Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 9 (EISS 9 ... - CSSP - CNRS

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coincident and dualic prefixes, meaning ‘half(way), middle’. But this expression, which is the only expression that seems to correspond to proportionality over sets of entities when considering its English translation, actually does not involve a type quantifier but rather a usual quantity as argument expression. Consider a more common spatial use of the verb illustrated in (40). In that use, the verb denotes a relation between two distances. The sentence in (40) is therefore more faithfully glossed as ‘how far we have gone is half (the distance we have to travel)’. In other words, the distances (the quantities in non-spatial uses of the verb) are treated as first-order individuals, not as properties of sets or relations among sets. (40) n2 uhte tshaP-te-w-ahs2n´2 niyo . lé . niyukwe . nú. then probably COIN-DUALIC-3Z/N.SG.AGT-half how far we (pl) have gone ‘then I guess we had gone halfway (to the store, along the railway tracks) (Barbara Schuyler, A ghost sighting, recorded 2008) The absence of proportional quantifiers is not an accidental lexical gap. It is part of a more general pattern: There is no (quantificational) partitive construction in Oneida that corresponds to English X of them. Consider the excerpt in (41) from a dialogue about hockey, produced by Mercy Doxtator in 1998. (41a) sets up a set of boys who all have on skates. (41b), a few lines later, discusses what some of these boys were wearing. Count clauses are used to talk about the two boys wearing black shirts and the three boys wearing white uniforms. These count clauses take exactly the same form as if one were talking about a set of two boys, not a subset of the set of boys who put on skates. In other words, the partitive meaning is inferred; it is not grammatically encoded. The general absence of (quantificational) partitive construction may be taken as evidence that the absence of quantifiers corresponding to English most is not merely an accidental gap. It reflects a general fact about Oneida structures that express quantifications: Quantities are treated as individuals and serve as arguments of predicates, they are not themselves predicates. And that constructional fact itself reflects the non-selective or direct nature of Oneida syntax. (41) a. Kwáh Just 6. Conclusion lati-kwekú te-hon-atePkhé . tslut-eP 3MASC.PL.AGT-all DUALIC-3MASC.PL.PAT-put.on.skates-STV ‘All of them have on skates.’ b. Te-hni-yáshe o-Psw´2 . t-aP DUALIC-3MASC.DU.AGT-be.together[STV] 3Z/N.SG.PAT-black-NOUN.SUFFIX lon-atyaPtawí . t-u kháleP áhs2 3MASC.PL.PAT-put.on.a.shirt-STV and three ni-hatí o-wískl-aP PART.3MASC.PL.AGT[be.that.many.STV] 3Z/N.SG.PAT-white-NOUN.SUFFIX ni-hu-hkw2nyó . t2 PART-3MASC.PL.AGT-have.on.an.outfit[STV] ‘Two of them have on black shirts and three of them have on white uniforms.’ In this paper, we have outlined a picture of Oneida that challenges what linguists, implicitly or explicitly, take to be two universals of syntax and the syntax/semantics interface: the syntac- 202
tic selection of dependent phrases by heads, and the concomitant use of functional application to combine the meanings of heads and selected dependents. If we are correct, the existence of languages like Oneida means we may have to revise our views on what can vary across languages and what is truly universal. Argument realization, for example, in the sense of Levin and Rappaport 1985, would not be a universal component of the syntax/semantics interface of natural languages. At a deeper level, Oneida’s direct syntax suggests that what we have been accustomed to thinking are the fundamental phenomena of syntax may be only one of the ways that syntax can look like. Argument realization, binding, control, valence alternations, raising, VP anaphors, constraints on extraction, and so forth are simply not part of Oneida syntax. Consequently, syntax is about more than these phenomena. But what is also interesting is how much one can do with a direct syntax and a conjunctive mode of semantic composition. Most of our communicative needs seem to be met by this ‘simpler’ kind of syntax and this ‘simpler’ semantics (as the absence of functional application removes (some of) the need for higher-order types). As mentioned earlier, the fact that a conjunctive mode of composition is good enough for most aspects of the semantics of natural language is nothing new to scholars who adopt a DRT approach to natural language semantics. However, it is news to see a language making so much use of that mode of semantic composition. It is also news that we do not need functional application to model composition (but see footnote 2 for some parallels between Riau Indonesian, as described by Gil, and Oneida). Even more interesting, in some sense, is the fact that the kind of expressive limitations one would expect to find in a language that uses a direct syntax and a conjunctive mode of semantic composition are indeed true of Oneida: Truly proportional quantifiers and quantificational partitive constructions seem to be systematically absent in Oneida. This is not to say Oneida could not have developed constructions to express proportional quantification. The point is that direct syntax is geared towards a ‘mathematical’ way of expressing quantification, and this way of expressing quantification does not allow for the expression of proportional quantification. How