Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS
Formal Linking in Internally Headed Relatives
By Min-Joo Kim
The present paper investigates how morphosyntax, semantics, and pragmatics work together to produce the so-called Internally Headed Relative Clause (IHRC) construction in Korean and Japanese. The IHRC construction exhibits a mismatch between the syntax and semantics and a delimited discourse-sensitivity in its interpretation. In recent literature, E-type pronoun analyses have been proposed to capture these properties of the construction (e.g., Hoshi 1995, Shimoyama 1999).
The existing E-type pronoun analyses have been successful in accounting for the syntax and semantics mismatch and the discourse-sensitivity of the construction, but they fail to explain why the discourse-sensitivity is delimited, that is, why the E-type pronoun needs to be formally linked to its semantic antecedent. This paper resolves this problem by proposing an interpretive tool which establishes a formal link between the E-type pronoun and the event structure of the embedded clause. In so doing, it shows that what is alleged to be a purely pragmatic phenomenon is in fact regulated by principles of grammar.
Keywords: IHRC, E-type pronoun, binding, eventuality
Source: Semantics Archive
Posted by Tony Marmo
at 14:28 BST
