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Miners and modals
(2018)
I generalise Kolodny and MacFarlane’s miners puzzle by showing epistemic analogues of their case exist. After motivating various conservative approaches to the original problem, I show how they fail to solve the problem in its epistemic guise. I argue that a probabilistic approach to information-sensitivity gives a general solution to the problem.
The Wolof imperfective auxiliary di is compatible with event-in-progress, habitual and future readings. Furthermore, while varieties of all these readings are available for di when it sits in a syntactically low position, only future readings are available when it sits in a syntactically high position. We aim to account for this puzzle by combining several ingredients independently motivated in the literature: (i) event-relative circumstantial modality for event-in-progress, habitual, and a subset of future readings; (ii) metaphyisical modality for generalized future readings; (iii) the idea that syntactic height determines the type of modal anchor that projects a modal base. This study contributes to our understanding of the relation between syntactic height and modal flavor, as well as the nature of modal-aspectual interactions cross-linguistically.
The present paper offers evidence that there are two variants of adverbial modification that differ with respect to the way in which a modifier is linked to the verb's eventuality argument. So-called external modifiers relate to the full eventuality, whereas internal modifiers relate to some integral part of it. The choice between external and internal modification is shown to be dependent on the modifier's syntactic base position. External modifiers are base-generated at the VP periphery, whereas internal modifiers are base generated at the V periphery. These observations are accounted for by a refined version of the standard Davidsonian approach to adverbial modification according to which modification is mediated by a free variable. In the case of external modification, the grammar takes responsibility for identifying the free variable with the verb's eventuality argument, whereas in the case of internal modification, a value for the free variable is determined by the conceptual system on the basis of contextually salient world knowledge.
Wie bekannt, besitzt neben der literarischen Übersetzung auch die fachsprachliche Übertragung einen wichtigen Platz in der übersetzungswissenschaftlichen Forschung. In Rahmen des Themas Übersetzung und Bearbeitung soll in diesem Beitrag festgestellt werden, welche satzstrukturelle Abwandlungen das neue Strafgesetzbuch der Türkei (YTCK) vollzogen hat.
One aspect of the progress being made is that the focus of attention has widened. Adverbials, though still the heart of the matter, now form part of a much larger set of constituent types subsumed under the general syntactic label of adjunct; while modifier has become the semantic counterpart on the same level of generality. So one of the readings of Modifying Adjuncts stands for the focus on this intersection. Moreover, recent years have seen a number of studies which attest an increasing interest in adjunct issues. There is an impressive number of monographs, e.g. Alexiadou (1997), Laenzlinger (1998), Cinque (1999), Pittner (1999), Ernst (2002), which, by presenting in-depth analyses of the syntax of adjuncts, have sharpened the debate on syntactic theorizing. Serious attempts to gain a broader view on adjuncts are witnessed by several collections, see Alexiadou and Svenonius (2000), Austin, Engelberg and Rauh (in progress); of particular importance are the contributions to vol. 12.1 of the Italian Journal of Linguistics (2000), a special issue on adverbs, the Introductions to which by Corver and Delfitto (2000) and Delfitto (2000) may be seen as the best state-of-the-art article on adverbs and adverbial modification currently on the market. To try and test a fresh view on adjuncts was the leitmotif of the Oslo Conference “Approaching the Grammar of Adjuncts” (Sept 22–25, 1999), which provided the initial forum for the papers contained in this volume and initiated a period of discussion and continuing interaction among the contributors, from which the versions published here have greatly profited. The aim of the Oslo conference, and hence the focus of the present volume, was to encourage syntacticians and semanticists to open their minds to a more integrative approach to adjuncts, thereby paying attention to, and attempting to account for, the various interfaces that the grammar of adjuncts crucially embodies. From this perspective, the present volume is to be conceived of as an interim balance of current trends in modifying the views on adjuncts. In introducing the papers, we will refrain from rephrasing the abstracts, but will instead offer a guided tour through the major problem areas they are tackling. Assessed by thematic convergence and mutual reference, the contributions form four groups, which led us to arrange them into subparts of the book. Our commenting on these is intended (i) to provide a first glance at the contents, (ii) to reveal some of the reasons why adjuncts indeed are, and certainly will remain, a challenging issue, and thereby (iii) to show some facets of what we consider novel and promising approaches.
