2022
Nirmalangshu Mukherji
Nirmalangshu Mukherji (Prof.em., University of Delhi): Language and the Generative Mind
Time and place: Aug. 31, 2022 2:15 PM – 4:00 PM, Seminarrom 6 PAM
Human mental operations are capable of generating complex unbounded representations in various human-specific domains like language, arithmetic, music etc. Call it the Generative Mind. It is plausible to suppose that the generative mind consists of some powerful combinatorial devices. It is implausible to suppose that such devices were adopted from pre-hominid species; so a saltation is required for the emergence of each device. As saltation is an unattractive idea for higher cognitive functions, we explore the methodological prospect that a single saltation inserted a singular device for all domains, call it Principle G. However, the generative device of language, Merge, already requires saltation. So, only Merge can be such a general device, if anything. But Merge is widely assumed to be language-specific. We argue that the assumption is untenable. Thus, Merge may be viewed as one possible candidate for Principle G.
2021
Kjell Johan Sæbø
Kjell Johan Sæbø (ILOS): Non-actualistic mood in Czech, Russian, German and Norwegian, Part II
Time and place: Dec. 15, 2021 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Zoom
In the first installment on Nov 10, I was only able to cover half the ground. In this sequel I will start with a recap so anyone new can follow. Here is a handout:
Dag Haug
Dag Haug (Textlab/ILN): Reciprocals and their scope
Time and place: Dec. 1, 2021 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Seminarrom 5 SB
Reciprocal constructions often display a scope ambiguity:
(1) Two girls thought that they saw each other.
(1) a. Narrow scope: Each thought: ‘We saw each other.’
(1) b. Wide scope: Each thought: ‘I saw her.’
On the face of it, such evidence supports a quantificational theory of reciprocity and not a relational theory that assimilates reciprocal sentences to cumulative predication (Langendoen 1988). In the first part of this talk, I will present our relational theory of reciprocity, which is couched in plural dynamic semantics and does solve the scope problem (Haug and Dalrymple 2020). In the second part of the talk, I will survey reciprocal constructions where the scope is (or has been claimed to be) fixed, i.e. only the narrow or the wide scope reading is available. Relevant structures are coordinations with collective VPs, control structures, pronominal antecedents that are obligatorily bound or free, logophoric antecedents and constructions with obligatory scope marking. I show that our theory yields the right predictions for all these structures.
Kjell Johan Sæbø
Kjell Johan Sæbø (ILOS): Non-actualistic mood in Czech, Russian, German and Norwegian
Time and place: Nov. 10, 2021 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Seminarrom 5 SB
Mood with ‘non-actuality’ entailments, as figuring prominently, but far from exclusively, in counterfactual conditionals, has not yet received a comprehensive and compositional analysis. Focusing on four languages, I present under-appreciated facts and a novel theory where the mood serves to activate alternatives to operations over propositions, in particular one: the identity operation, giving rise to implicatures of contrast. Depending on the context, these contrast implicatures amount to non-actuality or – in downward entailing environments – actuality entailments.
Nykiel og Põldvere
Joanna Nykiel og Nele Põldvere (ILOS): Ellipsis in a less well known environment: The reactive what-x construction in English
Time and place: Sep. 29, 2021 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Seminarrom 5 SB
In this talk, we present, and suggest a theoretical analysis of, what is known as the reactive what-x construction, depicted in (1B). This construction has interrogative and anaphoric properties (i.e., it requires an antecedent in the preceding context), as has been shown by recent corpus work on English (Põldvere & Paradis 2019, 2020). We begin by summarizing this work and data drawn from the London-Lund Corpora, as well as a Construction Grammar analysis offered in Põldvere & Paradis (2020). In the second part of this talk, we address patterns that haven’t been noticed before, i.e., that this construction has properties aligning it with certain kinds of elliptical constructions (e.g., sluicing and fragments). This suggests that we could pursue a theoretical analysis that explicitly captures the elliptical properties of the reactive what-x construction.
We outline ways of doing so in a constraint-based framework, and this includes suggesting a multiple inheritance network to license the entire set of the construction’s properties.
(1) A: Have you ever been out there before?
(1) B: What to Russia?
References
Põldvere, N., & Paradis, C. (2019). Motivations and mechanisms for the development of the reactive what-x construction in spoken dialogue. Journal of Pragmatics, 143, 65-84.
Põldvere, N., & Paradis, C. (2020). ‘What and then a little robot brings it to you?’ The reactive what-x construction in spoken dialogue. English Language and Linguistics, 24(2), 307-332.
Joshi
Kinjal Hiren Joshi (ILN): Structural condition on [A-bar]-probe: A movement based account of [A-bar]-agreement
Time and place: Sep. 1, 2021 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Seminarrom 5 SB
2020
Atle Grønn
Embedded how- and that-clauses under perception verbs
Time and place: Feb. 5, 2020 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Seminarrom 6 PAM
The paper discusses different kinds of complements under perception verbs like see and hear in Russian, English and Norwegian.
The main idea is to analyze the choice of complementizers as markers of Vendler’s distinction between events and facts (here: how vs. that).
Such an approach will hopefully shed light on the unexpected distribution of aspect and tense in Russian perception constructions.
2019
Kjell Johan Sæbø
Building bridges: Themes in the work of Bergljot Behrens
Event semantics · discourse relations · causation · elaboration · translation
Time and place: Dec. 4, 2019 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Seminarrom 11 PAM
Abstract
When Bergljot Behrens retires from her post as professor of English and translation studies, she leaves a rich legacy of insight into ways of describing events and of making meaningful connections among them.
Starting with her 1998 dissertation, she has pioneered the comparative method in discourse semantics, showing how pairing up one language with one or more others can offer invaluable clues to meaning distinctions that may otherwise escape notice and to the contextual cues that make us select an interpretation.
Particularly notable are the discoveries of the various modes of event unification that can be conveyed with non-finite structures in a language like English and the findings on coordination at different levels and on explicit markers of event linking in a language like Norwegian.
This highly original work has had a strong influence on scholars like Robyn Carston, Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen and myself, and in this talk, I will recount some highlights of it.
Sarah Zobel: A closer look at German “existential ‘man’”
Time and place: Nov. 27, 2019 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Seminarrom 11 PAM
Abstract
Unlike English ‘one’, which only occurs in generic sentences, the German impersonal pronoun ‘man’ can also be used in episodic sentences, see (1).
(1) Gestern hat man die Uni angezündet.
yesterday has MAN the uni set-on-fire
‘Yesterday, MAN set the university on fire.’
In the literature, the contribution of ‘man’ in sentences like (1) is paraphrased as ‘someone’, and the use of ‘man’ in these sentences is called the “existential use” of ‘man’ (see e.g., Fenger 2018). In this talk, I take a closer look at the semantic behavior of “existential ‘man’”.
I show that in this use, ‘man’ does not show any of the semantic characteristics commonly described for existentially quantified expressions (e.g., ‘someone’), making an existential analysis implausible (pace Malamud 2012).
Instead, I propose that in sentences like (1), ‘man’ denotes a modifier of agentive one-place predicates that asks the interpreter to infer the missing argument, that is, one or more individuals that are involved as agents in the eventuality described by the predicate. That is, in (1) the individuals that are inferred are “the agent(s) of the set-on-fire-eventuality”.
Kjell Johan Sæbø: Recent developments in formal pragmatics
Part 2: The Grammatical Theory (recap) and New Game Theory
Time and place: Oct. 23, 2019 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Seminarrom 11 PAM
Giovanni Roversi: Person/number hierarchy effects in Äiwoo agreement
Time and place: Oct. 16, 2019 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Seminarrom 11 PAM
Mike Putnam
Penn State University
Abstract transfer: Hyper-V2 effects in Gottscheerisch Imperatives
Time and place: Oct. 9, 2019 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Seminarrom 11 PAM
Abstract
Although the prevailing position in the literature is that syntactic properties generally remain immune to contact and attrition effects, small scale changes do occur on occasion.
