Covert Modality in Non-Finite Contexts

This dissertation investigates the distribution and interpretation of covert modality. Three environments where covert modality appears are analyzed. These environments are infinitival relative clauses, infinitival questions, and ability modals. Infinitival relative clauses are shown to not form a unified class structurally. Subject infinitival relative clauses are assimilated to the class of reduced relative clauses. They lack a CP projection. Non-subject infinitival relative are assimilated to the class of full relative clauses. Like full relatives, they have a CP projection. The infinitival [+wh] Cº is argued to be the source of the modality in a non-subject infinitival relative clause. All nonsubject infinitival relative clauses and infinitival questions involve modality because of the obligatory presence of the infinitival [+wh] Cº. Since subject infinitival relative clauses do not involve the infinitival [+wh] Cº, they are not necessarily modal. If they are modal, the source of the modality lies within the infinitival clause. The conditions under which a subject infinitival relative can receive a non-modal interpretation are analyzed. It is shown that a non-modal interpretation must be licensed and that only a limited class of modifiers (superlatives, ordinals, and only) in a particular configuration can license the non-modal interpretation. The licensing configuration obtains under reconstruction of the head NP of the relative clause. The basic result regarding themodality in infinitival questions is that despite the apparent variability in the nature (deontic vs. circumstantial) and the force of this modality, we really have just one modality. The apparent variation in force and nature falls out from the interaction between the semantics of the infinitival [+wh] C0 and contextual factors. The apparent variation in the force and nature of the infinitival questionmodality is also found in non-subject infinitival relative clauses. The proposal for capturing variable modality effects in infinitival questions is extended to non-subject infinitival relatives. A covert modal (the Generic operator) is responsible for the modality in an ability modal. The ability modal itself has the semantics of an implicative verb like manage

Aspect and Meaning in the Russian Future Tense: Corpus and Experimental Investigations

This dissertation is a study of the Russian future tense within the framework of cognitive linguistics. In this dissertation I focus on the distribution of the perfective and imperfective future forms, their future and non-future meanings, and the use of the future tense verb forms by both native and non-native speakers. In the Russian tense-aspect system, it is reasonable to operate with markedness on a local level of tense, rather than the level of the verb. Via local markedness it is possible to see that the perfective future is the unmarked member of the opposition, and the imperfective future is the marked one. The perfective future tense forms are approximately fourteen times more frequent than imperfective future tense forms in the Russian National Corpus. Both perfective and imperfective future tense forms express not only future meanings but also gnomic, directive etc. The (non-)future meanings form a radial category with the future meaning as a prototype and other meanings as extensions. Native speakers operate with frequency when they use future tense forms. Non-native speakers are not sensitive to frequency, and instruction in the use of the future tense forms in Russian could be improved

Temporal and Aspectual Entailment

Inferences regarding "Jane's arrival in London" from predications such as "Jane is going to London" or "Jane has gone to London" depend on tense and aspect of the predications. Tense determines the temporal location of the predication in the past, present or future of the time of utterance. The aspectual auxiliaries on the other hand specify the internal constituency of the event, i.e. whether the event of "going to London" is completed and whether its consequences hold at that time or not. While tense and aspect are among the most important factors for determining natural language inference, there has been very little work to show whether modern NLP models capture these semantic concepts. In this paper we propose a novel entailment dataset and analyse the ability of a range of recently proposed NLP models to perform inference on temporal predications. We show that the models encode a substantial amount of morphosyntactic information relating to tense and aspect, but fail to model inferences that require reasoning with these semantic properties.Comment: accepted at IWCS 201

Infinitives

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1998.Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves [335]-351).This dissertation is an investigation of the structure of control infinitives, the mechanism of control, and the general architecture of clauses involving auxiliaries and modals. The dissertation challenges the idea that control infinitives are represented uniformly by a clausal (CP) structure. It is argued that control infinitives of a certain well-defined class are best analyzed as simple VP-complements that do not involve an embedded subject. The structure of VP-infinitives is motivated by five sets of properties that systematically differ from the properties of clausal control infinitives. First, VP-infinitives do not allow complementizer and wh-material (chapter two). Second, VP-infinitives do not exhibit tense related properties-VP-infinitives (in contrast to clausal infinitives) do not contribute independent tense information, and overt tense marker and modification of the embedded tense are prohibited in VP-infinitives (chapter two). Third, VP-infinitives do not involve a structural case position. Rather, the embedded object is assigned case by the matrix predicate (chapter three). Fourth, VP-infinitives do not involve an embedded syntactic subject (chapter four). Fifth, VP-infinitives are characterized as properties rather than as propositions semantically (chapter five). The second major contribution of this dissertation is that it provides a new approach to control. It is argued that there are two forms of control--syntactic or variable control vs. semantic or obligatory control. In contrast to previous theories, however, it is argued that only syntactic control-which correlates with non-VP-infinitives-is a relation between an antecedent and an embedded syntactic PRO-subject. VP-infinitives, which do not have a syntactic subject, involve semantic control (chapter four) which is to be understood in terms of a semantic entailment relation. Finally, this dissertation investigates constructions with complex verb phrases. It is argued that modal verbs and raising verbs in German are functional categories that are generated outside the VP in some inflectional head (chapter six).by Susanne Wurmbrand.Ph.D

