What's in a compound? Review article on Lieber and Štekauer (eds) 2009. 'The Oxford Handbook of Compounding'

The Oxford Handbook of Compounding surveys a variety of theoretical and descriptive issues, presenting overviews of compounding in a number of frameworks and sketches of compounding in a number of languages. Much of the book deals with Germanic noun–noun compounding. I take up some of the theoretical questions raised surrounding such constructions, in particular, the notion of attributive modification in noun-headed compounds. I focus on two issues. The first is the semantic relation between the head noun and its nominal modifier. Several authors repeat the argument that there is a small(-ish) fixed number of general semantic relations in noun–noun compounds (‘Lees's solution’), but I argue that the correct way to look at such compounds is what I call ‘Downing's solution’, in which we assume that the relation is specified pragmatically, and hence could be any relation at all. The second issue is the way that adjectives modify nouns inside compounds. Although there are languages in which compounded adjectives modify just as they do in phrases (Chukchee, Arleplog Swedish), in general the adjective has a classifier role and not that of a compositional attributive modifier. Thus, even if an English (or German) adjective–noun compound looks compositional, it isn't

Does prosody meet syntax? A case study on standard Italian cleft sentences and left peripheral focus.

In this work we deal with two structures that have a very similar pragmatic function in Italian and have been claimed to have similar semantic and syntactic properties, namely clefts and left peripheral focus. Since Chomsky (1977. On wh-movement. In Peter W. Culicover, Thomas Wasow & Adrian Akmajian (eds.), Formal Syntax, 71\u2013132. New York: Academic Press.) they have been both considered as instances of A\u2019-movement and should therefore behave alike. Here we investigate their prosody and their syntax on the basis of three experimental studies and show that while the prosodic patterns found are indeed very similar, their syntax is less homogenous than expected if we apply general tests that have been traditionally used to distinguish A- from A\u2019- movement. In particular, we will discuss three of these tests, namely parasitic gaps, weak crossover and anaphoric binding and show that the two constructions yield quite different results. We analyse the differences within the framework of featural relativized minimality originally proposed in Rizzi (2004. Locality and the left periphery. In Adriana Belletti (ed.), Structures and Beyond: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures 3, 223\u2013251. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) and subsequent work. On this basis, we conclude that there is no one to one match between prosodic and syntactic properties, since we observe differences in the syntactic behaviour of the two constructions that do not surface in the prosodic patterns. Indirectly, this study sheds new light on the interface between prosody and syntax and is a confirmation of a modular theory of the components of grammar: some specific syntactic properties have no reflex in other components of grammar and can only be detected through purely syntactic tests

Affected Experiencers

Numerous languages permit an NP that is not selected by the verb to be added to a clause, with several different possible interpretations. We divide such non-selected arguments into possessor, benefactive, attitude holder, and affected experiencer categories, on the basis of syntactic and semantic differences between them. We propose a formal analysis of the affected experiencer construction. In our account, a syntactic head Aff(ect) introduces the experiencer argument, and adds a conventional implicature to the effect that any event of the type denoted by its syntactic sister is the source of the experiencer’s psychological experience. Hence, our proposal involves two tiers of meaning: the at-issue meaning of the sentence, and some not-at-issue meaning (an implicature). A syntactic head can introduce material on both tiers. Additionally, we allow two parameters of variation: (i) the height of the attachment of Aff, and (ii) how much of the semantics is at-issue and how much is an implicature. We show that these two parameters account for the attested variation across our sample of languages, as well as the significant commonalities among them. Our analysis also accounts for significant differences between affected experiencers and the other types of non-selected arguments, and we also note a generalization to the effect that purely not-at-issue non-selected arguments can only be weak or clitic pronouns

Incorporating Punctuation Into the Sentence Grammar: A Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar Perspective

