Syntax and Semantics Circle
schedule

PAST MEETINGS:

13 december
RRR week: TBD

6 december
LSA Practice Talks

29 november
no meeting- thanksgiving

22 november
Mairi McLaughlin (UCB): The Special Status of the Passive in Journalistic French: An Historical Perspective

15 november
Marine Vuillermet (UCB): The Grammar of Fear in Ese'eja

Ese’eja (Takanan) is an Amazonian language spoken by around 1500 people in Peru and Bolivia. Besides the expected lexical resources like ‘be afraid / scared of’, ‘scare X’, etc., this language exhibits three grammatical devices to express fear. The first one, an apprehensional epistemics marker (Lichtenberk 1995), belongs to the obligatory tense/mood category.

(1) Ijya-ka-'io-chana-mi!
eat-3A-TEL-APPR-2ABS
‘(Watch out) he might eat you! (the devil, who whistled last night)’.

The second one is a ‘lest’-clause subordinate marker (Dixon 1977).

(2) Banco wana-nahe [kachina e-nobi-ki-ji kuanije].
bench(Sp) lay-P AS chicken(Sp) NMZ-enter-GO_TO_DO-NMZ LEST
‘I laid the bench so that the chicken do not get in.’ {elicited}

The third one is a postposition, called ‘aversive’.

(3) E-sho'i dokuei'ai=yajaho towaa-'io-nahe ena=wasije.
NPF-child stag=A VERSIVE jump-TEL-P AS water=ALL
‘The child jumped into the water for fear of the stag.’ {EpFWA.048}

'Fear’ morphemes are attested in many other languages of the world, apparently to the exception of Africa. Their systematic investigation may have been impaired by the great variety of existing terms to refer to them: apprehensives (Aikhenvald 2003; Epps 2008), admonitives (mostly in Cariban languages, as in (Meira 1999; Cáceres 2011)), boulomaic (Rescher 1968, 24–26), ‘certainty’, ‘prediction’ or ‘warning’ (Derbyshire 1979, cited in Palmer 1986, 119), evaluative (Palmer 1986, 119), lest-clauses (mostly in Australian languages, as in (Dixon 1977) and (Austin 1988)), monitive (optative) (Shipley 1964, 46–52, cited in Mithun 1999, 171), monitory (Shopen 2007, 315), negative purpose marker, objurgatif (objurgative?) (Queixalós 2000, 297ff.), prevent(at)ive, timitive (Palmer 2001, 131; Lichtenberk 2008) or volitive of fear (de Reuse 1988). Note that Ese’eja’s sister languages do not seem to have such morphemes.

In some languages, the ‘fear’ morphemes have raised questions about their polysemy or syntactic dependency (main clause or subordinate marker). The three distinct ‘fear’ markers in Ese’eja may help to solve this issue as they highlight the necessity to set apart distinct functions in the semantic continuum. For example, only the apprehensional epistemics marker -chana in (1) expresses the speaker’s attitude, and hence a warning to the hearer. The two other morphemes can refer to the speaker’s fear only if the main event is marked by the imperative mode, otherwise, they refer to the fear of the main verb’s agent.

8 november
Reading Discussion: Problems of Projection (Chomsky 2013)

Please join us in a discussion of Chomsky's (2013) Problems of Projection. A pdf of the paper can be found here. The abstract follows.

With the crystallization of the “generative enterprise” half a century ago, two concepts became salient: the initial state and final states of the language faculty, respectively, UG (the genetic component) and I-languages. Since then inquiry has gained far greater scope and depth. It has also led to sharpening of fundamental principles of language. At first, descriptive adequacy appeared to require rich and complex assumptions about UG. A primary goal has always been to overcome this deficiency. Core properties of concern have included compositionality, order, projection (labeling), and displacement. Early work assigned the first three to phrase structure rules and the last to the transformational component. Simplification of computational procedures suggests that compositionality and displacement (along with the “copy theory”) fall together while order may be a reflex of sensorimotor externalization, conclusions that have far-reaching consequences. As for labeling, minimal computation restricts options to the few that have considerable empirical support.

1 november
Matthew Goss (UCB): A Blending Analysis of the English Get-Passive

The English get-passive construction (1) has previously been studied for its syntactic and semantic relations to the more familiar be-passive (2), and to the plethora of related ‘get’ constructions such as the get-inchoative (3) and the get-causative (4).

1. The man got killed by a whale

2. The man was killed by the whale

3. He got sick

4. I got him fired

Most commonly, the get-passive has been studied for its notable adversative semantics. However, few previous researchers have attempted to provide an in-depth analysis of the semantics of the get-passive in context and an explanation for the origin of its common adversative reading. In this talk I present data to characterize the array of typical uses and senses of the get-passive, and use blending theory to provide an explanation of its semantics. This blending analysis is then brought to bear on a range of malefactive and adversative phenomena from other languages.

25 october
Ethan Nowak (UCB): Demonstratives and presupposition

Although non-deictic demonstratives—demonstratives which aren’t used to pick out an individual from the context of utterance—have received significant attention recently in the philosophical literature, existing semantic theories predict that they should be much more widely available than they in fact are. I introduce data which I take to undermine those theories, and I develop an alternative which I claim is both empirically superior and theoretically attractive.