In this squib, I want to argue that the morphological structure of words is, at least to some extent, motivated. As an example I have choosen the partonomic (and for the less part taxonomic) nomenclature of the human body. While important work by Brown et alii (1973), Anderson (1978) and Schladt (1997) exists on this topic, these analyses focus on the conceptualization of body-parts and their semantics, but not on their morphological representation.
In the following, I want to check two predictions about the morphological complexity of lexical items denoting parts of the human body. The first assumption is that the most canonical body-parts are always expressed by mono-lexematic items. The second one consists in the assumption that body-parts of the lowest levels in the hierarchy are always morphologically complex. A set of six body-parts has been analysed in 27 languages. The set consists of two canonical (HEAD and EAR) and of one from the lowest level of the hierarchy (TOENAIL). For this I have adopted a sample from Schladt (1997) and a small one compiled by myself
The paper presents an in-depth study of focus marking in Gùrùntùm, a West Ch adic language spoken in Bauchi Province of Northern Nigeria. Focus in Gùrùntùm is marked morphologically by means of a focus marker a, which typically precedes the focus constituent. Even though the morphological focus-marking system of Gùrùntùm allows for a lot of fine-grained distinctions in information structure (IS) in principle, the language is not entirely free of focus ambiguities that arise as the result of conflicting IS- and syntactic requirements that govern the placement of focus markers. We show that morphological focus marking with a applies across different types of focus, such as newinformation, contrastive, selective and corrective focus, and that a does not have a second function as a perfectivity marker, as is assumed in the literature. In contrast, we show at the end of the paper that a can also function as a foregrounding device at the level of discourse structure.
Trubetzkoy's recognition of a delimitative function of phonology, serving to signal boundaries between morphological units, is expressed in terms of alignment constraints in Optimality Theory, where the relevant constraints require specific morphological boundaries to coincide with phonological structure (Trubetzkoy 1936, 1939, McCarthy & Prince 1993). The approach pursued in the present article is to investigate the distribution of phonological boundary signals to gain insight into the criteria underlying morphological analysis. The evidence from English and Swedish suggests that necessary and sufficient conditions for word-internal morphological analysis concern the recognizability of head constituents, which include the rightmost members of compounds and head affixes. The claim is that the stability of word-internal boundary effects in historical perspective cannot in general be sufficiently explained in terms of memorization and imitation of phonological word form. Rather, these effects indicate a morphological parsing mechanism based on the recognition of word-internal head constituents. Head affixes can be shown to contrast systematically with modifying affixes with respect to syntactic function, semantic content, and prosodic properties. That is, head affixes, which cannot be omitted, often lack inherent meaning and have relatively unmarked boundaries, which can be obscured entirely under specific phonological conditions. By contrast, modifying affixes, which can be omitted, consistently have inherent meaning and have stronger boundaries, which resist prosodic fusion in all phonological contexts. While these correlations are hardly specific to English and Swedish it remains to be investigated to which extent they hold cross-linguistically. The observation that some of the constituents identified on the basis of prosodic evidence lack inherent meaning raises the issue of compositionality. I will argue that certain systematic aspects of word meaning cannot be captured with reference to the syntagmatic level, but require reference to the paradigmatic level instead. The assumption is then that there are two dimensions of morphological analysis: syntagmatic analysis, which centers on the criteria for decomposing words in terms of labelled constituents, and paradigmatic analysis, which centers on the criteria for establishing relations among (whole) words in the mental lexicon. While meaning is intrinsically connected with paradigmatic analysis (e.g. base relations, oppositeness) it is not essential to syntagmatic analysis.
An verschiedenen Stellen meiner Arbeit (Fuhrhop 1998/1999) bin ich auf den besonderen Einfluß von morphologischer Komplexität auf weitere morphologische Prozesse gestoßen. Insbesondere verhalten sich suffigierte Stämme anders als einfache, sowohl in der Komposition als auch in der Derivation. Im folgenden möchte ich die Fakten zusammenstellen, Überlegungen zur theoretischen Interpretation und Relevanz anstellen und das ganze mit dieser Vorveröffentlichung zur Diskussion stellen.