We argue that if a different definition of sentence complexity is adopted and processing capacity is assessed in a way that is consistent with that definition, then the Caplan & Waters distinction between interpretive versus postinterpretive processing is unnecessary insofar that it applies to the thematic role assignment in relative-clause sentences.

I propose the first strictly compositional semantic account of same. New data, including especially NP-internal uses such as two men with the same name, suggests that same in its basic use is a quantificational element taking scope over nominals. Given type-lifting as a generally available mechanism, I show that this follows naturally from the fact that same is an adjective. Independently-motivated assumptions extend the analysis to standard examples such as Anna and Bill read the same book via a mechanism I (...) call PARASITIC SCOPE, in which the scope of same depends on the scope of some other scopetaking element in the sentence. Although I will initially discuss the analysis in terms of a familiar Quantifier Raising framework, I go on to implement the analysis within an innovative continuation-based Type-Logical Grammar. The empirical payoff for dealing in continuations is that a simple generalization of the basic analysis gives the first ever formal account of cases in which same distributes over objects other than NP denotations, as in the relevant interpretation of John hit and killed the same man. (shrink)

Arguments are given against the thesis that properties and propositional functions are identical. The first shows that the familiar extensional treatment of propositional functions -- that, for all x, if f(x) = g(x), then f = g -- must be abandoned. Second, given the usual assumptions of propositional-function semantics, various propositional functions (e.g., constant functions) are shown not to be properties. Third, novel examples are given to show that, if properties were identified with propositional functions, crucial fine-grained intensional distinctions would (...) be lost. (shrink)

First published in 1976, this book presents a view of language as a matter of systematic communicative behaviour.

We are going to explain partial blocking as the result of diachronic processes based on what we will call associative learning. Especially, we argue that the task posed by partial blocking phenomena is to explain their emergence from unambiguous and fully expressive languages. This contrasts with approaches that presuppose underspecified semantic meanings or ineffability like Bidirectional Optimality Theory (Bi–OT) and some game theoretic explanations. We introduce a formal framework based on learning, speaker’s preferences and pure semantics for describing diachronic strengthening (...) of meaning. Moreover, we show how the diachronic development of systems of semantically co–extensive forms can be described in terms of a complete system of diachronic laws. (shrink)

This paper aims at specifying the complex links which two major and polemically related 18th-century linguistic theories James Harris' universal grammar in Hermes (1751) and John Horne Tooke's system of etymology in the Diversions of Purley (1786, 1804) bear to empiricism. It describes both the ideologicalethical determining factors of the theories and the epistemological consequences dependent upon their respective philosophical orientation (Harris using classical Greek philosophy against empiricism, Tooke criticizing Locke's semantics along Hobbesian lines). The effects within the linguistic theories (...) are examined through a comparison of the theories of determination which follow from divergent theses concerning abstraction. The analysis proposed in this paper exemplifies once more the historical question of the exact location of the compatibility/incompatibility between empiricist and non-empiricist linguistic theories. (shrink)

This paper uses a partially ordered set of syntactic categories to accommodate optionality and licensing in natural language syntax. A complex but well-studied data set pertaining to the syntax of quantifier scope and negative polarity licensing in Hungarian is used to illustrate the proposal. The presentation is geared towards both linguists and logicians. The paper highlights that the main ideas can be implemented in different grammar formalisms, and discusses in detail an implementation where the partial ordering on categories is given (...) by the derivability relation of a calculus with residuated and Galois-connected unary operators. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is the syntax of inverse scope in Hungarian, a language that largely disambiguates quantifier scope at spell-out. Inverse scope is attributed to alternate orderings of potentially large chunks of structure, but with appeal to base-generation, as opposed to nonfeature-driven movement as in Kayne 1998. The proposal is developed within mirror theory and conforms to the assumption that structures are antisymmetrical. The paper also develops a matching notion of scope in terms of featural domination, as opposed (...) to c-command, and applies it to otherwise problematic cases of pied piping. Finally, the interaction of different quantifier types is examined and the patterns are explained invoking morphological considerations on one hand and A-bar reconstruction on the other. (shrink)