18 october
Herman Leung (UCB): Subsyllabic semantics and pragmatics in Cantonese final particles

This talk examines Cantonese final particles (CFPs) with two agendas in mind: (i) determining the semantics of several subsyllabic segments in CFPs and their compositional contribution, and (ii) outlining the relevant analytical challenges CFPs present with respect to their phonology and morphosyntax. CFPs are exceptionally rich in number, totaling 30 to 90-some particles according to different analyses. As sentential modifiers, CFPs operate in the propositional, discourse, speech act, and modality domains (Sybesma & Li 2007); their diverse pragmatic uses present challenges for grammatical analysis. Sentence (1) illustrates one such challenge in determining the semantic contribution of ze1 (cf. Fung 2000: 48):

(1) gaan1 uk1 hou2 daai6 (ze1)
CL house very big (ze1)
‘The apartment is very big’
Possible pragmatic readings with ze1: reporting, refutation, downplaying, persuasion, or boasting

My analysis draws on previous studies (Law 1990; Fung 2000; S&L 2007) in arguing that certain onsets, nuclei, codas, and tones in CFPs are individual morphemes. I refine previous definitions of the coda -k and other subsyllabic units in 5 minimal pairs (aa(k)3, gaa(k)3, laa(k)3, lo(k)3, ze(k)1), and propose a compositional rule to account for all pragmatic uses described in the literature. Finally, I address whether this proposal can apply to other CFPs, as well as issues regarding interaction with boundary intonation, clustering patterns, and syntactic structure.

11 october
CUSP 6: The 6th California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics Conference

4 october
Michael Rieppel (UCB): Identifying Descriptions

The Fregean analysis of definite descriptions as referring expressions predicts that copular sentences with definite descriptions in postcopular position will invariably be interpreted as identity statements. But as numerous diagnostics show, such sentences are frequently capable of receiving a predicative reading. I argue that a proposal according to which referring expressions can quite generally undergo a type shift that transforms them into predicates does not succeed. In particular, I show that descriptions exhibiting the structure [the + NP + of + Proper Name] fall into two semantically distinct classes, and that the members of one of these classes of descriptions (the ones I call 'identifying') are incapable of receiving a predicative reading. The type-shifting proposal therefore overgenerates. I argue that we can account for the data by instead distinguishing two definite determiners, and go on to show how the two-determiner proposal will also let us explain why copular sentences with proper names in postcopular position fail to have a predicative reading.

27 september
Line Mikkelsen (UCB): Degrees of word order freedom in Karuk

This talk examines certain word order patterns in Karuk (Hokan, Northern California) in the light of classic and more recent theoretical approaches to the syntax of non-configurational languages.

20 september
Stephanie Farmer (UCB): Two Kinds of Plural in Máíhɨ̀kì

This talk will attempt to give a semantic account for the distribution of two kinds of morphological nominal plural in Máíhɨ̀kì, a Western Tukanoan language spoken in the Amazon basin of northern Peru. It has been noted (e.g. by Corbett 2000; Chierchia 1998) that there are in general two types of systems for marking nominal plurality: 1) systems in which plurality is marked obligatorily on a subset of nouns (the count nouns), as in English or many Romance languages, and 2) systems in which plurality is marked 'optionally' by classi er-like elements, as in many East Asian languages. These two types of plural systems have been argued to be fundamentally di erent on the basis that in the East-Asian-type system, plurals (and classi er-like elements in general) are associated with de niteness or speci city, whereas determiners are responsible for this e ect in the Romancelike systems. A more recent paper (Nomoto 2013) argues that speci city and plurality in Japanese, Chinese and Malay are indicated via separate morphemes and are linked indirectly through syntactic agreement between Num and D. According to my analysis, Máíhɨ̀kì uses a mixture of the two types of plural-marking systems that have been proposed to exist in the world's languages. For the majority of nouns, kinds are indicated with bare nouns and plurality is marked with an 'optional' classi er-like sux that in most cases indicates speci city, along the lines of the number systems of many East-Asian languages. For a subset of the lexicon, plurality is obligatorily marked by a di erent sux plus a stem alternation. The remarkable thing about Máíhɨ̀kì is not that both kinds of plural exist in the language, but that these plurals can (and in certain cases must) co-occur on a single noun. This suggests that the two plurals do not indicate precisely the same thing. In this talk I will attempt to answer the question, 'What's the di erence between them, and how can this di erence shed light on crosslinguistic variation in the marking of plurality?

13 september
Vera Gribanova (Stanford): Subject position, case and agreement in Uzbek

6 september
Alexander Tokar (UCB): The Semantics and Pragmatics of Euphemism-Formation

In this talk I will argue that quasi-idiomatization, which can be defined as adding covert idiomatic meanings to overt constituents’ meanings (Mel‘čuk 1995: 183; cf. Tokar 2012: 150–152), represents the default euphemism-formation mechanism in German and many other languages. This claim is based on my analysis of the diachronic history of 1037 German euphemisms that deal with four prominent taboo topics: economic and financial problems, death, sexuality, and reproductive organs. Of 1037 euphemisms from http://euphemismen.de/, a freely available online collection of German euphemisms that has served as a database of euphemistic expressions for the current study, 579 could be analyzed as instances of quasiidiomatization, while only 421 have come into existence via metaphorization. Of the 579 quasi-idiomatic euphemisms, 471 are products of hypernymization, i.e., their covert idiomatic meanings specify in some way their overt constituents’ meanings (e.g., the idiomatic meaning “sex with a third party” specifies the meaning “deceive” of the euphemism deceive in My girlfriend deceived me), and 90 are euphemisms that have been created with the help of an antecedent–consequent strategy (Warren 1992: 131, 143–146), i.e., expressions like sleep with somebody whose overt constituents’ meanings denote events that either immediately precede or follow taboo events (e.g., having sex is often followed by lovers falling asleep together in the same bed). While both economic and sexual euphemisms are usually instances of hypernymization, the taboo meanings “to die,” “to be dead,” and “to kill” are euphemized almost exclusively with the help of the antecedent–consequent strategy. Metaphorization plays an important role in the euphemization of reproductive organs and other sexualityrelated concepts, but its role in the euphemization of death and economic problems is almost negligible.

30 august
Clara Cohen (UCB): Advanced LaTeX Tutorial