A reasonable hypothesis is that syntactic change in these environments is highly conservative, and will most likely result in the amplification or 'recycling' of already existing properties in the less dominant grammar (Putnam & Schwarz, 2014; Hopp & Putnam, 2015), thus rendering any allusion to 'transfer' as an abstract process (Heine & Kuteva, 2005).
In this talk I take a closer look at a heritage variety of German called Gottscheerisch, paying particular attention to its imperative structures, which have begun to take on certain Slavic properties.
Building on Müller's (2004, 2018) proposal that the V2-property in Germanic is realized as vP-movement to the left edge of the clause (CP), I show that what may on the surface appear to be assimilation to Slavic-like imperatives is really abstract transfer resulting in the hyper-application of the V2-parameter (i.e., vP-raising) in Gottscheerisch imperatives.
Kinjal Joshi
Optional Agreement and Information Structure in Surati Gujarati
Time and place: Sep. 25, 2019 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Seminarrom 11 PAM
Abstract
In this talk, I present novel empirical evidence demonstrating optionality in agreement in Surati Gujarati (A language that belongs to the Indo-Aryan language family).
Further, I establish a relationship between information structure and agreement relationship and propose that dative case is a dependent (structural) case in Surati Gujarati. To account for both case alternation and the information structure-agreement relationship in Surati Gujarati I propose an object shift analysis.
To conclude, I raise a larger theoretical question on the status of A vs A-bar movement as I propose a focus-driven object movement analysis.
Kjell Johan Sæbø
Recent developments in formal pragmatics
Part 1: Optimality Theory and The Grammatical Theory
Time and place: Sep. 18, 2019 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Seminarrom 11 PAM
Dag Haug
Reciprocals with quantified antecedents (joint work with Mary Dalrymple)
Time and place: Sep. 11, 2019 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Seminarrom 8 PAM
Dag Haug et al.
Modification of DPs by epistemic adverbs
Time and place: June 5, 2019 1:30 PM–3:00 PM, PAM 15
Kjell Johan Sæbø
Inquisitive Semantics, Part two: Wh questions and existentials, and embedded issues
Time and place: May 15, 2019 1:30 PM–3:00 PM, PAM 15
Inquisitive Semantics is the brand name for a 10-year old theory seeking to unify the meaning of declaratives and interrogatives, thereby resolving a series of long-standing issues in the semantics of polar and wh questions as well as embedded questions of either sort.
This survey is based on the 2019 book by the same name by the three inventors, Ivano Ciardelli, Jeroen Groenendijk and Floris Roelofsen, but takes a different tack, one more suited to the language-minded than to the logic-minded, starting with facts and introducing theory in response.
Kjell Johan Sæbø
Inquisitive Semantics, Part one: Polar questions and disjunctions
Time and place: Apr. 24, 2019 1:30 PM–3:00 PM, NT 1016
Inquisitive Semantics is the brand name for a 10-year old theory seeking to unify the meaning of declaratives and interrogatives, thereby resolving a series of long-standing issues in the semantics of polar and wh questions as well as embedded questions of either sort.
This survey is based on the 2019 book by the same name by the three inventors, Ivano Ciardelli, Jeroen Groenendijk and Floris Roelofsen, but takes a different tack, one more suited to the language-minded than to the logic-minded, starting with facts and introducing theory in response.
Joanna Nykiel
Matrix vs embedded sluicing and (massive) pied-piping
Time and place: Mar. 27, 2019 2:00 PM–3:00 PM, PAM 15
This talk addresses the question of how much material can be pied-piped along with a stranded wh-phrase. (1) shows English instances of embedded sluicing and (2) shows their matrix counterparts.
(1) a. I’ve become mixed up in something. You know what.
b. I’ve become mixed up in something. You know in what.
c. I’ve become mixed up in something. *You know mixed up in what.
(2) a. A: I’ve become mixed up in something. B: What?
b. A: I’ve become mixed up in something. B: In what?
c. A: I’ve become mixed up in something. B: Mixed up in what?
The possibility illustrated in c is grammatical in matrix sluicing (2c), but not in full embedded clauses (*You know mixed up in what I’ve become) or in embedded sluicing (1c), unless the wh-phrase and the pied-piped material are ordered first (Harvey’s become mixed up in something. But mixed up in what, (that) I don’t know). These patterns seem robust cross-linguistically: they also hold in German (Abels 2018), Danish, and Polish. I first review the analyses of Bechhofer (1976) and Abels (2018), then present corpus data from English, and finally consider possibilities of analyzing the patterns in (1)-(2).
2018
Alexander Pfaff (UiO): A "former" analysis, or: How to derive intensionality syntactically?
Time and place: Mar. 6, 2019 1:30 PM–3:00 PM, P.A Munchs Hus, room 15
Adjectives like "former" belong to a class of modifiers that are called intensional (or opaque, privative, non-subsective etc.), but how does this property come about? Formal semantic accounts tend to assign a complex denotation in one fell swoop, while less formal (syntactic) accounts tend to oversimplify the semantics.
In this presentation, I will argue that it is possible to derive the opacity effects of adjectives like "former" by assuming that they have more syntactic structure and, in particular, comprise verbal (aspectual) structure.
Tatiana Nikitina: The syntax of reported speech: Towards a typology
Time and place: Feb. 6, 2019 1:30 PM–3:00 PM, P.A Munchs Hus, room 15
Despite major recent advances, many aspects of speech reporting – including cross-linguistic variation in the syntax and semantics of the relevant constructions – remain largely underexplored. This situation has to do primarily with the general inapplicability of standard elicitation methods to phenomena rooted in discourse.
In this talk I introduce a research program that aims at a systematic investigation of properties of speech reporting constructions, focusing on African languages. I discuss three cross-linguistically rare phenomena that are characteristic of African languages: logophoricity, expression of mirativity in reported speech, and the use of quotative markers. I argue that in-depth corpus-based analysis of these phenomena undermines existing analyses of the syntax of reported speech, sheds new light on the expression of epistemic stance, and suggests new directions in the study of still underexplored constructions widely attested in European languages.
Christine Meklenborg Salvesen (UiO): "Semantically bleached or semantically salient? The story of two homonymous particles in Old French"
Time: Nov. 14, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM
Stefan Hinterwimmer (U Köln): Narratorship and different kinds of perspective-taking
Time: Nov. 7, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM
Building on previous work (Hinterwimmer 2018), I compare the formal properties as well as the licensing conditions of two distinct kinds of protagonists’ perspective taking in narrative texts, Free Indirect Discourse (FID) and Viewpoint Shifting (VS). In particular, I will take a close look at the role that the presence vs. absence of an involved narrator with an identifiable perspective has on the availability of FID and VS, respectively. As a case study, the interplay of the narrator’s and the main protagonist’s perspective in the crime novel 'Auferstehung der Toten' ('Resurrection of the dead') by Wolf Haas will be discussed.
Elena Callegari & Riccardo Pulicani: Nobody Likes «Everyone» (but most people like lists)
Time and place: Oct. 31, 2018 3:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A.Munchs hus 8
We report the results of a forced-choice acceptability judgment experiment testing the interpretation of quantified subject questions (i.e., matrix subject interrogatives containing a quantifier, e.g. "Which writer read each book?") in Italian. Our specific goal was to investigate the availability of a pair-list interpretation (PL) as opposed to an individual-answer one, as well as the effect of topicalization on the availability of such readings.
Three different types of quantifiers were tested: every, each and at least a. Overall, the results show that a PL interpretation is available for the majority of speakers even in subject questions, contra Chierchia (1993). The different quantifiers however vary greatly both concerning the acceptability of a PL interpretation, and the effect of topicalization, with "every/everyone" being the one quantifier that almost no one accepts under a PL reading if in non-topicalized structures.
Elena Callegari (UiO): Mapping Types of Foci in Questions
Time: Oct. 24, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM
Ever since Rizzi (1997, 2001), a standard assumption in the generative literature has been that foci are incompatible with wh-elements (see also Beck 2006).
In this talk, I refine this claim by investigating different combinations of Foc + WH. I focus in particular on comparing different pragmatic types of foci (Bianchi, Bocci & Cruschina 2015, 2016), as well as different types of interrogative environments.