Oneida deals with the absence of proportional quantifiers and partitives in general can be understood in the context of tenseless languages. The absence of tense does not mean event descriptions are not ordered temporally. It just means that temporal ordering is a matter of inference (although defaults play an important role in this respect: see Langacker 1991 and Bohnemeyer and Swift 2004). Similarly the absence of proportional quantifiers or partitives does not mean those concepts are not expressed. The subset-superset relation is merely inferred. We began this paper by stressing the (rather obvious) importance of ‘exotica’ when trying to uncover universals. In this concluding paragraph, we go back and consider what Oneida has taught us. First and foremost, it has taught us that the venerable, 75-year-old approach to syntactic combinatorics (or an equivalent approach) is not universally at the core of the grammar of natural languages. It has also taught us that the 40-year-old use of functional application (or an equivalent approach) as the basic method for achieving semantic combinatorics is not universally needed. Finally, it has taught us that the 30-year-old generalized quantifier approach to natural language quantification is but one option and quantifiers are not universally present in natural languages. But ‘exotica’ not only can help us discover what is or is not universal, they can also help us uncover what we took for granted; in other words, help us reconstruct our analytic tools. An Oneida-centric reconstruction of syntax and the syntax/semantics interface looks eerily like Quine’s algebraic dream: Conjunction, variable identification, variable selection for external combinators (in this paper, index selection). The Oneida constructions accomplish that much, but nothing more. This algebraic ‘purity’ of Oneida’s syntax/semantics 203
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EISS 9 Empirical Issues in Syntax a
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Contents Preface v Valentina Bianch
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Preface The ninth volume of the ser
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contexts; we provide experimental e
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which we included random intercepts
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• Locality condition: The proposi
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[[(1B′)]] f = {invite(john, x) |
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focus projection, and require that
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The term ‘root clause’ was intr
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pared the degree of metrical promin
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Focus in situ + negative tag Focus
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Horvath, Julia. 2010. “Discourse-
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languages: Hungarian (H) and Romani
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attach-wh usually licenses a single
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on’ requires an overt preposition
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of syntactic priming: the stricter
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(43) Nu văd cum și, mai important
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for certain values to be identical
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ing the CNJ-LST proposed for coordi
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oth of these cases, as well as the
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References Abeillé, Anne. 2005. Le
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the addressee by virtue of linguist
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dressee is enticed by the imperativ
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some way. She notes that it is not
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. A: Give me an aspirin! B: # I don
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Effective preference structures can
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the content gets realized (i.e. he
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to the principle in (39), which aim
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Kaufmann follows the second strateg
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5. Portner 2005, 2007: a dedicated
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to realize the imperative once he a
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epresentation and defeasible reason
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equative reading can be paraphrased
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‘the greatest French soldier’ t
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2.4. Plurals 2.4.1. Plural definite
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group of people constituting the on
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3. A(n) sole/*only The solution to
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ichest i : richest ii :: only : sol
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In the case of a singular definite
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The lexical entries we have given f
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Strawson, P. F. 1950. On referring.
