Linguistik
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Part of linguistic competence involves the ability to construct and interpret words. The average high school student knows about 60,000 words whose form and meaning are not derived from those of other words. Such words including read, language, on, cold, and if, to name but a few - must be learned and stored as separate items in the lexicon (or mental dictionary). However, countless other words can be constructed and comprehended by the application of quite general rules to more basic words. For example, any speaker of English who knows the meaning of the noun fax - and the verb derived from it - could form and interpret words such as faxable (for things that can be faxed) and fax machine (for the device that sends and receives faxes). The system of categories and rules involved in word formation and interpretation is called morphology. This chapter presents an introduction to the study of morphology, beginning with the inventory of notions relevant to the analysis of word structure.
Coreference in dialogue
(1997)
Since the early days of discourse analysis coreference has always been considered a major factor in the formation of texts and dialogues. The repetition of nominal elements and the anaphoric use of pronouns in successive sentences is a fundamental cohesive pattern which ties sentences together and contributes to the coherence of sequences. "La coherence transphrastique trouve dans la pronominalisation un des procedes les plus efficaces" (Stati 1990, 160). The basic structural pattern on which linguists focused their interest in the early 1970s is captured by the following examples: (1) A man entered the house. After closing the door, the man sat down. He was tired. (2) Peter The man entered the house. He was tired. He ...
Simplicity as a methodological orientation applies to linguistic theory just as to any other field of research: ‘Occam’s razor’ is the label for the basic heuristic maxim according to which an adequate analysis must ultimately be reduced to indispensible specifications. In this sense, conceptual economy has been a strict and stimulating guideline in the development of Generative Grammar from the very beginning. Halle’s (1959) argument discarding the level of taxonomic phonemics in order to unify two otherwise separate phonological processes is an early characteristic example; a more general notion is that of an evaluation metric introduced in Chomsky (1957, 1975), which relates the relative simplicity of alternative linguistic descriptions systematically to the quest for explanatory adequacy of the theory underlying the descriptions to be evaluated. Further proposals along these lines include the theory of markedness developed in Chomsky and Halle (1968), Kean (1975, 1981), and others, the notion of underspecification proposed e.g. in Archangeli (1984), Farkas (1990), the concept of default values and related notions. An important step promoting this general orientation was the idea of Principles and Parameters developed in Chomsky (1981, 1986), which reduced the notion of language particular rule systems to universal principles, subject merely to parametrization with restricted options, largely related to properties of particular lexical items. On this account, the notion of a simplicity metric is to be dispensed with, as competing analyses of relevant data are now supposed to be essentially excluded by the restrictive system of principles.
It is widely believed that existential quantifiers can bring about the semantic effects of a scope which is wider than their actual syntactic scope (See Fodor & Sag (1982), Cresti (1995), Kratzer (1995), Reinhart (1995) and Winter (1995), among many others.) On the other hand, it is assumed that the syntactic scope of universal quantifiers can be determined unequivocally by the semantics. This paper shows that this second assumption is wrong; universal quantifiers can also bring about scope illusions, though in a very specific environment. In particular, we argue that in the environment of generic tense, universal quantifiers can show the semantic effects of a scope which is wider than the one that is actually realized at LF. Our argument has four steps. First, we show that in generic contexts, universal quantifiers escape standard “scope-islands” (Section 1). Second, we show how the effects of wide scope in generic contexts can be achieved without syntactic wide scope (Section 2.1). Third, we show that this result is actually forced on us, once we take seriously certain independent issues concerning the interpretation of generic tense (Sections 2.2 - 2.4). Finally, the semantics of generic tense and, in particular, its interaction with focus, will yield some intricate new predictions, which, as we show, are borne out (Sections 3 - 5).