This paper investigates the semantics of measure phrases in Japanese. Based on new data, we argue that the interpretation of measure phrases in Japanese is sensitive to scale structure such that (i) measure phrases are introduced by a degree morpheme that selects only for gradable predicates whose scale contains a minimal element (i.e., a lower closed scale) and (ii) violations to this restriction are repaired via coercion, which forces a comparative interpretation with a contextually determined standard and (...) hence a minimal element. We compare the Japanese facts to data in other languages and argue that the requirement of having a minimal element is not specific to Japanese, but universal. We show that languages may vary in how they deal with potential violations of this universal constraint, including coercion of a contextually recoverable derived minimal element (Japanese), ungrammaticality (e.g., Spanish, Korean, Russian), and a hybrid system of ungrammaticality for some adjectives and allowed constraint violation for others (e.g., English, German, Italian). (shrink)

I should like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Professor H. Schultink, whose criticisms and careful reading helped me to improve considerably upon the clarity of exposition while I wrote this study, and whose seemingly innocent requests to elaborate confronted me time and again with the need of revising or abandoning ideas I thought stood on firm ground. His support, and Dr. M. C. van den Toom's gratefully acknowl edged willingness to read and evaluate the manuscript enabled me to (...) present this work as a thesis in the University of Utrecht. In more than one way, lowe a debt to Albert Kraak, Professor of Linguistics in the University of Nijmegen. His inspiring enthusiasm awakened my interest in linguistics when I was a student of his. He in troduced me to transformational grammar at a time when it seemed almost improper to talk about it, and the stimulating experience of writing a book on Dutch syntax together with him taught me invaluable lessons. I should also like to thank my friend and colleague Henk Verkuyl, to gether with whom I prepared an article on the subject of measuring duration in Dutch. Without our stimulating discussions on the subject, the fourth chapter of this study could never have been written in the present form. I am also indebted to him for criticisms and helpful suggestions. At an early stage I profited greatly from discussions with Pieter A. M. (shrink)

We present a set of experiments investigating how English- and Japanese-speaking children interpret Measure Phrase comparatives. We show that despite overt cues to the comparative interpretation, children representing both languages diverge from their adult counterparts in that they access a non-adult-like ‘absolute measurement’ interpretation. We propose to account for their response pattern by appealing to proposals by Svenonius and Kennedy and Sawada and Grano that Meas in the head of the DegP, which houses the differential, selects for an (...) absolute minimal value: zero. We argue that young children appeal to this absolute zero minimum in lieu of the correct derived standard, and must learn to override this value by appealing to the context to set the standard of comparison when interpretation requires them to do so. (shrink)

In this talk, I first systematize the analogies and complete the picture in some corners. Then, I formally relate the three constructions, and I derive their properties from a single operator. Previous analyses were not designed to account for all three constructions at the same time. Accordingly, I not only assess how well they generalize beyond their intended purpose, but I also evaluate them in their own right. Even so, this analysis improves on previous accounts in several ways. Although I (...) will not focus on this in the talk, the analysis of distributive quantification is compatible with more general analyses of cumulative and collective quantification such as Landman (2000). (shrink)

Word recognition is the Petri dish of the cognitive sciences. The processes hypothesized to govern naming, identifying and evaluating words have shaped this field since its origin in the 1970s. Techniques to measure lexical processing are not just the back-bone of the typical experimental psychology laboratory, but are now routinely used by cognitive neuroscientists to study brain processing and increasingly by social and clinical psychologists (Eder, Hommel, and De Houwer 2007). Models developed to explain lexical processing have also aspired (...) to be statements about the nature of human cognition (e.g., connectionist models, Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, and Patterson 1996). Words were convenient objects to study for cognitive psychologists because they are welldefined and their nature as alphabetic strings was a good fit to analysis with the computer programming languages of the 1970s and 1980s which excelled at string manipulation. But are words actually the privileged unit of mental representation and processing that all of this scientific attention makes them out to be? Like a growing number of other language researchers, our answer is no (see, e.g., (Bybee and Hopper 2001; Wray 2002). We propose that the mental representations for lexical structures form a continuum, from word combinations which have fossilized into single units (nightclub) to those that both exist as independent units and yet have bonds, varying in tightness, with the words with which they frequently co-occur (Harris 1998). The first line of support for this view is the simple observation that fluent speakers easily recognize the familiarity and cohesive quality of word combinations in their language. Examples in English include common noun compounds (last year, brand new), verb phrases (cut down, get a hold of, faced with) and other multi-word expressions such as common sayings and references to cultural concepts (saved by the bell, speed of light; Jackendoff 1995).. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

