Focus without variables: A multi-modal analysis

By Gerhard J?ger
Source: Semantics Archive
In this paper I will explore a certain phenomenon concerning the interaction between ellipsis and focus that has been used as an argument (by Kratzer (1991), see also Pulman (1997)) that both the use of variables and of an intermediate level of representation are indispensable. I will present a surface compositional and variable free analysis. The techniques used are not new (the most important sources are Krifka (1992) and Jacobson (1997)), but the paper aims to show that integrating these concepts into multi-modal categorial grammar (cf. Carpenter (1997), Moortgat (1997), Morrill (1994)) results in a system that is more than just the sum of its parts.

Section 2 discusses the problem to be explored and Kratzer's proposal for it's solution. In section 3 the basic concepts of multi-modal categorical grammar are introduced. Section 4 and 5 are concerned with the treatment of ellipsis and of focus in this approach to grammar. Section 6 explicates the interaction of these modules.
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Posted by Tony Marmo at 16:56 GMT

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MAPPING FOCUS:
THE SYNTAX AND PROSODY OF FOCUS IN SPANISH

By Laura Dominguez

This dissertation investigates the realization and interpretation of information structure in Spanish. Focused constituents may appear in the right-periphery, in the left-periphery or in situ in Spanish. Recent studies have addressed the relative weight of syntactic and phonological cues in the realization of information structure, but have not adequately accounted for these three types of focus. Syntax-based accounts, asserting that focused phrases move to the left-periphery to check features, fail to account for focus in the right-periphery. So-called prosody-based accounts, which in fact depend on the syntactic requirement that focus has to be aligned with nuclear stress, are unable to account for focus in a position other than final. Experimental data from a pilot study reported in this dissertation suggest that prominence in all three types of focus is determined by a prosodic structure without syntactic motivation.
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WHY SOME FOCI MUST ASSOCIATE

By Roger Schwarzschild

The association of only with focus is explained in terms of

(a) a semantics for only which makes no mention of focus and
(b) discourse appropriateness conditions on the use of focus and principles of quantifier domain selection.

This account differs from previous ones in giving sufficient conditions for association with focus but without stipulating it in the meaning of lexical items. Detractors have contended that foci have different pragmatic import depending on whether or not they are associated with a higher operator. I give evidence against this claim. Others argue that there is no deterministic connection between intonational focus and association. One argument for this is the fact that association readings are possible even when nothing in the scope of the operator is focussed. The present account predicts the absence of intonational focus in these cases and explains how the readings come about. The wide variety of associating operators provide incentive for pursuing accounts like the present one based on independent principles of grammar.
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Posted by Tony Marmo at 05:31 GMT

Updated: Tuesday, 30 November 2004 05:32 GMT

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(S) 1. La madre de Sofia{1} la{1} beso.
2. La*{1}/{2} beso la madre de Sofia{1}.

An A-binding asymmetry in Greek

and its significance for Universal Grammar

By Phoevos Panagiotidis & Stavroula Tsiplakou

Principle C of the Binding theory is set up to capture why the grammaticality of the coreferential reading between the pronominal and the R-expression is precluded in sentences such as (1) below

(1) She{i} called Sophia{i}/{j}'s mother.

on the basis that the R-expression is illicitly bound by the pronominal. By the same token, the coreferential reading in sentences such as (2) below

(2) Sophia{i}'s mother called her{i}.

is not disallowed as the R-expression is free everywhere.
In Modern Greek, a language which displays largely free constituent order, the equivalent of the English sentence in (2) can have two different realizations, shown in (3) and (4) below, and the following A-binding asymmetry obtains:

(3)i mitera tis Sofias{i}/{j} tin{i} fonakse
the mother-NOM the Sophia-GEN her-ACC called

(4) tin*{i}/{j} fonakse i mitera tis Sofias{i}
her-ACC called the mother-NOM the Sophia-GEN

Sophia's mother called her

The coreferential reading between the pronominal and the R-expression tis Sofias is obtainable in (3), where the R-expression is contained within the preverbal subject phrase [ i mitera [tis Sofias ]], but it is absolutely disallowed in (4), where the R-expression is contained in the postverbal subject. This sharp asymmetry, first noted in Tsiplakou 1998, is surprising in view of the fact that, at least at first blush, the object clitic pronoun tin should not be able to bind into the subject at the level where the Binding Principles operate. The question that naturally arises is whether this asymmetry should be ascribed to some particularity of the syntax of Greek or whether it has more far-reaching implications for Binding theory as it is currently formulated within the Minimalist framework. (...)

Bind it

Posted by Tony Marmo at 03:50 GMT

Updated: Saturday, 27 November 2004 21:17 GMT

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QUANTIFICATION, ASPECT AND LEXICON

