Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

180 Workshops
“‘Good design’ conditions are in part a matter of empirical discovery, though
within general guidelines of an aprioristic character, a familiar feature of rational
inquiry [...]. Even the most extreme proponents of deductive reasoning from first
principles, Descartes for example, held that experiment is critically necessary to
discover which of the reasonable options was instantiated in the actual world”.
It can be argued that the general architecture is universal, but the hierarchy of features is
language-specific and therefore subject to relativism.
The role of syntax in the interpretation of temporal connectives
Mylonaki, Agapi / Papadopoulou, Despina / Tsimpli, Ianthi-Maria
Thessaloniki
amylon@enl.auth.gr;depapa@enl.auth.gr;imt@enl.auth.gr
This paper begins with the standard observation that temporal connectives (while, after)can be
ambiguous between a temporal and a non-temporal (causal, concessive, opposition) reading in
languages like English and Greek. According to most analyses of Greek connectives, the
ambiguity is a matter of semantic and/or pragmatic factors (Kalokerinos 2001, Kitis 2000,
among others). Following Haegeman 2002, we argue that the temporal and the non-temporal
readings of the connectives are constrained by syntactic properties of the internal structure of
the adjunct clause as well as of the adjunction site (CP, vP) of the clause introduced by the
connective. With respect to the Greek connectives, our aim is to analyze the morpho-syntactic
properties which block the ambiguity of the connective and force the non-temporal reading. In
particular, aspectual properties of the verb in the adjunct clause in the temporal reading seem
to be subject to c-selection by the connective involved. Moreover, negation in the adjunct
clause blocks the temporal reading; we argue that this is due to the ‘island’ effects that
negation has in the aspectual dependency formed between the verb and the connective.
In order to show that aspect and negation constrain the ambiguous reading of temporal
connectives in Greek, we will present results from an interpretation task administered to adult
native Greek speakers which tested the availability of the temporal reading with aspectual
changes on the embedded verb and with the negative vs. affirmative status of the adjunct clause.
C-Related Parts of Speech
Panagiotidis, Phoevos / Grohmann, Kleanthes K.
Nicosia
panagiotidis@cycollege.ac.cy;kleanthi@ucy.ac.cy
We will revisit so-called “mixed projections” (or categories) — which combine properties
typically associated with two distinct grammatical categories — from a novel perspective and
argue for categorial switches in the syntactic derivation. These are categories in the phrasemarker
which instantiate the switch from one categorial sub-tree to another. The most
straightforward implementation of this idea, we will argue, is to adopt Grohmann’s (2003)
Prolific Domains. These are sub-parts of the derivation that encode specific contextual
information (typically relating to thematic, agreement or discourse properties). Our suggestion
is that a switch may only be merged at the edge of a Prolific Domain, giving rise to the
phenomenon that has been ascribed to “mixed projections” without adopting the
terminological difficulties borne by that term. This talk will concentrate on switches selecting
the agreement (Φ-) and thematic (Θ-) Prolific Domains in languages like Dutch or Spanish,
switching the category of the projection from clausal to nominal as we move up the tree.