This paper examines some aspects of the grammar of measurement based on data from non-split and split measure phrase (MP) constructions in Japanese. I claim that the non-split MP construction involves measurement of individuals, while the split MP construction involves measurement of events as well as of individuals. This claim is based on the observation that, while both constructions are subject to some semantic restrictions in the nominal domain, only the split MP construction is sensitive to restrictions in (...) the verbal domain (namely, incompatibility with single-occurrence events and with individual-level predicates, and (un)availability of collective readings). It is shown that these semantic restrictions can be explained by a uniform semantic constraint on the measure function, namely, Schwarzschild’s [(2002). The grammar of measurement. The Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistics Theory, 24, 241–306] monotonicity constraint. In particular, I argue that, in the two constructions at issue, the measure function is subject to the monotonicity constraint, and that we observe different semantic restrictions depending on whether the measure function applies to a nominal or a verbal domain. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel semantic analysis of unit names (like pound and meter) and gradable adjectives (like tall, short and happy), inspired by measurement theory (Krantz et al. In Foundations of measurement: Additive and Polynomial Representations, 1971). Based on measurement theory’s four-way typology of measures, I claim that different adjectives are associated with different types of measures whose special characteristics, together with features of the relations denoted by unit names, explain the puzzling limited distribution of measure phrases, as (...) well as unit-based comparisons between predicates (as in the table is longer than it is wide). All considered, my analyses support the view that the grammar of natural languages is sensitive to features of measurement theory. (shrink)

According to what I call the Traditional View, there is a fundamental semantic distinction between counting and measuring, which is reflected in two fundamentally different sorts of scales: discrete cardinality scales and dense measurement scales. Opposed to the Traditional View is a thesis known as the Universal Density of Measurement: there is no fundamental semantic distinction between counting and measuring, and all natural language scales are dense. This paper considers a new argument for the latter, based on a puzzle I (...) call the Fractional Cardinalities Puzzle: if answers to ‘how many’-questions always designate cardinalities, and if cardinalities are necessarily discrete, then how can e.g. ‘2.38’ be a correct answer to the question ‘How many ounces of water are in the beaker?’? If cardinality scales are dense, then the answer is obvious: ‘2.38’ designates a fractional cardinality, contra the Traditional View. However, I provide novel evidence showing that ‘many’ is not uniformly associated with the dimension of cardinality across contexts, and so ‘how many’-questions can ask about other kinds of measures, including e.g. volume. By combining independently motivated analyses of cardinal adjectives, measure phrases, complex fractions, and degrees, I develop a semantics intended to defend the Traditional View against purported counterexamples like this and others which have received a fair amount of recent philosophical attention. (shrink)

Prosodic patterning is known to affect the impression that speakers make on their listeners. This study explores prosodic phrasing in good public speakers of American English and Czech. Czech is a West Slavic language whose intonation is reported to be flatter and prosodic phrases longer than in English. We analyzed prosodic characteristics of 10 speakers of Czech and American English who appeared in TED Talks, assuming such appearance to be a mark of a “good speaker.” Our objective was to see (...) whether prosodic phrasing will be more similar in these public speeches between the two languages. We measured the length of prosodic phrases, speech rate in each phrase, and pitch range and melodic variability in the entire phrase, as well as in its pre-nuclear and nuclear portion. The number of syllables per phrase was higher in Czech than in English, although phrases were generally very short in both languages. The melodic indicators confirm smaller melodic variability in Czech even in publicly performed TED Talks. Overall, our results show that there are differences between Czech and English prosodic phrasing in good public speakers but that the genre also affects phrasing. Prosodic rendition—especially prosodic phrase length and melodic variability—is therefore a vital, albeit somewhat language-specific aspect of speech performance which public speakers should pay close attention to, both in their native language and in foreign languages. (shrink)

