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Institute
For reasons of space, we only discussed one text in which the metaphors used seem to take their root in the context in which it has been written. One text is definitely not enough to make any definite claims on how widespread this phenomenon is. Given what we know about the two domains - Food and taste - one has reasons to believe that when speakers/conceptualisers (e.g. journalists) describe something which stands in some relation to both, they may intuitively be reaching for taste metaphors of the kind described above on the premise that this kind of ‘ornamentation’ will add some spice to what the addressee might otherwise consider a trivial (and boring) topic. At the same time, taste is only one among many properties a particular item of food or a substance (e.g. sugar) has. In consequence, one may well imagine contexts in which it is not its taste, but other properties (e.g. what Harbottle [1997:183] refers to as its 'pure white and deadly’ image) that will make the conceptualiser reach for a particular linguistic or conceptual metaphor.
The cognitive framework seems to comply with the need of interdisciplinary outlook on the issue of emotions, as it itself draws upon findings of psychological, anthropological and philosophical research. Along with undertaking further studies on the conceptualization of emotions in different languages, from the detailed analysis of the repertoire of linguistic means used for talking about emotions to investigation into tendencies to use metaphors or metonymies to talk about emotions, some broader conclusions could be drawn. The greatest challenge seems to be establishing whether there are any cultural (social, economical, conventional, political, religious) conditions that may influence the relevant changes in conceptualizing emotions in different languages and whether it is possible to point to any laws or regularities that would govern these changes.
The paper explains the absence of resultative secondary predication in Russian as arising from a conflict of inferential interpretations. It formalises the framework necessary to express this proposal in terms of abductive reasoning with Poole systems in Gricean contexts. The conflict is shown to arise for default rules regulating alternative realisation of verb-internally specified consequent states. The paper thus indicates that typological variation may be due not only to different parameter values but to general inferential properties of the syntax-semantics mapping. The proposed theory also contradicts some widespread proposals that the absence of resultative secondary predication is due to the absence of some particular language feature.
Issues on topics
(2000)
The present volume contains papers that bear mainly on issues concerning the topic concept. This concept is of course very broad and diverse. Also, different views are expressed in this volume. Some authors concentrate on the status of topics and non-topics in so-called topic prominent languages (i.e. Chinese), others focus on the syntactic behavior of topical constituents in specific European languages (German, Greek, Romance languages). The last contribution tries to bring together the concept of discourse topic (a non-syntactic notion) and the concept of sentence topic, i.e. that type of topic that all the preceding papers are concerned with.
Russian predicate cleft constructions have the surprising property of being associated with adversative clauses of the opposite polarity. I argue that clefts are associated with adversative clauses because they have the semantics of S-Topics in Büring's (1997, 2000) sense of the term. It is shown that the polarity of the adversative clause is obligatorily opposed to that of the cleft because the use of a cleft gives rise to a relevance-based pragmatic scale. The ordering principle according to which these scale
Dog after dog revisited
(2006)
This paper presents a compositional semantic analysis of pluractional adverbial modifiers like 'dog after dog' and 'one dog after the other'. We propose a division of labour according to which much of the semantics is carried by a family of plural operators. The adverbial itself contributes a semantics that we call pseudoreciprocal.
In my paper, I show that the so-called German right dislocation actually comprises two distinct constructions, which I label 'right dislocation proper' and 'afterthought'. These differ in their prosodic and syntactic properties, as well as in their discourse functions. The paper is primarily concerned with the right dislocation proper (RD). I present a semantic analysis of RD based on the 'separate performative' account of Potts (2004, 2005) and Portner (forthc.). This analysis allows a description of the semantic contribution of RD to its host sentence, as well as explaining certain semantic constraints on the kind of NP in the RD construction.
In a recent contribution to a long-standing discussion in semantics as to whether the neo-Davidsonian analysis should be extended to stative predicates or not, Maienborn (2004, 2005) proposes to distinguish two types of statives; one of them is said to have a referential argument of the Davidsonian type, the other not. As one of her arguments for making such a distinction, Maienborn observes that manner modification seems to be supported only by certain statives but to be excluded by others (thus linking the issue to the use of manner modification as one major argument in favour of event semantics, cf. Parsons 1990). In this paper, it is argued that the absence of manner modification with Maienborn's second group of statives is actually due to a failure of conceptual construal: modification of a predicate is ruled out whenever its internal conceptual structure is too poor to provide a construal for the modifier; hence, the effects observed by Maienborn reduce to the fact that eventive predicates have a more complex conceptual substructure than stative ones. Hence, the issue of manner modification with statives is shown to be orthogonal to questions of logical form and event semantics. The explanatory power of the conceptual approach is demonstrated with a case study on predicates of light emission, adapting the representation format of Barsalou's (1992) frame model.