One of the central issues in linguistics is whether or not language should be considered a self-contained, autonomous formal system, essentially reducible to the syntactic algorithms of meaning construction (as Chomskyan grammar would have it), or a holistic-functional system serving the means of expressing pre-organized intentional contents and thus accessible with respect to features and structures pertaining to other cognitive subsystems or to human experience as such (as Cognitive Linguistics would have it). The latter claim depends critically on the existence (...) of principles governing the composition of semantic contents. Husserl''s fourth Logical Investigation is well known as a genuine precursor for Chomskyan grammar. However, I will establish the heterogeneous character of the Investigation and show that the whole first part of it is devoted to the exposition of a semantic combinatorial system cognate to the one elaborated within Cognitive Linguistics. I will thus show how theoretical results in linguistics may serve to corroborate and shed light on those parts of Husserl''s Fourth Investigation that have traditionally been dismissed as vague or simply ignored. (shrink)

In this paper I address the issue of the subject matter of linguistics. According to the prominent Chomskyan view, linguistics is the study of the language faculty, a component of the mind-brain, and is therefore a branch of cognitive psychology. In his recent book Ignorance of Language Michael Devitt attacks this psychologistic conception of linguistics. I argue that the prominent Chomskyan objections to Devitt's position are not decisive as they stand. However, Devitt's position should ultimately be rejected as there is (...) nothing outside of the mind of a typical speaker that could serve to fix determinate syntactic rules of her language or constitute the supervenience base of her connection to any such rules. (shrink)

The basic thesis of this book is that there is a level of utterance-type meaning, which is distinct from, and intermediate between, sentence-type meaning and utterance-token meaning. That is, it is more than encoded linguistic meaning but generally less than the full interpretation of an utterance. Here are some examples, where (a) is a sentence and (b) is its utterance-type meaning in each case.

Neil Smith has worked across the full range of the discipline of linguistics and explored its interfaces with other disciplines. In all this work he has maintained a commitment to a mentalist approach to the study of language and communication. The aim of this Special Issue is to honour his work and commitment with a collection of papers which brings together work by phonologists, syntacticians, psycholinguists, and pragmatists who share this interest in language as a central component of the human (...) mind and who have worked with Neil, whether as colleagues, collaborators, or students. Neil’s career can be viewed in relation to three main developments in modern linguistics. First, it reflects the development of generativism, in both syntax and phonology. For Neil, this has meant working within, and exploring the ramifications of, the groundbreaking theoretical framework for linguistics initiated and developed by Noam Chomsky. Neil has given full expression to this intellectual debt in two book-length studies of Chomsky’s ideas and principles (Smith and Wilson 1979, Smith 1999) and in many papers and commentaries. Notwithstanding his unswerving Chomskyan allegiance, Neil has been open to, and has encouraged, the exploration of alternative approaches to both syntax and phonology, including optimality theory, GPSG, word grammar, and categorial grammar. The second development reflected in Neil’s work is the trend towards placing research in linguistics in the context of research in cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind and language - in other words, the development of linguistics as one of the cognitive sciences, again very much a Chomskyan initiative. This ‘cognitive turn’ can be seen as, at least in part, a consequence of a commitment to generativism and to linguistic theories that aim to go beyond detailed description of data to achieve explanatory adequacy. In the field of phonology, this search for explanatory adequacy led to Neil’s work on the acquisition of.... (shrink)

Philosophy for Linguists provides students with a clear, concise introduction to the main topics in the philosophy of language. Focusing on what linguists need to know and how philosophy relates to modern linguistics, the book is structured around key branches of linguistics: semantics, pragmatics, and language acquisition. Assuming no prior knowledge of philosophy, Siobhan Chapman traces the history and development of ideas in the philosophy of language and outlines the contributions of specific philosophers. The book is highly accessible and includes: (...) a general introduction and introductions to each chapter; numerous examples and quotations; comprehensive suggestions for further reading and an extensive glossary of linguistic terms. (shrink)

A reference guide to the work of figures who have played an important role in the development of ideas about language.

In the 1970s, the concept of "difference" transformed our understanding of language and our reading of literary texts. Since then it has found application in almost every branch of literary and cultural studies. In this accessible, lively volume, Mark Currie traces the diverse meanings and changing fortunes of the term from a wide geography of sources in philosophy, linguistics, feminism, cultural geography and cultural theory. The author follows the concept from its most widely studied articulations in structuralism and poststructuralism to (...) broader critical issues such as individuality, diversity and universality. He offers particular discussion of: *Identity and difference *Difference and reference *Differance *Different histories *Difference and equivalence Displaying a remarkable range of discussion and unique insight into underlying philosophical and social debates, Difference is the best possible introduction to a term at the very heart of recent critical thought. (shrink)

Parsing according to the principles of modern linguistic theory is only now becoming a computationally interesting task. We contribute to these developments by illustrating how the account of movement introduced by Chomsky inBarriers can be incorporated into a Static Discontinuity Grammar (SDG). We are concerned with A''-movement as reflected inwh movement of arguments and adjuncts. The resulting SDG can be processed by an SDG parser to recover the thematic information and constitutency structure associated with a natural language sentence.