This article concerns the distinction between memory-time and information-time, which appeared in Wittgenstein’s middle-period lectures and writings, and its relation to Wittgenstein’s career-long reflection about musical understanding. While the idea of “information-time” entails a public frame of reference typically pertaining to objects which persist in physical time, the idea of pure “memory-time” involves the totality of one’s present memories and expectations that do now provide any way of measuring time-spans. I argue that Wittgenstein’s critique of Augustine notion of pure memory-time (...) entails ipso facto a critique of an influential idea of musical motion, which has been recurring in the work of some major philosophers of music up until the present day. The article connects Wittgenstein’s critical remarks on the confused foundations of such “Augustinian Picture of Music” with his emphasis on the notion of phrasing or characterization in language and music. Wittgenstein’s reversal of Augustinian priorities regarding musical time brings to surface the particularity of expression and the aesthetically “right” in music, evoked by Wittgenstein’s remarks on simultaneity and tempo in music and language. Wittgenstein renders musical simultaneity as enabled by a “protocol” which inheres in musizieren, in the aptly collaborative quest for drawing in significance by means of the phrasing and re-phrasing of a passage in order to characterize it, enabling by means of such comparative investigation meaningful distinctions between right and wrong. (shrink)

This paper makes two central claims. The first is that there is an intimate and non-trivial relation between the mass/count distinction on the one hand and the measure/individuation distinction on the other: a defining property of mass nouns is that they denote sets of entities which can be measured, while count nouns denote sets of entities which can be counted. Crucially, this is a difference in grammatical perspective and not in ontological status. The second claim is that the mass/count (...) distinction between two types of nominals has its direct correlate at the level of classifier phrases: classifier phrases like two bottles of wine are ambiguous between a counting, or individuating, reading and a measure reading. On the counting reading, this phrase has count semantics, on the measure reading it has mass semantics. (shrink)

The study aimed to identify the role of measuring and evaluating performance in achieving the objectives of control and the performance of the job at the Islamic University in Gaza Strip. To achieve the objectives of the research, the researchers used the descriptive analytical approach to collect information which is the questionnaire that consisted of (22) phrases were distributed to three categories of employees of the Islamic University (Faculty Members and Their Assistants, Members of the Administrative Board, Senior Management). A (...) random sample of (314) employees was selected and 276 responses were retrieved with a recovery rate of 88.1%. The Statistical Analysis Program (SPSS) was used to enter process and analyze the data. The results of the research showed a positive role between measuring and evaluating the performance and achieving the objectives of the control of performance in the Islamic University from the point of view of the members (senior management, faculty and their assistants, and members of administrative board). The researchers also recommended a number of recommendations, most notably the provision of an appropriate level of the elements of the control systems today through the modernization and continuous development of performance measures and the need to provide the physical and financial resources necessary to continue the development and achievement within the university, to expand the development of technology in the various activities of the university through the construction of a complete and integrated system to support supervision systems in the university to suit the size of the university. The researchers also recommended following up and reviewing the performance measures and work to modify them in line with the mission and the goals of the university that it seeks to reach. (shrink)

Philosophers, linguists and others interested in problems concerning natural language frequently employ tools from logic and model theory. The question arises as to the proper interpretation of the formal methods employed—of the relationship between, on the one hand, the formal languages and their set-theoretic models and, on the other hand, the objects of ultimate interest: natural language and the meanings and truth conditions of its constituent words, phrases and sentences. Two familiar answers to this question are descriptivism and instrumentalism. More (...) recently, a third answer has been proposed: the logic as modelling view. This paper seeks to clarify and assess this view of logic. The conclusion is that we can successfully adopt the modelling perspective on a given piece of logical machinery only if we have to hand some other machinery to which we take the descriptive attitude. Thus, logic as modelling is not a full-fledged alternative to the descriptive view— for it cannot stand alone: it can at best be an addition to the descriptive perspective. The paper first presents the argument in a general, abstract form, before working through a detailed case study. The case examined is the one with respect to which the logic as modelling view has been developed in the greatest detail in the literature: the case of fuzzy model theory as an account of vagueness in natural language. (shrink)