In his 1995 monograph, Apresyan suggests that it would be extremely interesting to investigate the means of expressing the definiteness/indefiniteness opposition in languages that do not have articles. In this paper, I will attempt to find possible correlations between the organization of discourse and the positions in which the (in)definite nominals may appear within a sentence of Russian. I will examine the information structure of Russian sentences and, based on the previous analyses, provide a new account of their organization with respect to information packaging. I will then look at various nominal elements contained in certain parts of a sentence and arrive at a system describing the distribution of NPs in Russian with respect to the information structure. The ultimate goal of this paper is to establish and motivate a system of correlations between various types of NPs and functions of information structure. This goal will be achieved by determining which characteristic of a NP may serve as a criterion allowing to provide a one-to-one mapping.
Sentence mood in German is a complex category that is determined by various components of the grammatical system. In particular, verbal mood, the position of the finite verb and the wh-characteristics of the so called 'Vorfeld'-phrase are responsible for the constitution of sentence mood in German. This article proposes a theory of sentence mood constitution in German and investigates the interaction between the pronominal binding of indefinite noun phrases which are semantically analyzed as choice functions. It is shown that the semantic objects determined by sentence mood define different kinds of domains which have to be uniquely accessible as the range of the choice function. The various properties of the pronominal binding of indefinites can be derived by the interplay of the proposed theoretical notions.
The goal of this paper is to study the influence of information structure in the referential status of linguistic expressions such as bare plurals and indefinite NPs in Spanish. In particular, we will argue for the following claims: (a) Spanish bare plurals can receive a generic interpretation in object position and (b) Spanish bare plurals in object position can be topics in siru. We will focus on object position because of the well known semantic and syntactic constraints that affect preverbal subject bare plurals in Spanish.
Although the linear order of arguments (and adverbials) in German is relatively free, it underlies certain restrictions; these don’t apply to the so-called unmarked order for arguments (Lenerz 1977) and adverbials (Frey/Pittner 1998). It is a common assumption to take the unmarked order as basic and derive all other orders from it by scrambling, whatever its specific characteristics may be (cf., amongst others, Haider/Rosengren 1998). The observable restrictions obtaining for some linear ordering may then be considered as constraints on a movement operation (scrambling). [...] In the following, I will try to present the outlines of a possible explanation for the restriction, based on a proposal governing the proper referential interpretation of indefinite NPs.
Current analyses of specificity are unable to provide an explanatory account for why specific and nonspecific uses of indefinites are available. While Abusch (1994), Reinhart (1997), and Kratzer (1998) provide successful mechanisms for deriving specific readings, they do not provide a fundamental explanation for the availability of this mechanism. This is due to the fact that specific indefinites are treated as involving an interpretive component or procedure unique to themselves: storage (Abusch) or choice function (Reinhart and Kratzer), for example. It would be preferable if specific indefinites could be understood as deriving from the use of independently motivated meaning components and interpretive mechanisms.
Here I will pursue the idea, building on Portner & Yabushita (1998), that specificity has to do with the indefinite's interaction with a topical domain (note similarities with the proposals of Enç 1991, Cresti 1995, and Schwarzschild 2000). In this conception, specificity is a matter of degree: the narrower the topical domain, the more specific the indefinite. More precisely, sentences containing specific indefinites will be understood as involving ordinary existential quantification in combination with a topical domain function.
In this article, I will present a survey of control structures in Korean. The survey is based on a sample of seventy SOA-argument-taking predicates, which are classified with respect to their complementation patterns and control properties. As a result, Korean is characterized as a language in which semantically determined control is predominant, whereas constructionally induced control is only marginal. In the discussion of the sample, I will show that there are two major classes of verbs exhibiting semantic control: the first class consists of matrix verbs such as hwuhoyhata 'regret' or kangyohata 'force', which require obligatory coreference between a matrix argument and the embedded subject due to their lexical meaning. The verbs of the second class are utterance verbs such as malhata 'tell', which select clauses headed by the quotative complementizer ko. With these verbs, subject, object, or split control arises if specific modal suffixes are attached to the verb heading the complement clause. In the second part of the paper, I will provide a lexical analysis of control in Korean, which adopts the Principle of Controller Choice proposed by Farkas (1988) as well as additional constraints which have to be assumed independently.
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This volume presents a collection of papers touching on various issues concerning the syntax and semantics of predicative constructions.
A hot topic in the study of predicative copula constructions, with direct implications for the treatment of he (how many he's do we need?), and wider implications for the theories of predication, event-based semantics and aspect, is the nature and source of the situation argument. Closer examination of copula-less predications is becoming increasingly relevant to all these issues, as is clearly illustrated by the present collection.
This paper argues for non-primary c- and s-selectional restrictions of verbs in computing nonprimary predicatives such as resultatives, depictives, and manners. Our discussion is based both on the selection violations in the presence of nonprimary predicates and on the cross-linguistic and language-internal variations of categorial and semantic constraints on nonprimary predicates. We claim that all types of thematic predication are represented by an extended projection, and that the merger of lexical heads with another element, regardless of the type of the element, consistently has c- and s-selectional restrictions.