I conclude that the prohibition against having a narrow lexical focus co-occur with an interrogative operator is by no means absolute, as several different combinations of such elements are perfectly licit.
I then focus specifically on one impossible combination, namely corrective foci + matrix interrogative operators, and argue that such restriction can be captured semantically by resorting to a nested focus analysis along the lines of Constant (2012), together with the understanding that corrective speech acts are only licensed in matrix left peripheries.
Espen Klævik-Pettersen (UiO): One Head, Many Features: Why "Strong" V2 Languages Defy (Strong) Cartography
Time: Oct. 17, 2018 2:15 PM–3:15 PM
CP cartography (Rizzi 1997 et seq.) postulates a universally ordered set of projections in the left periphery of the clause. This allows a principled account of so-called `relaxed V2 languages' like several Old Romance varieties (Benincà 1983) by saying that the latter feature V-to-C movement while lacking strong restrictions on the prefield.
At the same time, this solution raises the question why `strong V2 languages' like Modern Germanic or Old French do in fact feature such restrictions (the `linear V2 rule'). In this talk, I will demonstrate on the basis of evidence from 13th century Old French that recent attempts (Wolfe 2015) to derive the prefield of strong V2 languages in accordance with strong cartographic tenets meet with considerable theoretical and empirical problems, and an alternative analysis is suggested which represents a compromise between traditional and cartographic accounts.
Lisa Nussbaumer (Universität Wien): My personal pronoun is I, Robot
Potential Challenges in Human - Robot Communication
Time and place: Sep. 26, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Niels Treschows Hus, rom 1016
Abstract
The nature of individual denoting expressions, in specific personal pronouns, has been widely discussed in the field of linguistics, but still poses challenges in artificial speech comprehension.
In this talk, I will give an overview of how personal pronoun resolution is approached
in different scholarly fields (e.g. linguistics, NLP and cognitive studies) and present my PhD research project that explores the use of personal pronouns in task-specific speech interactions and in narrative descriptions in human-robot-communication.
Łukasz Jędrzejowski, Universität zu Köln: "On exceptive clauses in (the history of) Polish"
Time and place: Sep. 12, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A Munchs Hus, seminarrom 8
In this talk, I will examine the synchrony and the diachrony of exceptive clauses in the sense claimed by von Fintel (1992) in Polish. (1) is a case in point:
(1) Dzisiaj po południu mogą wyjść na wolność, *(chyba) że
Today afternoon may.3pl go:out.inf on freedom, *(presumably) that
/ *iż sąd zdecyduje inaczej.
/ *that court decide.3sg differently
‘They are allowed to be released from prison today afternoon,
unless the court will take a different decision.’
(NKJP, Dziennik Zachodni, 30/12/2004)
In the example given in (1), the exceptive clause is introduced by chyba że ‘unless’, consisting of the discourse particle chyba ‘presumably’ and the complementizer że ‘that’.
Synchronically, I argue that both chyba and że form a complex complementizer introducing adverbial exceptive clauses. Evidence for this claim comes from the fact that chyba cannot be omitted, indicating that it has been incorporated into the exceptive clause structure and accommodated into its compositional meaning. Additionally, że cannot be replaced by its stylistic counterpart iż mainly used in higher-register texts. Diachronically, I show that exceptive clauses emerged in Old Polish (till 1543) and that subjunctive morphology in the embedded clause was a necessary condition for them to arise.
I outline individual steps of how exceptive clauses developed, what role the discourse particle chyba ‘presumably’ played in this development, and, finally, account for why subjunctive morphology in Present-day Polish exceptive clauses can be dispensed with altogether.
References
von Fintel, Kai. 1992. Exceptive conditionals: The meaning of unless. Proceedings of the North East Linguistics Society 22. 135–151.
Eastern Cham optional wh-movement is DC-movement
Kenneth Baclawski, University of California, Berkeley
Time and place: Sep. 5, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A Munchs hus, room 8
Eastern Cham (Austronesian: Vietnam) is a wh-in situ language, but wh-phrases can in some cases be moved to the left periphery, resulting in apparently optional wh-movement. It has been claimed that no language exhibits true optional wh-movement; instead, moved wh-phrases are instances of clefts, topicalization, or something else (Cheng 1991, a.o.; but cf. Denham 2000). This talk argues that wh-phrases in Eastern Cham are moved due to the discourse subordination (DS) effect (see Tuesday's talk at ILN).
The DS-effect is analyzed syntactically with a feature we call [discourse-connected] ([DC]). Motivation for this feature-based analysis comes from topicalization, which also displays the DS-effect. Locality effects demonstrate that wh-phrases can intervene on topicalization and vice versa. According to feature inclusion theories (e.g. Friedman, et al 2009), this entails that topics and moved wh-phrases must share identical features at some level. Finally, evidence from DP-internal topicalization via inventory forms demonstrates that the wh-phrases themselves do not bear [DC]. Instead, we argue that autonomous DC-particles perform that function, alleviating the need for wh-phrases to completely share features with topics.
Eva Csipak: V3 clauses in Standard German
Time and place: May 30, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus, seminarrom 7
There is some consensus in the literature about the acceptability of verb-third (V3) structures in Standard German: it is acceptable in biscuit conditionals (see Davison 1983 and much subsequent literature), but generally not acceptable elsewhere. Consider the biscuit conditional in (1).
(1) Wenn du Hunger hast, ich habe Kekse.
if you hunger have I have cookies
If you are hungry, I have cookies.
Assuming that the clause "wenn du Hunger hast" forms a constituent, a total of two constituents precede the finite verb in the matrix clause. We observe that (1) has a slightly different interpretation from most other conditionals: the speaker is understood to believe that she has cookies independently of whether the addressee is hungry.
Compare this to the hypothetical conditional in (2).
(2) Wenn Peter eingekauft hat, habe ich Kekse.
If Peter shopping has have I cookies
If Peter went shopping, I have cookies.
(2) is a standard hypothetical conditional: the speaker is taken to be unsure about whether or not she has cookies in the actual world - what she commits to is that in those worlds where Peter went shopping, she has cookies. We observe that switching the order of "ich" and "habe" in (2) leads to a fairly odd sentence - to the extent that it is acceptable, it is more likely to be interpreted along the lines of (1).
Many analyses of biscuit conditionals depend on this fact. What they ignore is that (1) is part of a larger pattern: conditional antecedents are not the only type of clause that can appear in a V3 construction, and in fact there is a systematic effect of the word order on the interpretation.
(3) Wenn/weil/bevor du lange suchst, der Schlüssel ist im Auto.
if/because/before you long search the key is in.the car
If/because/before you spend a lot of time searching, the key is in the car.
We observe that the sentences in (3) differ in meaning from the corresponding sentences with V2 word order.
(4) Wenn/weil/bevor du lange suchst, ist der Schlüssel im Auto.
To the extent that the sentences in (4) are interpretable, they express a (conditional/causal/temporal) relation between two propositions. The sentences in (3), on the other hand, seem to express a relation between a proposition and a speech act.
I propose to follow Krifka's (2015, 2017) analysis for biscuit conditionals and extend it to other types of complex V3 clauses: the V3 word oder causes the subordinate clauses in (3) to act as speech act modifiers: they attach above the CP layer of the matrix clause.
Patrick Grosz & Janne Johannessen: Variation in parasynthetic compounds of the coarsefibered type
Time and place: May 2, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus, seminarrom 7
Ruprecht von Waldenfels: DOM beyond animacy in Polish and Ukrainian
Time and place: Apr. 25, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus 7
In Ukrainian and Polish, animate masculine nouns take the genitive ending for the (otherwise zero-marked) accusative. This pattern, inherited from Common Slavic, has expanded in both Polish and Ukrainian to encompass non-animate nouns.
In the talk, I report on ongoing work concerned with comparing the shape and historical spread of this phenomenon in the two standard languages. Research into the Ukrainian situation is based on GRAC a new, geographically tagged corpus of standard Ukrainian I am developing with colleagues in Ukraine and the US (uacorpus.org).