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In this paper, I show that a dialec
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(3) […] argretter, qu’dins ch
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2.3. Are there any restrictions on
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stand to the right of que2, which,
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heads FinP (Bovetto 2002, López 20
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(24) a. j’prétinds qu’à l’h
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. *T’as raison Colas, faut tacher
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6. Conclusion This paper shows that
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Appendix Frequency of DCC for embed
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In this paper, I provide empirical
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subjects are realized in a cleft to
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problem with the examples in (11),
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continuations chosen after exclusiv
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The questions were of two forms: ei
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quantified lexical subject any elem
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QUD:Qui a corrigé les copies? SF S
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Finally, the ranking proposed, with
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Onea, Edgar, and David Beaver. 2011
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semantics of these constructions ha
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filter. A quantifier like two sailo
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are not principal filters, can be c
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(22) monotone increasing NPs like a
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the equation of the formulas in (27
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presuppose the non-emptiness of the
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tune with the well-known observatio
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Keenan, Edward. 1996. The semantics
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(2) Paul veut que nous {soyons SUBJ
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(8) Le professeur subodore que les
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• verbs describing a course of ac
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The semantico-pragmatic condition h
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force is stronger than that of the
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dire (‘say’) or suggérer (‘s
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However, it must be stressed that t
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If it is the case that those moves
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certain environments. Again, the re
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Gross, Maurice. 1978. Correspondanc
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Semantically, the difference betwee
Page 158 and 159: (14) a. Descriptive meaning of (13)
Page 160 and 161: What is crucial here is that the en
Page 162 and 163: (30) a. Heute steigt sau die coole
Page 164 and 165: In the following, we will give a te
Page 166 and 167: These contrasts in their syntactic
Page 168 and 169: (50) [ QP je- [ DP der [ NP Student
Page 170 and 171: degree expression out of a seemingl
Page 172 and 173: 969264437.pdf. Koopman, Hilda, and
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Page 176 and 177: NP [AGR=[PERS=3,NUM=sing]] John S N
Page 178 and 179: Class CanSubj S Class DirObj VP Cla
Page 180 and 181: a. ⎡ ⎤ causation [ ] activity C
Page 182 and 183: lexical meaning PO pattern DO patte
Page 184 and 185: ⎡ ⎤ a. S causation [ ] NP [I= 1
Page 186 and 187: Class VSpine syntactic dimension VP
Page 188 and 189: sends ⎡ ⎤ causation EFFECTOR 8
Page 190 and 191: Crabbé, Benoit. 2005. Grammatical
Page 192 and 193: Claim 2. Semantic composition of ve
Page 194 and 195: (7) yo-k2nol-ú 3Z/N.SG.PAT-rain-ST
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Page 200 and 201: (26) a. ⎡ ⎤ English-transitive-
Page 202 and 203: Abstracting away from the particula
Page 204 and 205: As shown by the statement of the no
Page 206 and 207: (36) Áhs2 ni-ka-nláht-a-ke 2-té-
Page 210 and 211: aises, of course, the question of w
Page 213 and 214: A finer look at predicate decomposi
Page 215 and 216: kill is compatible with wide variet
Page 217 and 218: Do these relations correspond to di
Page 219 and 220: paper. The wider claim is that sube
Page 221 and 222: More significantly, all involve dir
Page 223 and 224: assume a syntactic view of event st
Page 225 and 226: other heads. Secondly, spell-out pa
Page 227 and 228: Finally, (53) shows the inchoative
Page 229 and 230: ⏟ AA ⏟ (61) [ v P … v TR [ Ak
Page 231 and 232: Negation-resistant polarity items A
Page 233 and 234: To summarize, these indefinites can
Page 235 and 236: covert alternative-sensitive operat
Page 237 and 238: (17) a. any book = ∃x∈D. x is a
Page 239 and 240: tion, negative quantifiers and with
Page 241 and 242: Since PPIs are endowed with the [+D
Page 243 and 244: 4.5. Extra-clausal negation A cruci
Page 245 and 246: What this data shows us is that PPI
Page 247 and 248: Prima facie it appears to be the ca
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