research Database BUILDING A LEXICAL FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR FOR TURKISH by OZLEM¨ C¸ETINO˙ GLU˘ Submitted to the Graduate School of Engineering and Natural Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Sabancı University June 2009 BUILDING A LEXICAL FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR FOR TURKISH APPROVED BY Prof. Dr. Kemal Oflazer .............................................. (Thesis Supervisor) Assoc. Prof. Dr. Aslı G¨oksel .............................................. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Berrin Yanıko˘glu .............................................. Prof. Dr. Cem Say .............................................. Assoc. Prof. Dr. H¨usn¨uYenig¨un .............................................. DATE OF APPROVAL: .............................................. c Ozlem¨ C¸etino˘glu 2009 All Rights Reserved to my parents Acknowledgments I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor Prof. Dr. Kemal Oflazer, for his guidance and advices not only for this research but also for academic life in general. I thank Prof. Dr. Cem Say, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Berrin Yanıko˘glu, Assoc. Prof. Dr. H¨usn¨uYenig¨un and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Aslı G¨oksel for their kind attendance to the thesis committee and for their valuable contributions. My sincere gratitude goes to Prof. Dr. Miriam Butt for patiently answering my questions and for her enormous help in linguistics. I would also like to thank all Par- Gram members for the insightful discussions and comments. I learned a lot from them. Onsel¨ Arma˘gan and Tuba G¨um¨u¸s helped me in integrating their work into my system. I thank them for their efforts. Thanks to everyone at FENS 2014 for creating a fun place to work.
    [Show full text]
  • 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.
    [Show full text]
  • 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.
    [Show full text]
  • The Content of Pronouns: Evidence from Focus
    The Content of Pronouns: Evidence from Focus VIi Sauerland Tiibingen University Thispaper is part of an effort to learn something about the semantics of pronominals from their focus properties. At present, I believe to have evidence substantiating the following two claims: Claim 1 is that Bound Pronominals can be hidden definite descriptions, but probably need not necessarily be. Claim 2 is that donkey anaphora must be hidden definite descriptions. The evidence for Claim 1 comes from a new analysis of cases with focus on bound pronouns such as (1) that also featured in earlier work of mine (Sauerland 1998, 1999). (1) On Monday, every boy called his mother. On TUESday, every TEAcher called hislHIS mother. In particular, I show parallels of focus on bound pronouns and bound definite de­ scriptions (epithets). The evidence for Claim 2 comes from cases like (2) where focus seems to be obligatory. (2) a. Every girl who came by car parked it in the lot. b. Every girl who came by bike parked #it/ITin the lot. 1 Bound Pronouns can DitTer in Meaning 1.1 Necessary_ConditioYLf or the Licensing of Fo cus The results of this paper are compatible with Schwarzschild's (1999) theory of focus. For convenience, however, I use the licensing condition in (3). This is only a necessary condition, not a sufficientcondition for focus licensing. Schwarzschild's (1999) theory entails that condition (3) is necessarily fulfilled for a focussed XP unless there's no YP dominating XP or the YP immediately dominating XP is also focussed.! (3) A focus on XP is licensed only if there are a Fo cus Domain constituent FD dominating XP and a Fo cus Antecedent constituent FA in the preceding © 2000 by Uli Sauerland Brendan Jackson and Tanya Matthews (eds), SALT X 167-1 84, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.
    [Show full text]
  • Journal of Linguistics the Meanings of Focus
    Journal of Linguistics http://journals.cambridge.org/LIN Additional services for Journal of Linguistics: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here The meanings of focus: The significance of an interpretation­based category in cross­linguistic analysis DEJAN MATIĆ and DANIEL WEDGWOOD Journal of Linguistics / FirstView Article / January 2006, pp 1 ­ 37 DOI: 10.1017/S0022226712000345, Published online: 31 October 2012 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0022226712000345 How to cite this article: DEJAN MATIĆ and DANIEL WEDGWOOD The meanings of focus: The significance of an interpretation­based category in cross­linguistic analysis. Journal of Linguistics, Available on CJO 2012 doi:10.1017/S0022226712000345 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/LIN, IP address: 192.87.79.51 on 13 Nov 2012 J. Linguistics, Page 1 of 37. f Cambridge University Press 2012 doi:10.1017/S0022226712000345 The meanings of focus: The significance of an interpretation-based category in cross-linguistic analysis1 DEJAN MATIC´ Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen DANIEL WEDGWOOD (Received 16 March 2011; revised 23 August 2012) Focus is regularly treated as a cross-linguistically stable category that is merely manifested by different structural means in different languages, such that a common focus feature may be realised through, for example, a morpheme in one language and syntactic movement in another. We demonstrate this conception of focus to be unsustainable on both theoretical and empirical grounds, invoking fundamental argumentation regarding the notions of focus and linguistic category, alongside data from a wide range of languages.
