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A Competition Mechanism for Anaphoric Expressions The Determinacy Scale: A Competition Mechanism for Anaphoric Expressions The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Ahn, Dorothy. 2019. The Determinacy Scale: A Competition Mechanism for Anaphoric Expressions. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42029564 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA The Determinacy scale: A competition mechanism for anaphoric expressions a dissertation presented by Dorothy Ahn to The Department of Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Linguistics Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts April 2019 2019 { Dorothy Ahn all rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Gennaro Chierchia Dorothy Ahn The Determinacy scale: A competition mechanism for anaphoric expressions Abstract Reference is a core property of language. In any given language, a number of expressions can be used to refer to new and familiar entities. This dissertation is concerned with the expressions that refer to familiar entities in a discourse. I explore a competition-based analysis, where the interpretation and the distribution of an anaphoric expression is determined by the presence of other anaphoric expressions in a given language. This competition mechanism makes use of semantically primitive properties such as meeting the phi-features that are composed into denotations that are universally available for anaphoric expressions. These denotations are lexicalized in language-specific ways. I argue that the denotations are then ordered by semantic strength, deriving a scale of anaphoric expressions. Given this scale, I propose an economy principle that chooses the least informative in a given context when multiple expressions successfully resolve to the intended referent. The main theoretical advantage of the competition mechanism proposed in this dissertation is that a single mechanism can be applied to a wide range of overt and covert expressions across languages. I show how the mechanism can be used to derive various phenomena involving covert pronouns such as PRO and null pro, definite descriptions, demonstratives, as well as the use of abstract space in sign languages, iii Dissertation Advisor: Gennaro Chierchia Dorothy Ahn thus unifying separate principles that have been proposed in previous literature. Moreover, because the competition is not a primitive principle but a phenomenon fully derived from semantic denotations, we are able to make specific predictions based on the mapping between semantics and morphology. Empirically, the theory can account for exceptions to principles that have been proposed in previous literature in a constrained way. The mechanism makes very concrete a number of accommodation processes that conversation participants would make use of to interpret sentences that violate the economy principle. These processes make use of existing theories of focus and presupposition accommodations, and allow some level of exceptional behavior of anaphoric expressions (for example, a definite description being used in an anaphoric context where a pronoun would have been sufficiently informative) but with specific predictions on how it would be constrained. iv Contents Title Page ...................................... i Copyright ...................................... ii Abstract ....................................... iii Table of Contents ................................. vii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Overview of the dissertation ........................ 5 2 Bare Noun Blocking 11 2.1 Introduction ................................. 11 2.2 Data ..................................... 13 2.3 Bare Noun Blocking Generalization .................... 20 2.4 Preliminary Analysis ............................ 31 2.5 Advantage of the competition-based analysis . 35 2.6 Slavic languages ............................... 36 2.7 Summary and implications ......................... 44 3 The competition mechanism 50 v 3.1 Main intuition ................................ 52 3.2 Ingredients .................................. 54 3.3 Going back to Bare Noun Blocking .................... 78 3.4 Advantage 1: Deriving the scale of familiarity . 92 3.5 Advantage 2: Focus sensitivity ....................... 97 3.6 Advantage 3: Competition with silent pronouns PRO and pro . 111 3.7 Summary ................................... 125 4 Demonstratives 127 4.1 Introduction ................................. 129 4.2 Demonstratives: Two approaches . 132 4.3 Analysis .................................... 152 4.4 Demonstrative pronouns in English . 159 4.5 Anaphoric demonstratives as last-resort . 168 4.6 Interim summary .............................. 179 4.7 Possible syntactic analysis . 180 4.8 Morphosyntactic realization of exophoricity . 184 4.9 Conculsion .................................. 196 5 Anaphoric expressions in ASL 198 5.1 Introduction: Disconnect on studies of IX . 199 5.2 Anaphoric expressions in ASL . 203 5.3 IX in production studies . 222 vi 5.4 Novel data: Effects of contrast in ASL anaphora . 228 5.5 Analysis: anaphoric expressions in ASL . 242 5.6 Conclusion .................................. 249 6 Conclusion 252 6.1 Directions for future research . 253 6.2 Summary ................................... 255 References 264 vii To 아빠, Hee Young Ahn. viii Acknowledgments Being a linguist who speaks two languages that divide up the semantic space quite differently from each other, I often think how limited language is. Language to me is a container that lets me carry various pieces of thought from my mind to myself and to the addressee, but the thoughts that I have do not always have the perfect size or shape that fits either of the two containers I have. All of these words are here just to express as closely as possible how unlikely it is that I will do justice to all of those individuals and entities that made this dissertation possible. Therefore, I will keep the words brief and emphasize that my appreciation is much deeper. I would like to thank: • My advisor Gennaro Chierchia for responding to my email that I wrote on a broken train waiting for an engineer: `if the engineer doesn't come, write me again, and I'll come rescue you.' For rescuing me at those many times I felt stuck in my academic life. For focusing my vision to details I missed and for widening my vision to see the bigger picture. For the countless meetings that never kept me in the same place and sometimes featured `Gennaro's cappuccino'. • My advisor Uli Sauerland for always keeping his office door open during his visit, ix that allowed a shy first year graduate student to walk in with a question. For letting that question develop into the first abstract, the first paper, and the first collaboration. For the bi-weekly Skype meetings that continued ever since, across the Atlantic and sometimes even the Atlantic. For the trust that often superseded that of my own. For the insights and guidance which enabled all of this. • My advisor Kate Davidson for the countless meetings that developed the craziest ideas into concrete questions and research projects, without which my chapters on demonstratives and ASL loci would not have come to existence. For making new ideas, new collaborations, and new discussions possible with her insights. For making my graduate life so much more colorful with those new ideas. • My advisor Jesse Snedeker for the mindblowing course on psychosemantics during my first year that started the project on number acquisition. For the advice thanks to which I learned to organize my vague ideas into concrete, testable hypotheses. • My professors at Penn, Dave Embick, Florian Schwarz, and Charles Yang for encouraging the undergraduate linguistics student back in 2010 to pursue a lin- guistic career. For their continued support and guidance that makes visiting Penn feel like going home. • My professors at Harvard, Huang Laoshi, Jay Jasanoff, Isabelle Charnavel, and Kevin Ryan for teaching me to become a well-rounded linguist. • My profesors and collaborators for their insightful comments and advice. Sudha Arunachalam for answering a random email from a random graduate student across the river asking about her research, for hiring me as the lab manager, for x sitting down with me (or standing at the standing desk) to go over everything I needed to learn about R, for using the bobkitten I drew as the logo for the new lab, and for allowing me to have all of this experience, just from a single email. Jenneke Van der Wal for the one meeting we had in Boylston that developed into an exciting elicitation sessions with Andrew, for teaching me how to make beau- tiful posters on Powerpoint, for writing my very first Bantu paper with me, and for generously using her time to share not only her insightful ideas and knowledge but also the amazing whether of Leiden over Skype. Annemarie Kocab for being colleagues and friends with a linguist, for sharing all her insights that made our collaboration on ASL IX and agreement so much more exciting and deep, for not kicking me out of the room for all of the BTS comments I made, and for making working together just so much fun (ft. Melissa, Nancy, and Shari). Professor
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