Dag Haug & Mary Dalrymple: Reciprocal scope revisited
Time and place: Apr. 18, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus, seminarrom 7
Julia Souma and Juho Härme. Please note that these are two separate talks.
Time and place: Apr. 11, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, PAM, seminarrom 7
Julia Souma (University of Tampere, Finland)
Expression of negation in Russian language in bilateral state treaties between Russia and Finland
I will tell about the use of negation in the Russian version of the state treaties between Russia and Finland. Negation in Russian can be expressed by explicit negation markers (particles , prepositions, etc.) and implicit negation markers (verbs and nouns expressing prohibition, refusal etc.). In the Russian versions of the documents explicit negation markers (particles, prepositions, etc.) are used much more frequently than implicit negation markers in comparison with the Finnish versions. This phenomenon can be explained by the language specificity, by diplomatic discourse conventions, and possible prevalence of translating the treaties from Russian into Finnish over composing texts directly in Finnish.
Juho Härme (University of Tampere, Finland)
Five reasons for placing a temporal adverbial in the clause-initial position in Finnish and why there are more in Russian.
The presentation discusses some of the main findings of a dissertation project comparing the positions of temporal adverbials in Finnish and Russian. The study is based on four comparable corpora, which have been queried for approximately 50 different temporal expressions in both languages. The occurrences of the temporal expressions have been filtered to include only affirmative SVO sentences, and a statistical model has been built to investigate the reasons for placing the adverbial either at the beginning of the clause, between the subject and the verb, between the verb and the object or at the end of the clause. In this presentation the differences concerning the clause-initial position are discussed using a constructional approach.
Organizer
Ruprecht van Waldenfels and Elena Callegari.
These talks are funded by the SIU grant "Text corpora in training linguists and translators (NCM-RU-2016/10039).
Elena Callegari + Jozina Vander Klok
Time and place: Apr. 4, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus, seminarrom 7
These are two separate talks.
Elena Callegari: The Relative Position of Foci and Interrogative Complementizers: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective
According to Abels (2012), the movement of a focus to a left-peripheral position is blocked by the presence of an intervening polarity complementizer (POL), i.e. by elements such as English if and Italian se, which introduce embedded polarity questions. On the basis of long-distance focalization, I show that polarity complementizers are not in fact interveners for focalization. Employing a cross-linguistic comparison of eight Slavic languages, I then show that in languages where a fronted focus may locally precede POL, this is because POL is a complex morpheme derived through the incorporation of a lower functional head with a higher one. In those languages where this ordering configuration is not possible, POL is not derived through movement but is externally merged directly in the position in which it surfaces.
Jozina Vander Klok: On the 'subject/topic' in Javanese
Many Austronesian languages are viewed as ‘topic-prominent’ (Li & Thompson 1976), and for some languages, it is argued that the ‘subject’ is always a topic (e.g., Mashudi 1976, Alsagoff 1992 for Malay; Pearson 2005 for Malagasy; Poedjosoedarmo 1977, Cole et al. 2002, Sato 2015 for Javanese). For instance, Cole et al. (2002) posit a syntactic rule is whereby the grammatical subject (Spec,TP) is the always topic in Javanese. Using a new diagnostic from the syntax of answers to yes-no questions, I show that this ‘Strict Parallelism Hypothesis’ is too strong for Javanese. I further suggest that – for any language – a strict relation between pragmatics and specific syntactic positions is also too strong.
Sarah Zobel + Neda Todorovic
Time and place: Mar. 14, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus, seminarrom 7
Please note that these are two separate talks.
Sarah Zobel (University of Tübingen): An adefinite analysis of impersonal pronoun
The consensus in the literature is that the main use of impersonal pronouns (e.g., English "one" or German/Norwegian "man") is their generic use, where they denote "people in general", see (1-a). While this is the only possible use for English "one", German/Norwegian "man" (among other languages) also allow for an indefinite use, where "man" is roughly paraphrasable as "someone", see (1-b), and a referential use, where "man" is close to "I" or "we", see (1-c) [see Johansson 2007, Fenger 2017].
(1) a. One must respect one's parents. (≈ 'People in general must respect their parents'; English)
b. Man har ringt etter deg. (≈ 'Someone called for you'; Norwegian)
c. Man setzte seine Brille auf. (≈ 'I/we put on my/our glasses'; German)
One question discussed controversially in the literature is whether impersonal pronouns should be classified as definite or indefinite expressions (see a.o. Alonso-Ovalle 2002, Cabredo-Hofherr 2008, 2010, Kratzer 1997, Malamud 2012, 2013, Safir 2004); this question is obviously complicated by the range of readings that are cross-linguistically available and the difference in (in)definiteness that we would intuitively attribute to the nominal expressions used in the paraphrases of (1).
In this talk, I present arguments for a third possible answer to this question: following Koenig & Mauner 1999, I argue that impersonal pronouns are "adefinite". I give an analysis of what it means to be "adefinite" adopting the system put forth in Onea 2013, 2015, and use it to model the generic and indefinite uses illustrated in (1-a) and (1-b). I end with speculations on the pronouns referential use in (1-c).
Neda Todorovic (UBC): (In)visible future across languages
In this talk, I discuss future readings and their peculiarity across languages. First, I show that, in Serbian, they are aspectually restricted, with the perfective not always being allowed. At first glance, the aspectual distribution under future readings seems arbitrary, but I show that it receives a principled explanation under the syntax-semantics account: the perfective is enabled by a covert modal/future element, which is independently syntactically licensed. The (im)possibility of the perfective thus serves as a diagnostic of the presence/absence of the covert modal, thus revealing the modal-temporal domain constellation.
A covert future/modal, I argue, is present in complements of verbs like ‘want’ in Serbian. However, there is an ongoing debate whether future orientation in these complements in, e.g. English, stems from a matrix verb (Ogihara 1996, Abusch 1997, i.a.), or from a covert component in the complement (Abusch 2004, Wurmbrand 2014, i.a.). Since the future modal is phonologically covert in Indo-European, its existence must be motivated by indirect evidence in these languages. In the second part of the talk, I provide evidence for its existence based on Gitksan, in which this component is realized overtly as ‘dim’.
Julian Kirkeby Lysvik
Word-Final Voicing in Artificial Language Learning (ALL) Provides Evidence for Substance
Time and place: Mar. 7, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus, seminarrom 7
Kjell Johan Sæbø
You don't know what you have until you lose it: what /lu:z/ can tell us about /hæv/
Time and place: Feb. 14, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P. A. Munchs hus, seminarrom 7
The folk theory of "lose" has it that it means to stop having. Thus a sentence "Jeg mista laksen" (Norwegian) presupposes that I had the salmon up to the time of the event and asserts that I did not have it from then on.
Now if there were a consensus on the right theory of "have", one could stop there. But there isn't, and in fact, facts about "lose" can throw new light on the debate about "have". In particular, relations coming from relational nouns can feed the relation that stops holding between the subject and the object, just as it can feed the relation that holds according to "have".
I discuss a succession of recent proposals on "have" in this light and conclude that some are more amenable to accommodating "lose" than others.
Alexander Peter Pfaff
Positional Predicates -- A Tale of adjectival inflection and a life outside the DP
Time and place: Feb. 7, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus, seminarrom 7
In this talk, I will discuss a small and largely neglected class of adjectives that have a number of rather peculiar (morpho-) syntactic and semantic properties. Starting out with a presentation of my analysis of adjectival inflection in Modern Icelandic, I will show that there is reason to believe that, differently from regular adjectives, Positional Predicates are merged DP-externally, which leads to the aforementioned peculiarities. A glimpse at Old Germanic and Classical Greek reveals that the phenomenon is not restricted to Modern Icelandic.