    [Show full text]
  • 30. Tense Aspect Mood 615
    30. Tense Aspect Mood 615 Richards, Ivor Armstrong 1936 The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rockwell, Patricia 2007 Vocal features of conversational sarcasm: A comparison of methods. Journal of Psycho- linguistic Research 36: 361−369. Rosenblum, Doron 5. March 2004 Smart he is not. http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/smart-he-is-not- 1.115908. Searle, John 1979 Expression and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seddiq, Mirriam N. A. Why I don’t want to talk to you. http://notguiltynoway.com/2004/09/why-i-dont-want- to-talk-to-you.html. Singh, Onkar 17. December 2002 Parliament attack convicts fight in court. http://www.rediff.com/news/ 2002/dec/17parl2.htm [Accessed 24 July 2013]. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson 1986/1995 Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Voegele, Jason N. A. http://www.jvoegele.com/literarysf/cyberpunk.html Voyer, Daniel and Cheryl Techentin 2010 Subjective acoustic features of sarcasm: Lower, slower, and more. Metaphor and Symbol 25: 1−16. Ward, Gregory 1983 A pragmatic analysis of epitomization. Papers in Linguistics 17: 145−161. Ward, Gregory and Betty J. Birner 2006 Information structure. In: B. Aarts and A. McMahon (eds.), Handbook of English Lin- guistics, 291−317. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Rachel Giora, Tel Aviv, (Israel) 30. Tense Aspect Mood 1. Introduction 2. Metaphor: EVENTS ARE (PHYSICAL) OBJECTS 3. Polysemy, construal, profiling, and coercion 4. Interactions of tense, aspect, and mood 5. Conclusion 6. References 1. Introduction In the framework of cognitive linguistics we approach the grammatical categories of tense, aspect, and mood from the perspective of general cognitive strategies.
    [Show full text]
  • Un-Titled Affirming Negations – Negating Affirmations
    Call for Papers Un-titled Affirming Negations – Negating Affirmations Conference: July 1-3, 2010 Abstracts Due: March 28, 2010 “When we say not-being, we speak, I think, not of something that is the opposite of being, but only of something different.” (Plato, Sophist 257B) How can we speak of non-being if to speak at all implies saying “some thing”? Would we not thereby impart being to the object of our utterance and thus contradict the very claim of our assertion? This linguistic and ontological difficulty raises the broader question of the nature of negation as a rhetorical, logical and political act. Negation cannot simply be opposed to or absolutely independent from affirmation but must instead be intertwined with positivity, since negation always involves a thing which is negated. But this can be called into question by asking whether every affirmation might only be achieved by negating other properties. Rather than starting from the premise that affirmation and negation are mutually exclusive, we wish to explore the possibility of a more intricate relationship between them. How might affirmation be expressed through negation and vice versa? This conference will focus on concepts of complex affirmations and negations in domains including rhetoric, logic, ontology, and politics. Three forms of complex negations provide an initial impetus for our investigation: • First, we are interested in exploring what are known as “infinite judgments,” in which the property of not- possessing a particular attribute is ascribed to the subject of the judgment, placing this subject in an infinite “outside.” For instance, the sentence “The soul is not mortal” seems to have a different logical form from the sentence “The soul is immortal.” In the latter case, the form of judgment appears to be positive, but this attribution is that of not-possessing the characteristic.
    [Show full text]
  • Nature Redacted September 7,2017 Certified By
    The Universality of Concord by Isa Kerem Bayirli BA, Middle East Technical University (2010) MA, Bogazigi University (2012) Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY September 2017 2017 Isa Kerem Bayirli. All rights reserved. The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Signature redacted Author......................... ...... ............................. Departmeyf)/Linguistics and Philosophy Sic ;nature redacted September 7,2017 Certified by...... David Pesetsky Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Linguistics g nThesis Supervisor redacted Accepted by.................. Signature ...................................... David Pesetsky Lead, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY SEP 2 6 2017 LIBRARIES ARCHiVES The Universality of Concord by Isa Kerem Bayirh Submitted to the Deparment of Linguistics and Philosophy on September 7, 2017 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics Abstract In this dissertation, we develop and defend a universal theory of concord (i.e. feature sharing between a head noun and the modifying adjectives). When adjectives in a language show concord with the noun they modify, concord morphology usually involves the full set of features of that noun (e.g. gender, number and case). However, there are also languages in which concord targets only a subset of morphosyntactic features of the head noun. We first observe that feature combinations that enter into concord in such languages are not random.
    [Show full text]
  • Descriptions, Negation, and Focus∗
    Descriptions, Negation, and Focus∗ Michael Glanzberg University of California, Davis Forthcoming in Compositionality, Context, and Semantic Values, ed. R. Stainton and C. Viger, Springer-Verlag One of the mainstays of the theory of definite descriptions since Russell (1905) has been their interaction with negation. In particular, Russellians, who advocate the view that definite descriptions are a kind of quantifier, point to these interactions as evidence in favor of the their view. The argu- ment runs roughly as follows:1 (1) a. Definite descriptions show a number of important interactions with negation (as well as with other quantifiers, with intensional contexts, etc.). b. These interactions are best analyzed as scope interactions. c. Such scope interactions are clearly and easily predicted if we treat definite descriptions as quantifiers. They are not predicted at all, or only by roundabout means, if we do not treat definite descriptions as quantifiers. d. Hence, we have evidence in favor of the quantificational treatment of definite descriptions. ∗Thanks to Kent Bach, Chris Barker, Paul Elbourne, John MacFarlane, Robert May, Paul Pietroski, Daniel Rothschild, Rob Stainton, the Bay Area Philosophy of Language Discussion Group, and an anonymous referee for very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. A preliminary version of some of this material was presented in my seminar at UC Davis in 2005. Thanks to the participants there, especially Brian Bowman, Josh Parsons, and Paul Teller. 1For instance, Neale (1990, p. 49) writes, “Since descriptions are treated as quantifiers . all sorts of interesting scope interactions are predicted; not just with negation and other quantified noun phrases, but also with various types of nonextensional operators (Chapter 4).” 1 descriptionsnegationfocus—May 31, 2007 This is a powerful argument, and potentially far-reaching.
    [Show full text]