Music exists not to be parsed, categorized, or otherwise processed, but because it provides enjoyment. Thus methodologies that concentrate on the cognitive aspects of music alone omit what is essential about this aesthetic form. This paper provides an alternative approach by proposing a measure of musical preference. Specifically, it is argued that a musical passage will be preferred to the extent that it induces synchrony in those brain structures that are responsible for processing the passage. It is first shown (...) that this conception is consistent with time-honored principle of unity in diversity. It is then argued that the synchrony measure follows from more recent results regarding a possible solution to the binding problem. The bulk of the paper, however, is concerned with verifying the measure via simulation. It is shown, in particular, that the measure applied to a network of interacting integrate and fire neurons responsible for the processing of musical stimuli produces results consistent with human musical preference. This was carried out in three areas in the context of Western classical and popular musical forms. First, the model was applied to the laws of voice leading and other principles developed in the period of common harmonic practice. Next, it was shown that the three most salient aspects of melody, the preponderance of stepwise transitions, the theme and variation nature of phrase development, and increased positive affect with exposure all follow directly from the model. Finally, it was demonstrated how a steady rhythm can increase neural synchrony and presumably positive affect. Additional simulations run on Turkish art songs show that the synchrony measure may have some applicability to non-Western musical forms. The paper concludes by arguing that the synchrony measure may, in certain cases, apply to non-musical aesthetic stimuli. (shrink)

L(ow) tone in Mandarin Chinese causes both downstep and post-low-bouncing. Downstep refers to the lowering of a H(igh) tone after a L tone, which is usually measured by comparing the H tones in a “H…HLH…H” sentence with a “H…HHH…H” sentence (cross-comparison), investigating whether downstep sets a new pitch register for the scaling of subsequent tones. Post-low-bouncing refers to the raising of a H tone after a focused L tone. The current study investigates how downstep and post-low-bouncing interact with focus and (...) phrasing in Mandarin Chinese. In the experiment, we systematically manipulated (a) the tonal environment by embedding two syllables with either LH or HH tone (syllable X and Y) sentence-medially in the same carrier sentences containing only H tones; (b) boundary strength between X and Y by introducing either a syllable boundary or a phonological phrase boundary; and (c) information structure by either placing a contrastive focus in the HL/HH word (XF), syllable Y (YF), or the sentence-final word (ZF). A wide-focus condition served as the baseline. With systematic control of focus and boundary strength around the L tone, the current study shows that the downstep effect in Mandarin is quite robust, lasting for 3–5 H tones after the L tone, but eventually levelling back again to the register reference line of a H tone. The way how focus and phrasing interact with the downstep effect is unexpected. Firstly, sentence-final focus has no anticipatory effect on shortening the downstep effect; instead, it makes the downstep effect lasts longer as compared to the wide focus condition. Secondly, the downstep effect still shows when the H tone after the L tone is on-focus (YF), in a weaker manner than the wide focus condition, and is overridden by the post-focus-compression. Thirdly, the downstep effect gets greater when the boundary after the L tone is stronger, because the L tone is longer and more likely to be creaky. We further analyzed downstep by measuring the F0 drop between the two H tones surrounding the L tone (sequential-comparison). Comparing it with F0 drop in all-H sentences (i.e., declination), it showed that the downstep effect was much greater and more robust than declination. However, creaky voice in the L tone was not the direct cause of downstep. At last, when the L tone was under focus (XF), it caused a post-low-bouncing effect, which is weakened by a phonological phrase boundary. Altogether, the results showed that although intonation is largely controlled by informative functions, the physical-articulatory controls are relatively persistent, varying within the pitch range of 2.5 semitones. Downstep and post-low-bouncing in Mandarin Chinese thus seem to be mainly due to physical-articulatory movement on varying pitch, with the gradual tonal F0 change meeting the requirement of smooth transition across syllables, and avoiding confusion in informative F0 control. (shrink)

This research examines whether the items of some of the most well-established five-factor inventories refer to competence. Results reveal that both experts and laymen can distinguish between items that refer to how competently a behavior is performed and items that do not. Responses to items that refer to competence create a higher-order factor in the personality inventories, and the variability in responses to competence-related items in personality self-ratings is best modeled as a general factor rather than as also tied to (...) the specific Big Five factors. We suggest that a focused debate on what personality items should refer to is likely to have considerable positive consequences for both theory and measurement of personality. (shrink)