Some examples are given below:
(1) a. í miðri borg.inni
in middle city.the
‘in the middle part of the city (= in the city center / downtown)’
b. á öndverðri öld.inni
on beginning century.the
‘in the early/former part of the century’
c. eftir endilöngum setaskála.num
after along building.the
‘from one end of the building to the other’
Helge Lødrup
Prominent internal possessors and backward possessor raising: The case of Norwegian ryggen på ham 'the back on him'
Time and place: Jan. 31, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus, sem 7
A prominent internal possessor is a possessor that is realized internally in a noun phrase, but is still syntactically active in the sentence that the noun phrase is a part of. This kind of possessor has been documented in several unrelated languages (see e.g. Ritchie 2016, 2017).
There has been a focus on agreement phenomena, but Ritchie 2016:623 stresses that prominent internal possessor constructions are not a homogeneous phenomenon. I will argue that Norwegian has prominent internal possessors in sentences like example (1) (mentioned, but not analyzed this way in König and Haspelmath 1998:559, Stolz et al. 2008:231–38, Lødrup 2009).
(1) De skar dypt i ryggen på ham
they cut deep in back.DEF on him
'They cut deep in his back'
These possessors with the preposition på 'on' can only be used with possessums that denote body parts and garments worn by the owner. They correspond to dative external possessors in e.g. German and French. A French example is (2). Old Norse also had dative external possessors, which were later replaced by the PP with på 'on'.
(2) On lui a tiré dans le ventre
one him has shot in the stomach
'They shot him in the stomach'
The possessor construction with på 'on' shares important properties with the dative external possessor construction in e.g. German and French. The body part noun cannot be modified non-restrictively, and when it denotes a body part which we have one of, it is always in the singular, with a distributive reading. Examples are (3) and (4).
(3) Hun vasket (*den skitne) ryggen på ham
she washed (the dirty) back.DEF on him
'She washed his (dirty) back'
(4) Hun stappet kaker i munnen / *munnene på dem
she popped cakes in mouth.DEF / mouths.DEF on them
'She popped cakes into their mouths'
These properties can also be found in other contexts where a body part noun is bound by a possessor that is external to the noun phrase. One case is sentences in which the subject is a possessor, such as examples (5) and (6) (Lødrup 2010).
(5) Han vasket (*den skitne) ryggen
he washed (the dirty) back.DEF
'He washed his (dirty) back'
(6) De hadde kaker i munnen / *munnene
they had cakes in mouth.DEF / mouths.DEF
'They had cakes in their mouths'
A dative external possessor is interpreted as an affected participant in the event denoted by the verb. The same is the case with the Norwegian på possesor. Even if example (7) with a regular possessive pronoun could be used of the same situation as example (1), the possessor in (7) would not be conceptualized as an affected participant.
(7) De skar dypt i ryggen hans
they cut deep in back.DEF his
'They cut deep in his back'
The på possessor behaves as if it were an argument of the sentence. At the same time, standard constituency tests indicate that it is - or can be - a part of the noun phrase with the body part noun. In example (8), a PP with the body part noun phrase and the på possessor precedes the finite verb - a sufficient condition for constituency in a verb second-language like Norwegian. In example (9), this PP is clefted as one constituent. When the body part noun phrase is an object, both a one constituent and a two constituent analysis seem to be possible, as shown in examples (10) - (11).
(8) I ryggen på ham skar de dypt
in back.DEF on him cut they deep
'In his back, they cut deep'
(9) Det var i ryggen på ham de skar dypt
it was in back.DEF on him they cut deep
'It was in his back they cut deep'
(10) De måtte fjerne leveren på ham
they must remove liver.DEF on him
'They had to remove his liver'
(11) Leveren på ham måtte de fjerne / Leveren måtte de fjerne på ham
liver.DEF on him must they remove / liver.DEF must they remove on him
'His liver, they had to remove'
Dative external possessors in e.g. German and French are phonologically realized at the sentence level, but they are often assumed to be grammatically represented in the body part noun phrase as well.
This is often implemented as possessor raising from the body part noun phrase to the sentence level (see e.g. Deal 2013). The noun phrase internal på possessors show the "opposite" situation: they are phonologically realized in the body part noun phrase, but they also need to be represented at the sentence level (as in the analysis of Chimane in Ritchie 2016, 2017).
This could be seen as a case of "backward possessor raising". Ritchie 2017 points out the parallel to backward raising and control in some languages, which allow the subject position of a verb to be controlled by a phonologically realized subject of an embedded infinitive in sentences such as 'tried [John to leave]' (Polinsky and Potsdam 2002).
References
- Deal, Amy Rose. 2013. External possession and possessor raising. Forthcoming in The Companion to syntax 2nd edition. Wiley-Blackwell.
- König, Ekkehard and Martin Haspelmath. 1998 Les constructions à possesseur externe dans les langues de l ́Europe. In Jack Feuillet (ed.), Actance et valence dans les langues de l’Europe, 525─606. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Lødrup, Helge. 2009. External and internal possessors with body part nouns: The case of Norwegian. SKY Journal of Linguistics 22, 221-250.
- Lødrup, Helge. 2010. Implicit possessives and reflexive binding in Norwegian. Transactions of the Philological Society 108, 2, 89-109.
- Polinsky, Maria and Eric Potsdam. 2002. Backward control. Linguistic Inquiry 33, 2, 245-282.
- Ritchie, Sandy. 2016. Two cases of prominent internal possessor constructions. In Doug Arnold, Miriam Butt, Berthold Crysmann, Tracy Holloway-King, Stefan Müller (eds.): Proceedings of the Joint 2016 Conference on Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Lexical Functional Grammar. 620-40. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
- Ritchie, Sandy. 2017. Agreement with the internal possessor in Chimane. Studies in Language 41, 3, 660-716.
2017
Koji Mineshima: Factivity and Presupposition in Dependent Type Semantics
Time and place: Nov. 22, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Svein Rosselands hus: Seminarrom 304
Dependent type theory has been applied to natural language semantics to provide a formally precise and computationally adequate account of dynamic aspects of meaning.
One of the frameworks of natural language semantics based on dependent type theory is Dependent Type Semantics (DTS), which focuses on the compositional interpretations of anaphoric expressions.
In this paper, we extend the framework of DTS with a mechanism to handle logical entailment and presupposition associated with factive verbs such as know. Using the notion of proof objects as first-class objects, we provide a compositional account of presuppositional inferences triggered by factive verbs.
The proposal also gives a formal reconstruction of the type-distinction between propositions and facts, and thereby accounts for the lexical semantic differences between factive and non-factive verbs in a typetheoretical setting.
Corien Bary: Present tense in speech reports - tracking other people’s beliefs
This talk is about the occurrence of present tense verbs in the complement of past tense speech verbs.
Time and place: Nov. 15, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Svein Rosselands hus sem.rom 304
"Present tense in speech reports: tracking other people’s beliefs" is a joint work with Daniel Altshuler, Kristen Syrett and Peter de Swart. This talk is about the occurrence of present tense verbs in the complement of past tense speech verbs, as for example in (1):
(1) John said that Mary is pregnant.
When can we use such sentences?
The question Corien Bary want to address is one that has already received a lot of attention in the literature: when can we use such sentences?
In addressing this question, the key intuition, going back to Carlota Smith’s work in the seventies, has been that such sentences make reference to two times. Hence the name double access used to describe the interpretation of (1).
Intuitively, the two relevant times are the time of John’s attitude and the actual utterance time, i.e. the time of utterance of the report in (1). In this talk Bary will focus on the latter: what exactly has to hold at the utterance time for the present tense to be felicitous?
Two experiments
According to Ogihara (1995), the truth of the complement in (1) at the actual utterance time n (i.e. when (1) is uttered) is not a prerequisite for the use of an embedded present tense. What matters is the cause of the belief (the state that made John think that Mary is pregnant): the present tense can be used only if this cause still holds at the actual utterance time.
Bary will present two experiments which identify two additional factors that play a role: predicate type (short term versus long term properties) and who is aware of the falsity of the belief (i.e. whether the audience of the original utterance still believes that Mary is pregnant). Bary will also discuss the implications of these findings for the (use of the) notions of acquaintance relations (Abusch 1997, Ogihara 1995) or time concepts (Heim 1994) adhered to in the prevailing theories to explain Ogihara’s observation.