What semantics should we attribute to mass expressions like "wisdom" and "love", which are derived from gradable expressions? We first examine how these expressions are used, then how they are interpreted in their various uses. We then propose a model to account for these data, in which derived mass nouns denote instances of properties.

This book deals with the need to rethink the aims and methods of contemporary linguistics. Orthodox linguists' discussions of linguistic form fail to exemplify how language users become language makers. Integrationist theory is used here as a solution to this basic problem within general linguistics. The book is aimed at an interdisciplinary readership, comprising those engaged in study, teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences, including linguistics, philosophy, sociology and psychology.

This paper addresses the two interpretations that a combination ofnegative indefinites can get in concord languages like French:a concord reading, which amounts to a single negation, and a doublenegation reading. We develop an analysis within a polyadic framework,where a sequence of negative indefinites can be interpreted as aniteration of quantifiers or via resumption. The first option leadsto a scopal relation, interpreted as double negation. The secondoption leads to the construction of a polyadic negative quantifiercorresponding to the concord reading. Given that (...) sentential negationparticipates in negative concord, we develop an extension of thepolyadic approach which can deal with non-variable binding operators,treating the contribution of negation in a concord context assemantically empty. Our semantic analysis, incorporated into agrammatical analysis formulated in HPSG, crucially relies on theassumption that quantifiers can be combined in more than one wayupon retrieval from the quantifier store. We also considercross-linguistic variation regarding the participation ofsentential negation in negative concord. (shrink)

It is argued that two different types of concept are often intermingled in discussions of Aktionsart. The most common type of classification is one of situation types, relating to the potential actualisation of a situation, although some of the definitions have to do with the actual realization of the situation. This distinction, adequately captured by the notions (a)telicity and (un)boundedness (Declerck 1989), is explored and it is shown how NPs, PPs and tense influence a sentence''s classification as (un)bounded.

This volume presents the semiotic and linguistic theory of extended axiomatic functionalism, focusing on its application to linguistic description.

Chomsky's current Biolinguistic (Minimalist) methodology is shown to comport with what might be called 'established' aspects of biological method, thereby raising, in the biolinguistic domain, issues concerning biological autonomy from the physical sciences. At least current irreducibility of biology, including biolinguistics, stems in at least some cases from the very nature of what I will claim is physiological, or inter-organ/inter-component, macro-levels of explanation which play a new and central explanatory role in Chomsky's inter-componential (interface-based) explanation of certain (anatomical) properties of (...) the syntactic component of Universal Grammar. Under this new mode of explanation, certain physiological functions of cognitive mental organs are hypothesized, in an attempt to explain aspects of their internal anatomy. Thus, the internal anatomy of the syntactic component exhibits features that enable it to effectively interface with (i.e. function in a coordinated fashion with) other 'adjacent' organs, such as the Conceptual-Intensional (C-I) ('meaning') system and the Sensory- Motor (SM) ('sound') system. These two interface systems take as their inputs the assembled outputs of the syntactic component and, as a result of the very syntactic structure imposed by the syntax (as opposed to countless imaginable alternatives) are then able to assign their (linearized) sound and (compositional) meaning interpretations. If this is an accurate characterization, Chomsky's long-standing postulation of mental organs, and I will argue, the advancement of new hypotheses concerning physiological inter-organ functions, has attained in current biolinguistic Minimalist method a significant unification with foundational aspects of physiological explanation in other areas of biology. (shrink)

Events and situations are represented by strings of temporally ordered observations, on the basis of which the events and situations are recognized. Allen’s basic interval relations are derived from superposing strings that mark interval boundaries, and Kamp’s event structures are constructed as projective limits of strings. Observations are generalized to temporal propositions, leading to event-types that classify event-instances. Working with sets of strings built from temporal propositions, we obtain natural notions of bounded entailment from set inclusions. These inclusions are decidable (...) if the sets are accepted by finite automata. (shrink)