By Hana Filip
Source: Semantics Archive

Languages differ in the variety of quantificational structures they employ (cf. Bach et al. (eds.), 1995) and in the extent to which the surface form of various quantificational structures provides us with explicit clues about semantic interpretation. The semantic structure of sentences with a single quantificational operator can be determined by the overt phrase structure or by the phrase structure together with information about topic and/or focus. If the semantic structure of quantified sentences is underdetermined (or ambiguous) by both the phrase structure and topic and/or focus structures, it may be disambiguated by the non-linguistic context (cf. Partee, 1995:541).
I propose that there is yet another factor that determines the semantic structure of quantified sentences: namely, the argument structure. A case in point are sentences in which the main quantificational operator is a lexical V-operator. Drawing mainly on the data from Czech, I propose that lexical V-operators function as quantifiers over episodic predicates and their arguments. They bind the variable introduced by the Incremental Theme argument (Hinrichs, 1985; Krifka, 1986; Dowty, 1988,1991), and possibly also the event variable (Davidson, 1967; Parsons, 1986; Kratzer, 1989). If there is no Incremental Theme argument, quantification is directed at the event variable alone; quantification is undefined, if there is neither. The hypothesis builds on Partee's (1991a, 1995) distinction between "syntactic" A-quantifiers (VP- or S-operators) and "lexical" A-quantifiers (V-operators) and presupposes that the denotations of nominal and verbal predicates have a lattice structure of the type proposed by Link (1983, 1987) and Bach (1986). It also builds on the telicity account proposed by Hinrichs (1985), Krifka (1986, 1992) and Dowty (1988, 1991) whose central part is the homomorphic mapping between the denotations of the Incremental Theme argument and the relevant episodic predicate.
Although I focus on lexical quantifiers that function as V-operators in Czech, the results of this study can be applied to other Slavic languages. It is yet to be seen how the conclusions that I reach about Czech will fare when tested against the data from typologically unrelated languages. (Preliminary investigations strongly suggest that my conclusions seem to be applicable to such languages as Hindi, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese.)

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Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT

Updated: Tuesday, 23 November 2004 04:33 GMT

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Content, Embodiment and Objectivity

The Theory of Cognitive Trails

By Adrian Cussins

The possibility of a new kind of representational theory is demonstrated: a theory which explains concepts and thoughts in terms of the nonconceptual, embodied contents of experience. The theory is neither empiricist nor rationalist as it adopts a symmetric metaphysics in which mind and world are explained as the logical genesis of objectivity. The notion of "cognitive trails through environmental experience" is introduced, and objective content is formalised as a dynamic construction within a two-dimensional space whose axes are given by the perspective dependence of the cognitive trails, and by their degree of stabilization.

Link

Posted by Tony Marmo at 17:58 GMT

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EXPERIENCE WITHOUT THE HEAD

By Alva No?

Some cognitive states -- e.g. states of thinking, calculating, navigating -- may be partially external because, at least sometimes, these states depend on the use of symbols and artifacts that are outside the body. Maps, signs, writing implements may sometimes be as inextricably bound up with the workings of cognition as neural structures or internally realized symbols (if there are any). According to what Clark and Chalmers[1998] call active externalism, the environment can drive and so partially constitute cognitive processes. Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? If active externalism is right, then the boundary cannot be drawn at the skull. The mind reaches -or at least can reach --- beyond the limits of the body out into the world. (...)

To appear in Perceptual Experience, edited by Tamar Szab-- Gendler and John Hawthorne. Oxford University Press.

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT

Updated: Tuesday, 23 November 2004 04:30 GMT

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NEGATION: TWO POINTS OF VIEW

By Arnon Avron

In this paper we look at negation from two dierent points of view: a syntactical one and a semantical one. Accordingly, we identify two dierent types of negation. The same connective of a given logic might be of both types, but this might not always be the case.
The syntactical point of view is an abstract one. It characterizes connectives according to the internal role they have inside a logic, regardless of any meaning they are intended to have (if any). With regard to negation our main thesis is that the availabilityof what we call below an internal negation is what makes a logic essentially multiple-conclusion.
The semantic point of view, in contrast, is based on the intuitive meaning of a given connective. In the case of negation this is simply the intuition that the negation of a proposition A is true if A is not, and not true if A is true.
Like in most modern treatments of logics, our study of negation will be in the framework of Consequence Relations (CRs). See more

Posted by Tony Marmo at 03:52 GMT

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Direct compositionality on demand

By Chris Barker
Source: Semantics Archive

This paper starts with the assumption that the expression saw everyone, as in John saw everyone, is a constituent. It can be coordinated, clefted, focussed, questioned, pronominalized, you name it. In general, if you have a constituent containing an NP, and you replace that NP with a quantificational NP like everyone, then the result is still a full-fledged constituent. But everyone can take scope outside of a verb phrase. As a result, the semantics of everyone must somehow gain access to material that can properly contain the constituent saw everyone. Despite decades of research on quantification, I will suggest that no existing analysis (including my own published accounts to date) provides an adequate characterization of both the local and the long-distance aspects of the syntax and the semantics of quantificational expressions. The main goal of this paper, then, is to propose an explicit new account that tries to do better.

Demand it

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT

Updated: Monday, 22 November 2004 15:29 GMT

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First - and Second-Order Logic of Mass Terms

By Peter Roeper

The logic of mass terms is a generalisation of standard predicate logic. It allows for domains of quantification which have parts, but do not consist of individuals. The rules of inference are largely those of normal predicate logic. The main point of divergence concerns the identification of argument places (reflexivisation). As there may be no individuals, the idea that distinct occurrences of the same variable always refer to the same individual cannot be applied in specifying the semantics.

The first -order system is developed syntactically in Section 1, the second-order system in Section 2. Formal semantics for the logic of mass terms 1are arrived at indirectly by first translating the statements of the logic of mass terms into a standard first -order calculus, whose domain of quantification is the totality of quantities, i.e. the totality of parts of the domain of mass quantification.

Soundness and completeness results for the first -order logic of mass terms are obtained in Section 3, for second-order logic in Section 4.

Published in the Journalof Philosophical Logic 33(2004)261-297
The paper

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT

Updated: Thursday, 25 November 2004 05:07 GMT

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