A substantial portion of the knowledge base of psychology is based on subjective reports with a risk of information bias. The objective of the present study was to elucidate one contextual source of variance and potential bias in subjective reports: the influence of affective state at the time of responding to questionnaires. Employees were subjected to mood-induction procedures in the laboratory. Neutral, positive, and negative moods were induced by combinations of pictures from the international affective picture set and music. The (...) subjects responded to questions on visual analog scales in order to optimize sensitivity and attenuate short-term memory effects. Most subjects exhibited significant affective-state inductions with no change in arousal. The analyses took affective response to the manipulation into account. Only four of 20 questions were somewhat influenced by induced affective state: job overload, social support from co-workers, satisfaction with getting to develop personally, and an item measuring agreeableness. In general, responding to questions of work that were phrased for valence was little or insignificantly influenced by induced affective state. (shrink)

To sum up on forms and rightness. No one wants poetry to be like filling out a form, though plenty of poems look dismally like it. The forms were there to be wrestled with mightily, because they silently and emptily, till one filled them up with the thing said, stood for the recalcitrant outside and other that knows nothing of the human will. The mindless rigidity in principle of the verse patterns suggestively compounded with the sinewy nature of the speaking (...) voice that flowed in continuous energy through the marked-off graph of foot and line and strophe. Together they might be taken to stand for two powers of the mind that ought to work with and against one another to the same effect: the streamy nature of association, said Coleridge, that thinking curbs and rudders. Ezra Pound's commandment to the poet, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome, is a good warning against monotonous cadences; but taken literally it invites the reply that Beethoven did both. For art is a place where you make choices, sometimes difficult ones that require you decide not between good and bad but between this good and that: very often it is between the beauty of a line and the sense of the whole thing. A proverb says you can't do two things at once; but it is conspicuous that in art you must always be doing two things at once, knowing that that is only the minimum requirement: And twofold Always. May God us keepFrom Single vision & Newton's sleep! Howard Nemerov, professor of English at Washington University, is the author of, among other works, Figures of Thought: Speculations on the Meaning of Poetry and Other Essays and The Collected Poems, for which he received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1978. See also: "Strict Form in Poetry: Would Jacob Wrestle with a Flabby Angel" by Peter Viereck in Vol. 5, No. 2. (shrink)

This paper provides a new account of positive versus negative antonyms. The data includes well-known linguistic generalizations regarding negative adjectives, such as their incompatibility with measure phrases (cf. two meters tall/ *short) and ratio phrases (twice as tall/ #short) as well as the impossibility of truly crosspolar comparisons (*Dan is taller than Sam is short). These generalizations admit a variety of exceptions, e.g., positive adjectives that do not license measure phrases (cf. #two degrees warm/cold) and rarely also negative (...) adjectives that do (cf. two hours late/early). Furthermore, new corpus data is presented regarding the use of twice with positive and negative adjectives. The analysis the paper presents supposes that grammar associates gradable adjectives with measure functions—mapping of entities to a set of degrees isomorphic to the real numbers (Kennedy, Projecting the adjective: The syntax and semantics of gradability and comparison, 1999). On this analysis, negative adjectives map entities to values that are linearly reversed and linearly transformed in comparison with their values in the positive antonyms. As shown, the generalizations, as well as their exceptions, directly follow. Negative polarity is explained in terms of function reversal, and non-licensing of measure phrases is explained in terms of transformation by an unspecified value. (shrink)

Structuring Sense explores the difference between words however defined and structures however constructed. It sets out to demonstrate over three volumes, of which this is the first, that the explanation of linguistic competence should be shifted from lexical entry to syntactic structure, from memory of words to manipulation of rules. Its reformulation of how grammar and lexicon interact has profound implications for linguistic, philosophical, and psychological theories about human mind and language. Hagit Borer departs from both language specific constructional approaches (...) and lexicalist approaches to argue that universal hierarchical structures determine interpretation, and that language variation emerges from the morphological and phonological properties of inflectional material. In Name Only applies this radical approach to nominal structure. Integrating research in syntax, semantics, and morphology, the author argues that nominal structure is based on the syntactic realization of semantic notions such as classifier, quantity, and reference. In the process she seeks to do away with lexical ambiguity and type-shifting. Among the topics she considers are the interpretation of proper names, the mass-count distinction, the weak-strong interpretation of quantifiers, partitive and measure phrases, and the structural representation of the definite article. In the process she explores inter-language variation through the properties of the morpho-phonological system. The languages discussed include English, Chinese, Italian, and Hebrew. (shrink)