Atle Grønn: On events and the proper treatment of viewpoint aspect
Time and place: Nov. 8, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Svein Rosselands hus: Seminarrom 304
This is a programmatic paper. Partee (1973) changed the way we analyze tense in natural language, criticizing the standard quantificational approach to tense. What about aspect? What is the standard view and should it be challenged?
Viewpoint aspect (Smith 1991), perfective vs. imperfective, mediates between the verb phrase (event predicate) and tense. Klein (1995) popularized the idea that aspects express temporal (inclusion) relations between the assertion time and the temporal trace of the event argument of the underlying VP. The idea was formalized in a compositional setting in seminal papers by Krifka (1992), Kratzer (1998) and a dozen papers by von Stechow. The standard view, following these authors, is that the event argument is existentially closed off at the level of AspP.
In this talk I will discuss cases where interpretation and compositionality require some departure from the standard view, although we clearly want to keep the insights gained from the above-mentioned approaches. The cases under discussion include (i) aspect under direct perception (John saw Mary win/winning – discussed without taking aspect and compositionality into account in Higginbotham 1983), (ii) aspect in Ancient Greek participles (He was speaking praising God – Bary & Haug 2011), and (iii) anaphoric/referential aspect (Grønn 2004, Grønn & von Stechow 2016, Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria 2014). Data from Russian aspect will possibly shed some light on these issues.
WOLP 2017
Word Order in the Left Periphery, workshop organized by Elena Callegari and Espen Johan Klævik-Pettersen (both ILOS).
Time and place: Oct. 17, 2017–Oct. 18, 2017, Professorboligen
Inclusive and Exclusive Plurality: Beyond the Singular/Plural Dimension
Mary Dalrymple (joint work with I Wayan Arka, Australian National University)
Time and place: Oct. 11, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Svein Rosselands hus: Seminarrom 304
Recent research on the semantics of number has focused particular attention on so-called weak or inclusive plural readings, where the reference of a plural noun phrase includes single individuals. An English example is "I didn't see children", which, despite the use of the plural noun "children", means that no children (not even one) were seen. Such readings contrast with so-called exclusive plural readings, where the plural means "more than one": a sentence like "I saw children" means that more than one child was seen, and is false if only one child was seen.
The availability of inclusive plural readings has been claimed to provide fresh insight into the semantics of plural marking. However, much work in this area has concentrated on languages like English and French, with an obligatory two-way singular/plural contrast.
We believe that important insights can be gained by an examination of languages with number systems that differ from this type, and we examine inclusive/exclusive plural readings in several languages from Indonesia whose number system differs from the English/French singular/plural system. Our findings call into question commonly-accepted competition-based analyses of inclusive plurality.
Mary Dalrymple is Professor of Syntax in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on syntax, semantics, and the syntax-semantics interface. She is also interested in language documentation and the languages of Indonesia.
Kari Kinn: Stability and (Apparent) Change in Heritage Norwegian Nominal Structure. A View from Predicate Nouns.
Time and place: Sep. 27, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Svein Rosselands hus: Seminarrom 304
Kjell Johan Sæbø: Fresh takes on VP ellipsis
Time and place: Sep. 20, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Svein Rosselands hus: Seminarrom 304
The extent to which a VP ellipsis must copy its antecedent – in particular, whether so-called voice mismatches are possible – has been a topic of debate for decades; recent approaches attribute a differential acceptability to information structure (Kertz 2013), processing biases (Frazier 2013, Kim and Runner 2017), or the size of the ellipsis (Sailor 2014).
Another controversial issue is what it takes for a language to exhibit VP ellipsis. For example, Mainland Scandinavian is claimed by some to do (so); this is partly a purely empirical question (Sailor 2017) and partly a question about the depth of anaphoricity (Bentzen, Merchant and Svenonius 2013).
Jozina Vander Klok: The existential past tense, and not the experiential perfect, in Javanese and Atayal.
Time and place: Sep. 13, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Svein Rosselands hus: Seminarrom 304
Abstract
Joint work with Sihwei Chen, Lisa Matthewson, & Hotze Rullmann.
We argue that temporal operators with a salient experiential interpretation, while typically associated with a reading of the perfect, are not necessarily perfects. Drawing from data on the functional morphemes tau in Javanese and -in- in Atayal (Austronesian), which both have dominant experiential readings, we provide evidence that they cannot be analyzed as a perfect or more broadly, any kind of aspect. Instead, these morphemes are best analyzed as existential relative past tenses. We show how tau and -in- contrast with non-quantificational past tenses (pronominal tense; Partee 1973) and how they contrast with perfects as a relative tense, supporting Bohnemeyer (2014). More broadly, what are considered 'experientials' in a given language are not all perfects.
Amanda Swenson: Auxiliaries and light verbs: exploring the clausal spine in Malayalam
Time and place: June 8, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus 609
This talk will examine the way in which tense, aspect and the perfect are expressed in Malayalam. It begins by arguing that Malayalam has both tense morphology and a TP (contra Amritavalli & Jayaseelan 2005, et seq) and sketches out the beginnings of a tensed account. With respect to the perfect, the talk will show that Malayalam lacks dedicated perfect morphology in (at least) the Universal reading of the perfect. Instead it makes use of simple tense forms that often do not look so simple.
Kersti Börjars: Non-recursive adjectives in Old Icelandic
Time and place: Apr. 26, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus 609
One-Day Seminar on Corpus Linguistics & Quantitative Linguistics
With speakers from Palacký University Olomouc, Czechia.
Time and place: Apr. 5, 2017 9:30 AM–5:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, A‐blokka: Auditorium 6
Program
- How to use and build your own corpus manager with CQL: a hands-on workshop
Vladimír Matlach, Eliška Syrovátková - Quantitative Linguistics at the Discovery of the Voynich Manuscript
Dan Faltýnek - Linguistic Iconicity in Syntax and Information Structure
Ľudmila Lacková, Diego Gabriel Krivochen - The Menzerath-Altmann Law Zeroed In
Martina Benešová - Linguistic Law as an Explanatory Tool
Lukáš Hadwiger Zámečník - Aspect & Tense
Dan Faltýnek, Michaela Mrázková
Kjell Johan Sæbø
Recent developments on event kinds, or: How verbs are conceived and born
Time and place: Mar. 29, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus 609
Maria Polinsky: What you don't know can hurt you: How a language you barely speak affects the one you do
Time and place: Mar. 22, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A.Munchs hus 360
Helge Lødrup and Joanna Nykiel
The anaphor "gjøre det" in Norwegian
Time and place: Mar. 15, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus 609
We report on work in progress that examines the features of the verbal anaphor "gjøre det" in Norwegian. This anaphor has the distribution that covers the same ground as several anaphoric constructions in English, that is, do so, do it/that, and Verb Phrase ellipsis. Previous literature has argued that the closest English correspondent of gjøre det is Verb Phrase ellipsis (Bentzen et al. 2013), as in (1).
(1) Ola spiser epler, men Magnus gjør ikke det.
‘Ola eats apples, but Magnus doesn’t.’
Further, some of the uses of "gjøre det" have been argued to represent surface anaphora and some have been argued to represent deep anaphora in the sense of Hankamer and Sag (1976) and Sag and Hankamer (1984).
We re-evaluate these arguments, pointing out strong parallels between Norwegian gjøre det and English do so, which has been analyzed as a deep anaphor (Kehler and Ward 1999, Houser 2010, contra Hankamer and Sag 1976).
Finally, we consider theoretical possibilities of best capturing these facts, including Lexical Functional Grammar.
Christine Meklenborg Salvesen: Resumptive particles and Verb Second
Time and place: Feb. 8, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus 609
Atle Grønn: pros and cons of analyzing the perfect as a stativizer
Time and place: Feb. 1, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus 609
2016
Norwegian pseudocoordinations with "drive" `carry on'
Helge Lødrup.