In this paper we examine interactions of the reciprocal with distributive and collective operators, which are encoded by prefixes on verbs expressing the reciprocal relation: namely, the Czech distributive po and the collectivizing na-. The theoretical import of this study is two-fold. First, it contributes to our knowledge of how word-internal operators interact with phrasal syntax/semantics. Second, the prefixes po and na generate (a range of) readings of reciprocal sentences for which the Strongest Meaning Hypothesis (SMH) proposed by Dalrymple et (...) al. (1998) does not make the right predictions. The distributive prefix po prefers the Strong Reciprocity reading, although the SMH predicts that a weakening should take place, while with the prefix na we find cases where weaker reciprocal readings are preferable to the stronger ones predicted by the SMH. This behavior of po and na is, we propose, due to the way in which they modulate two factors that are crucial in the interpretation of reciprocal sentences: (i) the relevant subpluralities in the group denoted by the reciprocal's antecedent, and (ii) the strength of reciprocal relations. We provide a detailed analysis of the semantics of the prefixes po and na and their contribution to the meaning of reciprocal sentences within the general framework of event semantics with lattice structures. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky, the founding father of generative grammar and the instigator of some of its core research programs, claims that linguistics is a part of psychology, concerned with a class of cognitive structures employed in speaking and understanding. In a recent book, Ignorance of Language, Michael Devitt has challenged certain core aspects of linguistics, as prominent practitioners of the science conceive of it. Among Devitt’s major conclusions is that linguistics is not a part of psychology. In this thesis I defend (...) Chomsky’s psychological conception of grammatical theory. My case for the psychological conception involves defending a set of psychological goals for generative grammars, centring on conditions of descriptive and explanatory adequacy. I argue that generative grammar makes an explanatory commitment to a distinction between a psychological system of grammatical competence and the performance systems engaged in putting that competence to use. I then defend the view that this distinction can be investigated by probing speakers’ linguistic intuitions. Building on the psychological goals of generative grammar and its explanatory commitment to a psychological theory of grammatical competence, I argue that generative grammar neither targets nor presupposes non-psychological grammatical properties. The latter nonpsychological properties are dispensable to grammarians’ explanations because their explanatory goals can be met by the theory of grammatical competence to which they are committed. So generative grammars have psychological properties as their subject matter and linguistics is a part of psychology. (shrink)

Theory of language is an important factor in the plans of political and educational reform drawn by Italian philosophers of the eighteenth century. Analysis of language is a technique they often resort to when discussing the foundations of political philosophy and the ways and means of social communication. Interesting suggestions concerning philosophy of language can be found in the works of writers on political economy and philosophy of jurisprudence (Antonio Genovesi, Gaetano Filangieri, Cesare Beccaria, Melchiorre Gioia, Gian Domenico Romagnosi, among (...) others), where subjects such as abuse of words and linguistic arbitrarism are connected to theoretical and practical problems of the transition from feudal to bourgeois régime. (shrink)

This paper offers a new semantic theory of existentials (sentences of the form There be NP pivot XP coda ) in which pivots are (second order) predicates and codas are modifiers. The theory retains the analysis of pivots as denoting generalized quantifiers (Barwise and Cooper 1981; Keenan 1987), but departs from previous analyses in analyzing codas as contextual modifiers on a par with temporal/locative frame adverbials. Existing analyses universally assume that pivots are arguments of some predicate, and that codas are (...) main or secondary predicates. It is shown that these analyses cannot account for the behavior of codas with quantifiers and for the interaction of multiple codas, both of which receive a simple treatment on the proposed theory. The assimilation of codas to frame adverbials explains several semantic properties which have not been analyzed in the semantic literature, and that distinguish existentials from their copular counterparts. Furthermore, it highlights important properties of the semantics of modification and its relation to predication. (shrink)

The main result in this paper is a method for obtaining derivation trees from sentences of certain formal grammars. No parsing algorithm was previously known to exist for these grammars.Applied to Montague's PTQ the method produces all parses that could correspond to different meanings. The technique directly addresses scope and reference and provides a framework for examining these phenomena. The solution for PTQ is implemented in an efficient and useful computer program.

The representation of Neg-Raising in the grammar is a matter of controversy. I provide evidence for representing Neg-Raising as a kind of presupposition associated with certain predicates by providing a detailed analysis of NPI-licensing in Neg-Raising contexts. Specific features of presupposition projection are used to explain the licensing of strict NPIs under Neg-Raising predicates. Discussion centers around the analysis of a licensing asymmetry noted in Horn (1971, Negative transportation: Unsafe at any speed? In CLS 7 (pp. 120–133)).Having provided this analysis, (...) I go on to discuss its implications for the theory of NPI-licensing more generally. In particular, I discuss how the present proposal reflects on von Fintel’s (1999, Journal of Semantics, 16, 97–148) proposal to use Strawson downward entailment in the statement of NPI-licensing principles. (shrink)