Course Titel
Issues
in the Semantics of Modification
Teacher
Louise McNally
E-mail:
louise.mcnally@upf.edu
Postal Address: Department
of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra;
c/Roc Boronat, 138; 08018
Homepage: http://mutis.upf.es/~mcnally/
Intermediate
This is an
intermediate level course that presupposes some basic knowledge of (preferably
formal) semantics or the empirical domain to be discussed (mainly, the
syntactic distribution and interpretation of adjectives within noun phrases, on
the one hand, and noun incorporation and incorporation-like constructions, on
the other).
In this
course we will discuss various problems that modification raises for linguistic
theory, particularly at the interfaces between syntax and semantics, and
semantics and pragmatics. We will begin by reviewing the basic criteria that
have been explicitly or implicitly used in the syntax and semantics literature
to distinguish modifiers and modification from arguments and saturation. We
will then explore two different empirical domains – modification within noun
phrases, with particular emphasis on so-called subsective
modification; and noun incorporation and related phenomena within the verb
phrase. These data present challenges for the principle of compositionality,
theories of vagueness resolution, and theories of discourse reference, inter alia,
and we will assess some of the most prominent sorts of responses to these
challenges that have appeared in the (mainly formal semantics) literature. An
important goal of the course, beyond strengthening the students’ empirical and
theoretical background in the area of modification, is to promote deeper
reflection on the nature of language as a tool for representing and conveying
information.
Tuesday: Modification within the noun phrase (1). Modification, compositionality and vagueness: four approaches to the intersective/subsective distinction (Siegel, Larson, Pustejovsky, Asher).
Wednesday: Modification within the noun phrase (2). Modification of types vs. modification of tokens: relational and frequency adjectives. Modification vs. saturation in the noun phrase; modification and discourse reference. Adjectival vs. PP modification of event nominals.
Thursday: Modification within the verb phrase (1). Property-type nominals as verbal complements: the problem for semantic composition. Mini semantic typology of noun incorporation and related phenomena.
Friday: Modification within the verb phrase (2). Modification vs. saturation analyses of incorporation and related phenomena.
Background and preparatory readings:
Any basic textbook in semantics such as:
Chierchia, Gennaro & Sally McConnell-Ginet.1990/2000. Meaning and grammar. An introduction to semantics. Cambridge Mass.: The MIT Press.
De Swart, Henriette. 1998. Introduction to Natural Language Semantics. Stanford: CSLI.
Dowty, David, Robert Wall & Stanley Peters. 1981. Introduction to Montague Semantics. Dordrecht: Springer.
Heim, Irene & Angelika Kratzer. 1998. Semantics in generative grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.
Course readings and related bibliography:
Alexiadou, Artemis & Melita Stavrou. To appear. Ethnic adjectives as pseudoadjectives. Studia Linguistica.
Asher, Nicholas. 2007. Web of words: Lexical semantics in context. Ms., CNRS/U. Texas.
Chung, Sandra & William A. Ladusaw. 2006. Chamorro evidence for compositional asymmetry. Natural Language Semantics 14, 325-357.
Dayal, Veneeta. A semantics for pseudo-incorporation Ms., Rutgers University.
Dowty, David. 1989. On the semantic content of the notion of ‘thematic role’. In Gennaro Chierchia, Barbara H. Partee & Ray Turner (eds.), Properties, types, and meaning, Volume II, 69–129. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Espinal, M. Teresa & Louise McNally. 2009. Bare nominals and incorporating verbs in Spanish and Catalan. Ms. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona & Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Fábregas, Antonio. 2007. The internal syntactic structure of relational adjectives. Probus 19, 1-36.
Farkas, Donka & Henriëtte de Swart. 2003. The semantics of incorporation: From argument structure to discourse transparency. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Gehrke, Berit & Louise McNally. Frequency adjectives and assertions about event types. To appear in the Proceedings of SALT XIX.
de Hoop, Helen. 1992. Case configuration and noun phrase interpretation. Ph.D. dissertation, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
Larson, Richard K. 1998. Events and modification in nominals. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) VIII, 145-168.
Larson, Richard K. 1999. Lecture notes on adjectives (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5).
McNally, Louise. 1995. Bare plurals in Spanish are interpreted as properties. In Glyn Morrill & Richard Oehrle (eds.), Formal Grammar, 197–212. Barcelona: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.
McNally, Louise & Gemma Boleda. 2004. Relational adjectives as properties of kinds. Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 5, 179-196.
Partee, Barbara H. In press (for 2009). Formal semantics, lexical semantics, and compositionality: The puzzle of privative adjectives. Philologia 7:7-19.
Partee, Barbara. To appear. Privative Adjectives: Subsective plus Coercion. In Presuppositions and Discourse, eds. Rainer Bäuerle, Uwe Reyle and Thomas Ede Zimmermann. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Pustejovsky, James. 1995. The generative lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Van Geenhoven, Veerle. 1995. Semantic Incorporation: A uniform Semantics of West Greenlandic noun incorporation and West Germanic bare plural configurations. In Audra Dainora et al. (eds.) Papers from the 31st Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 171-186. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Van Geenhoven, Veerle. 1996. Semantic incorporation and indefinite descriptions: Semantic and syntactic aspects of West Greenlandic noun incorporation. Ph.D. dissertation, Universität Tübingen.