Time and place: Oct. 26, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, GM 452
A small group of Norwegian verbs allow so-called pseudocoordinations. These constructions look like coordinations of two verb phrases, but have rather different grammatical properties. An example is:
- Han driver og skriver en bok
- he carries.on and writes a book
- 'He is writing a book'
In this talk, I will discuss pseudocoordinations with the verb drive 'carry on' - a verb that primarily has aspectual content. Its pseudocoordinations have syntactic properties that are different from other pseudocoordinations. I will show that its behavior is basically that of other aspectual verbs (e.g. fortsette 'continue') - except the form requirement of the second verb. I will also discuss pseudocoordinations with drive from a grammaticalization point of view.
Combining formal and distributional semantics: An argument from the syntax and semantics of modification
Louise McNally.
Time and place: Oct. 19, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, PM, GM 452
The lexical semantics of content words has historically generated comparatively little interest among formal semanticists, except when a class of content words proves to be sensitive to some sort of logical or grammatical phenomenon. There are some obvious reasons for this: the tools of formal semantics are poorly suited to dealing with the messy details of the lexicon, and many of these details — specifically, those not relevant for logical inference or grammatical phenomena — are not considered part of what a semantic theory should have to account for. Moreover, natural language has provided plenty of problems for semanticists to work on (indeed, with great success), even without getting into the lexicon.
In this talk, I reflect on the some of the negative effects of this situation and on my experience when I turned to distributional models, a completely different set of tools from those in which I was trained and with which I have worked for many years, in an effort to better address the interaction of lexical and compositional semantics. In part, the talk will serve as a methodological lesson in how easy it is to forget the adage that, when one only has a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In part, it will provide me with an opportunity to point to some largely ignored paths that I think researchers concerned with natural language meaning should explore.
Making Logical Form type-logical
Matthew Gotham.
Time and place: Oct. 12, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, GM 452
Glue Semantics (Dalrymple et al. 1993, 1999) is a theory of the syntax-semantics interface according to which the syntactic structure of a sentence gives rise to premises in a fragment of linear logic (Girard 1987), and semantic interpretation is determined by a proof from those premises to a specified type of conclusion. In this talk, I will show how Glue can be connected to a Minimalist syntactic theory (based largely on Adger 2003) and compare the result with the more mainstream approach to the syntax-semantics interface in Minimalism, according to which the input to semantic interpretation is a structure (Logical Form) derived from surface structure by covert movement operations. I will also show how the Glue approach addresses some difficulties that have arisen in the transition from trace-based to copy-based theories of movement phenomena (since Chomsky 1995).
References
- Adger, David (2003). Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach. Oxford: OUP.
- Chomsky, Noam (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Dalrymple, Mary, John Lamping and Vijay Saraswat (1993). ‘LFG Semantics via Constraints’. In Steven Krauwer, Michael Moortgat and Louis des Tombe (eds.), Proceedings of the Sixth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Universiteit Utrecht, 97-105.
- Dalrymple, Mary, Vineet Gupta, John Lamping and Vijay Saraswat (1999). ‘Relating Resource-based Semantics to Categorial Semantics’. In Mary Dalrymple (ed.), Semantics and Syntax in Lexical Functional Grammar: The Resource Logic Approach. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 261-280.
- Girard, Jean-Yves (1987). ‘Linear logic’. Theoretical Computer Science 50(1):1-101.
A Foot-Driven Analysis of the Typology and Distribution of Topics
Elena Callegari.
Time and place: Sep. 28, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, 452 Georg Morgenstiernes hus
According to Cartography, a topic becomes specified as being Shifting, Contrastive or Familiar as a result of being moved to corresponding dedicated functional projections hosting these features. Drawing on data from a variety of Romance languages, I argue that this type of analysis is unwarranted: if we assume that a topic moves to escape a domain marked as focus, not only can we account for why different topic placements seem to be associated with different overall sentence meanings, but we also see that the type of a topic automatically follows from the size and composition of the material in its scope. This new analysis does not just dispense with dedicated functional projections, it also captures the extreme flexibility in the distribution of the different topics.
Grammaticizing aspect in early Slavic
Dag Haug.
Time and place: Sep. 7, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, 452 Georg Morgenstiernes hus
Perspectival reflexives and event semantics
Per Erik Solberg.
Time and place: Aug. 31, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, 452 Georg Morgenstiernes hus
Utilize Cues - a pragmatic account of obligatory markers
Patrick Grosz.
Time and place: May 25, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Harriet Holters hus 201
This talk focuses on optative utterances (e.g. "If I could just make them understand my point of view!" [Quirk et al. 1985:842]). In languages such as English and German, optatives can take the shape of an if-clause (or verb-initial clause) in order to convey a counterfactual wish ("I wish I could make them understand my point of view."). Superficially, such optatives seem to require the presence of certain particles (such as "but", "just", or "only" in English), which do not transparently contribute a "desirability" component.
I argue that the optative use of such utterances is, in fact, independent from the semantics of these obligatory particles; it qualifies as a specialized non-canonical utterance use that is freely available for if-clauses and verb-initial clauses.
The quasi-obligatory particles make a non-truth-conditional semantic contribution that favors the optative reading over more canonical readings. By doing so, these particles serve as "optativity cues". In order to account for their obligatoriness, I posit a pragmatic principle, which I call "Utilize Cues": a non-canonical utterance use must be supported by semantic cues unless the context makes the intended reading highly salient.
Utilize Cues is shown to derive from independent constraints on successful communication; I provide corpus data to support this view and discuss the German particle "doch" as a case study. Crucially, Utilize Cues has applicability beyond optatives, e.g. in explaining the obligatoriness of interjections (e.g. "boy", "wow", "golly") in V1 degree exclamatives such as "Boy, is it late!" (with the intended reading: "How very late it is!").
Second-position clitics and the syntax-prosody interface: The case of Ancient Greek
Dag Haug (joint work with David Goldstein)
Time and place: May 11, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Harriet Holters hus 201
Fragment answers in Korean and English
Joanna Nykiel (joint work with Jong-Bok Kim)
Time and place: May 4, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Harriet Holters hus 201
Fragment answers consist of nonsentential XPs that have the propositional content of full sentences, inducing form-meaning mismatch (A: Who did Pat meet? B: Ally.). Such fragments raise the question of how to account for the semantically propositional character of apparently nonsentential structures. Two main approaches address this question: the deletion-based approach and the direct interpretation (DI) approach. The former posits sentential sources for fragments whose parts go unpronounced (Hankamer 1979, Morgan 1989, Merchant 2004). The DI approach assumes that the complete syntax of a fragment is the categorial phrase projection of the fragment itself (Ginzburg & Sag 2000, Stainton 2006, Culicover & Jackendoff 2005).
We argue for a DI analysis of fragment answers. We begin with evidence from Korean, which closely tracks patterns found in English, and then propose a unified account of fragment answers in both Korean and English. Our Korean evidence includes fragments with nonlinguistic antecedents, fragments violating island constraints, and fragments showing absence of case-matching effects. Absence of case-matching effects means that a Korean fragment can optionally be caseless rather than matching the semantic case marked on the correlate. This optionality affects both semantic and grammatical case, which is problematic for the deletion-based approach, given that case ellipsis of this kind is available in nonelliptical clauses only for grammatical case.
Fragments with nonlinguistic antecedents and violation of island constraints follow straightforwardly from the DI approach. We argue that cases of absence of case-matching effects also speak in favor of this approach. A caseless fragment in Korean can’t be derived via syntactic operations of fronting and deletion required by the deletion-based approach (cf. Kim 2015). We connect absence of case-matching effects in Korean fragments to the possibility of omitting prepositions from English fragments (A: Who did Pat get a gift from? B: From Ally/Ally.) by assuming that fragments can undergo form reduction independently motivated by processing principles articulated in Hawkins (2004) (cf. Nykiel 2016).
We adopt the view that a fragment is the sole daughter of an S-node licensed by the surrounding context (Ginzburg & Sag 2000, Culicover & Jackendoff 2005, Sag & Nykiel 2011, Kim 2015). It follows that any XP can function as a fragment, projecting into a sentential structure, as licensed by the Head-Fragment Construction (cf. Ginzburg & Sag 2000, Kim & Sells 2013, Kim 2015). The construction allows the head daughter to be any syntactic category, but it must correspond to the category specified by the contextually provided SAL-UTT (salient utterance). The mother is an S, allowing such a phrase to serve as a stand-alone clause. We further leave room for processing principles to operate on fragments by allowing fragments to optionally undergo form reduction by mismatching the case (in Korean) or syntactic category (in English) of their correlates just in case the correlates are overt phrases. By incorporating processing constraints into our DI approach, we predict cases of case/syntactic category mismatch in Korean and English in a uniform way.