The semantic literature takes degree operators like the comparative, but also measure phrases, the equative, the superlative and so on, to be quantifiers over degrees. This is well motivated by their semantic contribution, but leads one to expect far more scope interaction than is actually observed. This paper proposes an alternative-semantic analysis of certain degree constructions, in particular constructions with little and other negative antonyms. Restrictions on scope can then be explained as intervention effects.

One of the fundamental properties of human language is movement, where a constituent moves from one position in a sentence to another position. Syntactic theory has long been concerned with properties of movement, including locality restrictions. This work investigates how different movement operations interact with one another, focussing on the special case of smuggling. The contributions in this volume each describe different areas where smuggling derivations play a role, including passives, causatives, adverb placement, the dative alternation, the placement of (...) class='Hi'>measure phrases, wh-in-situ and word order in ergative languages. Other issues addressed in the volume include the freezing constraint on movement and the acquisition of smuggling derivations by children. (shrink)

The standard versions of predicativism are committed to the following two theses: proper names are count nouns in all their occurrences, and names do not refer to objects but express name-bearing properties. The main motivation for predicativism is to provide a uniform explanation of referential names and predicative names. According to predicativism, predicative names are fundamental and referential names are explained by appealing to a null determiner functioning like “the” or “that.” This paper has two goals. The first is to (...) reject the predicativists’ explanation of the two types of names. I present three syntactic counterexamples to the predicativists’ account of referential names: incorporation, modification, and measure phrase uses. The second goal is to present a novel strategy to explain the two types of names. I propose that referential names are fundamental but that there are null morphemes available for transforming a name into a count noun (and possibly into other syntactic categories). (shrink)

Mandarin Chinese, along with Japanese, Yorùbá, Mòoré, and Samoan, has been argued to lack ‘degree abstraction’, a configuration at LF involving lambda abstraction over a degree variable. These languages are claimed to have a negative setting for a hypothesized ‘Degree Abstraction Parameter’. Recent work, however, has argued for degree abstraction in Japanese and Yorùbá, and degree abstraction has been detected in a number of additional languages. Could it in fact be universal? Here, we focus on the case of Mandarin, and (...) argue that Mandarin has degree abstraction too. We offer three arguments in favor of degree abstraction in Mandarin, based on attributive comparatives, comparatives with embedded predicates, and scope interactions with modals. We also rebut prior arguments for the lack of degree abstraction in Mandarin, considering degree questions, measure phrases, and negative island effects. Taken together, these results show that degree abstraction is not a parameter along which Mandarin and English vary, and suggest rather that degree abstraction may be universally available. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel semantic analysis of unit names and gradable adjectives, inspired by measurement theory (Krantz et al 1971). Based on measurement theory's typology of measures, I claim that different predicates are associated with different types of measures whose special characteristics, together with features of the relations denoted by unit names, explain the puzzling limited distribution of measure phrases.

This paper presents a novel semantic analysis of unit names and gradable adjectives, inspired by measurement theory (Krantz et al 1971). Based on measurement theory's typology of measures, I claim that different predicates are associated with different types of measures whose special characteristics, together with features of the relations denoted by unit names, explain the puzzling limited distribution of measure phrases.

In the International System of Units (SI), ‘meter’ is defined in terms of seconds and the speed of light, and ‘second’ is defined in terms of properties of cesium 133 atoms. I show that one consequence of these definitions is that: if there is a minimal length (e.g., Planck length), then the chances that ‘meter’ is completely determinate are only 1 in 21,413,747. Moreover, we have good reason to believe that there is a minimal length. Thus, it is highly probable (...) that ‘meter’ is indeterminate. If the meter is indeterminate, then any unit in the SI system that is defined in terms of the meter is indeterminate as well. This problem affects most of the familiar derived units in SI. As such, it is highly likely that indeterminacy pervades the SI system. The indeterminacy of the meter is compared and contrasted with emerging literature on indeterminacy in measurement locutions (as in Eran Tal’s recent argument that measurement units are vague in certain ways). Moreover, the indeterminacy of the meter has ramifications for the metaphysics of measurement (e.g., problems for widespread assumptions about the nature of conventionality, as in Theodore Sider’s Writing the Book of the World) and the semantics of measurement locutions (e.g., undermining the received view that measurement phrases are absolutely precise as in Christopher Kennedy’s and Louise McNally’s semantics for gradable adjectives). Finally, it is shown how to redefine ‘meter’ and ‘second’ to completely avoid the indeterminacy. (shrink)