Punctuation helps us to structure, and thus to understand, texts. Many uses of punctuation straddle the line between syntax and discourse, because they serve to combine multiple propositions within a single orthographic sentence. They allow us to insert discourse-level relations at the level of a single sentence. Just as people make use of information from punctuation in processing what they read, computers can use information from punctuation in processing texts automatically. Most current natural language processing systems fail to take punctuation into account at all, losing a valuable source of information about the text. Those which do mostly do so in a superficial way, again failing to fully exploit the information conveyed by punctuation. To be able to make use of such information in a computational system, we must first characterize its uses and find a suitable representation for encoding them. The work here focuses on extending a syntactic grammar to handle phenomena occurring within a single sentence which have punctuation as an integral component. Punctuation marks are treated as full-fledged lexical items in a Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar, which is an extremely well-suited formalism for encoding punctuation in the sentence grammar. Each mark anchors its own elementary trees and imposes constraints on the surrounding lexical items. I have analyzed data representing a wide variety of constructions, and added treatments of them to the large English grammar which is part of the XTAG system. The advantages of using LTAG are that its elementary units are structured trees of a suitable size for stating the constraints we are interested in, and the derivation histories it produces contain information the discourse grammar will need about which elementary units have used and how they have been combined. I also consider in detail a few particularly interesting constructions where the sentence and discourse grammars meet-appositives, reported speech and uses of parentheses. My results confirm that punctuation can be used in analyzing sentences to increase the coverage of the grammar, reduce the ambiguity of certain word sequences and facilitate discourse-level processing of the texts

Hey, y\u27guys! : A diachronic usage-based approach to changes in American English address

This dissertation adopts a functional, usage-based perspective on language to highlight key changes in American English address over the past century, especially the development of \u27you guys\u27 and its expansion across second-person plural contexts. Based on data from the Corpus of Historical American English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (among other corpora), the study tracks the increasing usage, gradual restructuring, semantic generalization, and shifting registers of \u27you guys\u27, including the interactions of those changes as the form has grammaticalized. This work offers an explanation, therefore, as to why \u27you guys\u27 has been uniquely reshaped into a pronominal unit with non-masculine meanings in American English, while other appositive uses such as \u27you men\u27 and \u27you fellows\u27 have retained their structural and semantic properties with far greater fidelity

On reduced relatives with genitive subjects

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 222-232).What is the place of relatives with genitive subjects in a typology of relative clauses? Are they full or reduced, headed or free relatives? Can they appear pre- and postnominally? Can they be head-internal relatives? Are they finite or non-finite? Can they be restrictives and appositives? These are the questions that this thesis will address. Full relatives have nominative subjects. Thus, relatives with genitive subjects are not full relatives. Relatives with genitive subjects share, however, many properties with reduced relatives. Among others, both prohibit relative pronouns and complementizers. Both employ participles, i.e., verbs that lack tense but exhibit nominal properties. Both prohibit nominative subjects. Therefore, it will be argued that relative clauses with genitive subjects are reduced relatives. There exists, however, one difference between relative clauses with genitive subjects and standard reduced relatives. Only the former permits non-subject relativization. It will be argued that reduced relatives are headed by a NP and that the difference in permitting genitive subjects is caused by a difference in the case licensing mechanisms within this NP. Only if N can license structural genitive case can a language have relative clauses with genitive subjects. The verb in reduced relatives lacks tense. If the finite/non-finite distinction is based on the presence of tense, then reduced relatives are non-finite clauses.(cont.) Furthermore, there are no non-finite free relatives. Thus, reduced relatives must be headed relatives. Finally, reduced relatives cannot be appositives. Appositives are full clauses. Thus, reduced relatives can only be restrictive relatives. In certain contexts, however, reduced relatives permit another reading. They can receive Free Adjunct interpretations. This is because Free Adjuncts too are smaller than CP. Thus they depend on the matrix clause for their temporal interpretation. This can result in a reading according to which the events in the matrix and the adjunct clause co-occur, i.e., in a when-reading and in an if-reading if the matrix clause contains a modal. The reading that is always available to reduced adjunct clauses is the because-reading, which as a default is the most salient way for the adjunct to establish a logical connection to the matrix clause.by Cornelia Krause.Ph.D