Our DI approach has three advantages. First, it simplifies the grammar of fragments by introducing no additional syntax: fragments are mapped onto nonsentential utterances and induce sentential interpretations from the enriched discourse. Second, it introduces no additional principles into the grammar of fragments other than independently motivated processing principles. Third, it can account for parallels among typologically diverse languages of the Korean type and those of the English type.
Copredication: quantificational issues and methodological implications
Matthew Gotham.
Time and place: Apr. 27, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Harriet Holters hus 201
Copredication (Pustejovsky 1995, 236) is the phenomenon whereby two (or more) predicates are applied to a single argument and make apparently conflicting semantic requirements of that argument, in a sentence that is nevertheless coherent and possibly true. For example, in (1) ‘delicious’ requires that ‘lunch’ refer to food, while ‘took forever’ requires that it refer to an event.
1. Lunch was delicious but took forever. (Asher 2011, 11)
In this talk I will focus on issues of individuation and counting in copredication. Many quantified copredication sentences have truth conditions that cannot be accounted for given standard assumptions, because the predicates used impose different criteria of individuation on their arguments. For example, while (2) could be true in a situation involving three copies of the same book (three books individuated physically, one book individuated informationally), and (3) could be true in a situation involving three books printed in a single volume (three books individuated informationally, one book individuated physically), (4) would be true in neither situation, since it requires the three books in question to be both physically and informationally distinct.
2. Three books are heavy.
3. Three books are informative.
4. Three books are heavy and informative.
I will present a theory that compositionally derives the correct truth conditions for sentences like (2)–(4), based on formalizing criteria of individuation as equivalence relations on subsets of the domain of discourse, and incorporating them into lexical entries.
In the light of this theory, I will also discuss the argument (made by Chomsky (2000), Collins (2009), and Pietroski (2005), for example) that copredication makes it impossible to maintain an ‘externalist’ view of semantic theory – that is, one according to which a proper explanation of semantic competence must include relations between either words or their mental encodings and things in the world (Collins, 2009, 55). I will argue that the effort to maintain externalistic viability is good methodology for semantic theory.
References
- Asher, Nicholas (2011), Lexical Meaning in Context: A Web of Words. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.
- Chomsky, Noam (2000), New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.
- Collins, John (2009), ‘Methodology, not Metaphysics: Against Semantic Externalism’. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 83:53–69.
- Pietroski, Paul (2005), ‘Meaning Before Truth’. In Gerhard Preyer and Georg Peter (eds.), Contextualism in Philosophy: Knowledge, Meaning and Truth. Oxford University Press. 253–300.
- Pustejovsky, James (1995), The Generative Lexicon. MIT Press. Cambridge, MA.
Oleg Belyaev and Andrei Sideltsev
Time and place: Apr. 13, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Harriet Holters hus 201
Defining statives: Slavic nominal predicatives and SLP semantics
Anton Zimmerling.
Time and place: Apr. 6, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Harriet Holters hus 201
Perfect participle agreement and restructuring in Norwegian
Teodor Aagaard.
Time and place: Mar. 30, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Harriet Holters hus 201
To a varying degree, Scandinavian speakers allow infinitival complements to agree in TMA-features with the matrix verb. Verbal feature agreement in Swedish has been argued by Wiklund (2007) to be a restructuring (aka reanalysis, clause union) effect: The verbs involved share one active T/M/A feature.
This analysis is supported by the fact that Norwegian long passive constructions (aka long object movement) optionally involve voice agreement (Lødrup 2014). I show that the distribution of PPC-agreement in the NoWac corpus is consistent with the restructuring analysis. It has been observed that PPC-agreement is more common in counterfactual context (Sandøy 1991): Du skulle (ha) prøvd å gjort det (You should have tried to done it).
This fact, along with the perfect participle’s more general ability to express irrealis mood, has led some authors to suggest that the second participle in such examples carries its own mood feature, and that such examples are not due to agreement (Julien 2003; Sæbø 2009). I show that a restructuring analysis within the framework of LFG (as proposed for verbal feature agreement by Niño 1997; Sells 2004) is able to capture the observed differences between the distribution of counterfactual and non-counterfactual PPC-agreement in the NoWac corpus.
Word order change in Norwegian: One factor with several consequences
Jan Terje Faarlund.
Time and place: Mar. 2, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Harriet Holters hus 201
Determiners of Distribution
Kjell Johan Sæbø.
Time and place: Feb. 24, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Harriet Holters hus 201
There are two theories of adverbial readings of frequency adjectives (the odd grouse): the theory that the adjective incorporates into the determiner, recently represented by Zimmermann (2003), and the theory that the adjective modifies the noun, recently represented by Gehrke and McNally (2015).
I present their proposals and their arguments, and evidence from my native language to show or anyway suggest that Zimmermann was right but did not go far enough: there is the “distributional” determiner ei og anna, with hitherto unmapped properties.
Irrealis mood and negation
Kjell Johan Sæbø.
Time and place: Feb. 17, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Harriet Holters hus 201
As aptly put by Quer (2009), mood is mostly overshadowed by tense and aspect and has never become a major focal topic in theoretical approaches. What work has been done has mainly been on Romance (and Greek), where subjunctives are not irrealis moods.
By contrast, “the Russian subjunctive is an irrealis mood” (Dobrushina 2010), and so is the German subjunctive (II), as long as we distinguish between subjunctives that are free and subjunctives that are bound by negation.
I discuss a range of recent theoretical approaches to subjunctives and so-called light negation in conditionals. What exactly irrealis means, however, remains to be seen.
2015
Historical change and morphosyntactic theory
28 January
Kersti Börjars
Child-directed prescriptive infinitives
4 February
Janne Bondi Johannesen
Genitivus explicativus
11 February
Kjell Johan Sæbø
The logical form of 'will'-conditionals vs. 'would'-conditionals
25 February
Atle Grønn
Verb second languages: a typology
4 March
Anton Zimmerling
Workshop "Traces of History"
9-10 March
Guest lectures by David Adger
12-13 March
The meaning of 'now'
18 March
Daniel Altshuler (joint work with Una Stojnic)
English rather vs. German eher: a study in semantic micro-variation
29 April
Stephanie Solt and Carla Umbach
Embedded aspect. A Russian perspective
6 May
Atle Grønn
2014
The meaning of alone, aleine, solo, odin, etc.: a window on social semantics
3. september
Kjell Johan Sæbø et al.
The genesis of wh-based correlatives
10. september
Dag Haug (joint work with Oleg Belyaev).
Semantic approaches to the perfect
17. september
Atle Grønn
"How" questions and their answers (handout)
24. september
Kjell Johan Sæbø
Demonstrative and Interrogative Verbs in Wolaitta
01. oktober
Azeb Amha
How can a verb agree with a verb? The cases of reanalysis and pseudocoordination in Norwegian
08. oktober
Helge Lødrup
The meaning of be missing, manquer, faltar, fattas, etc.: intensionalism vs. intentionalism (paper)
15. oktoberKjell
Johan Sæbø
When "all the five circles" are four: the strange ways of domain restriction (paper)
22. oktober
Bart Geurts (Nijmegen)
"Aspektsymptomer. På jakt etter gammelrussiske aspektpar"
29. oktober
Hanne Eckhoff
Aspekt og tempus i slaviske infinitiver
05. november
Silje Alvestad
Preposition stranding in a diachronic and typological perspective
12. november
Jan Terje Faarlund
Long-distance reflexives in Latin: Perspective or logophoricity?
19. november
Per Erik Solberg
Double perfects and the grammaticalization of auxiliaries
26. november
Ida Larsson og Ellen Brandner