The following contribution1 was inspired by Cleo Condoravdi’s article on NPI licensing in temporal clauses (Condoravdi, this volume). Condoravdi gives a coherent and comprehensive account of be- fore which crucially involves coercion of propositions to the earliest or maximal times at which the propositions are true, and a modal component for non-factual interpretations. I argue for a nonmodal, non-coercive analysis of clauses like [A before B] as ‘A is the case when B has not been the case’, triggering a conversational (...) implicature that B will be the case later. I will discuss temporal operators involving measure phrases, like three hours before, and I will show that so-called “expletive” negation in corresponding clauses in German is, in fact, interpreted as negation. (shrink)

Degree readings of size adjectives, as in big stamp-collector, cannot be explained away as merely the consequence of some extragrammatical phenomenon. Rather, this paper proposes that they actually reflect the grammatical architecture of nominal gradability. Such readings are available only for size adjectives in attributive positions, and systematically only for adjectives that predicate bigness. These restrictions can be understood as part of a broader picture of gradable NPs in which adnominal degree morphemes—often overt—play a key role, analogous to their role (...) in the extended AP. Size adjectives acquire degree readings through a degree morpheme similar to the one that licenses AP-modifying measure phrases. Its syntax gives rise to positional restrictions on the availability of these readings, and the semantics of degree measurement interacts with the scale structure of size adjectives to give rise to restrictions on the adjective itself. (shrink)

This paper explores the hypothesis that all comparative sentences— nominal, verbal, and adjectival—contain instances of a single morpheme that compositionally introduces degrees. This morpheme, sometimes pronounced much, semantically contributes a structure-preserving map from entities, events, or states, to their measures along various dimensions. A major goal of the paper is to argue that the differences in dimensionality observed across domains are a consequence of what is measured, as opposed to which expression introduces the measurement. The resulting theory has a number (...) of interesting properties. It characterizes the notion of ‘measurement’ uniformly across comparative constructions, in terms of non-trivial structure preservation. It unifies the distinctions between mass/count nouns and atelic/telic verb phrases with that between gradable and non-gradable adjectives. Finally, it affords a uniform characterization of semantically anomalous comparisons across categories. (shrink)

Phrase structure trees have a hierarchical structure. In many subjects, most notably in {\bf taxonomy} such tree structures have been studied using ultrametrics. Here syntactical hierarchical phrase trees are subject to a similar analysis, which is much simpler as the branching structure is more readily discernible and switched. The occurrence of hierarchical structure elsewhere in linguistics is mentioned. The phrase tree can be represented by a matrix and the elements of the matrix can be represented by triangles. (...) The height at which branching occurs is not prescribed in previous syntactic models, but it is by using the ultrametric matrix. In other words the ultrametric approach gives a complete description of phrase trees, unlike previous approaches. The ambiguity of which branching height to choose, is resolved by postulating that branching occurs at the lowest height available. An ultrametric produces a measure of the complexity of sentences: presumably the complexity of sentences increases as a language is acquired so that this can be tested. All ultrametric triangles are equilateral or isosceles. Here it is shown that \={X} structure implies that there are no equilateral triangles. Restricting attention to simple syntax a minimum ultrametric distance between lexical categories is calculated. A matrix constructed from this ultrametric distance is shown to be different than the matrix obtained from features. It is shown that the definition of {\sc c-command} can be replaced by an equivalent ultrametric definition. The new definition invokes a minimum distance between nodes and this is more aesthetically satisfying than previous varieties of definitions. From the new definition of {\sc c-command} follows a new definition of of the central notion in syntax namely {\sc government}. (shrink)