Decompositional Semantics for Events, Participants, and Scripts in Text

This thesis presents a sequence of practical and conceptual developments in decompositional meaning representations for events, participants, and scripts in text under the framework of Universal Decompositional Semantics (UDS) (White et al., 2016a). Part I of the thesis focuses on the semantic representation of individual events and their participants. Chapter 3 examines the feasibility of deriving semantic representations of events from dependency syntax; we demonstrate that predicate- argument structure may be extracted from syntax, but other desirable semantic attributes are not directly discernible. Accordingly, we present in Chapters 4 and 5 state of the art models for predicting these semantic attributes from text. Chapter 4 presents a model for predicting semantic proto-role labels (SPRL), attributes of participants in events based on Dowty’s seminal theory of thematic proto-roles (Dowty, 1991). In Chapter 5 we present a model of event factuality prediction (EFP), the task of determining whether an event mentioned in text happened (according to the meaning of the text). Both chapters include extensive experiments on multi-task learning for improving performance on each semantic prediction task. Taken together, Chapters 3, 4, and 5 represent the development of individual components of a UDS parsing pipeline. In Part II of the thesis, we shift to modeling sequences of events, or scripts (Schank and Abelson, 1977). Chapter 7 presents a case study in script induction using a collection of restaurant narratives from an online blog to learn the canonical “Restaurant Script.” In Chapter 8, we introduce a simple discriminative neural model for script induction based on narrative chains (Chambers and Jurafsky, 2008) that outperforms prior methods. Because much existing work on narrative chains employs semantically impoverished representations of events, Chapter 9 draws on the contributions of Part I to learn narrative chains with semantically rich, decompositional event representations. Finally, in Chapter 10, we observe that corpus based approaches to script induction resemble the task of language modeling. We explore the broader question of the relationship between language modeling and acquisition of common-sense knowledge, and introduce an approach that combines language modeling and light human supervision to construct datasets for common-sense inference

Advice giving in telephone interactions between mothers and their young adult daughters

This thesis focuses on the social organisation of advice, as it unfolds in interactions between mothers and their young adult daughters on the telephone. The analysis is based on a corpus of 51 telephone calls from 5 different families. Advice giving is studied here using the methods of conversation analysis and discursive psychology. The main interest has been to consider the dimensions that are relevant to the potentially tricky action of advice giving, building on the dimensions of normativity and knowledge asymmetry that have already been identified in the literature. The less strictly institutionalised context studied here provides a relatively new arena for considering the array of issues that are relevant to advice giving. Indeed, this has provided a broad scope for specifying how recipiency is brought off in advice giving sequences and how the position of advice recipient is managed. The analysis begins by considering the different forms of advice that were found in the data and their affordances in terms of the recipient s next turn. Contingency is identified as an important dimension in advice giving and a range of resources are identified which build contingency into the advice in various ways and which provide the recipient with different degrees of optionality when responding to advice. The thesis then goes on to consider how recipients respond to advice and the sorts of issues that make relevant one response type over another. The analysis identifies the importance of affiliation and alignment when considering different types of advice response. Furthermore, it is shown that morality, activity type, and alignment to the recipient s position, are important features of why a particular response type is chosen over another. The final analytic chapter then considers how the potentially tricky action of advice giving is made relevant in the first place. It is shown that the choice between different forms of advice is related to local issues of entitlement and contingency. In considering these different components to advice giving, the analysis explicates an array of important issues in advice giving sequences including: knowledge asymmetry, normativity, entitlement, contingency, affiliation, alignment and morality as well as considering evidence to suggest that advice is a dispreferred action. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for studying advice and promoting advice acceptance, as well as considering how we can begin to see relationality being constituted

Worlds of the Future: Modality & Future Licensing at the Syntax-Semantics Interface

The objective of this dissertation is to accurately describe and derive the distribution of future reference in English. In particular, the dissertation covers the following constructions in depth: (i) prejacents to modal auxiliaries (Chapter 2), (ii) (non)-finite complements to attribute predicates (Chapter 3), (iii) adverbial clauses including conditionals, causal/concessive clauses, and temporal clauses (Chapter 5). We propose that future reference in English is introduced by a covert temporal operator FUT (Matthewson, 2012; Giannakidou and Mari, 2018). This operator is an existential quantifier over times following the local evaluation time. We propose that the distribution of this operator is constrained by a contingency presupposition which is modeled as a condition, not on a world, but on a set of worlds, the modal context (Portner, 1997; Yalcin, 2007; Anand and Hacquard, 2013). We attempt to derive this distribution by appealing to the grammatical principle of Analyticity (Gajewski, 2002, 2009; Abrusán, 2014; Del Pinal, 2019). Throughout the dissertation, we supply arguments for this particular approach. We provide evidence from of scope interactions that future reference is introduced by an independent operator as opposed to modal elements. In addition, we provide evidence that FUT is locally licensed, as opposed to globally (e.g., Kaufmann, 2005; Kaufmann et al., 2006; Bohnemeyer, 2009). In Chapter 6, we discuss a number of additional constructions which are able to license future reference in a way which is compatible with the theory developed. These are: (i) sentential adverbials, (ii) disjunctions, and (iii) restrictor arguments of universal quantifier phrases. Chapter 4 is dedicated to past-in-future readings of the perfect marker have under deontic modals and commitment predicates. There, a novel observation is made regarding an asymmetry between the acceptability of past-in-future readings of obligation modals on the one hand, and the unacceptability of past-in-future readings of permission modals on the other. We attribute this to an interaction between the presuppositions of performative modals and a grammatical principle of Redundancy (Meyer, 2015; Marty, 2017; Moracchini, 2018)

Analyzing Meaning - Second corrected and slightly revised edition

This book provides an introduction to the study of meaning in human language, from a linguistic perspective. It covers a fairly broad range of topics, including lexical semantics, compositional semantics, and pragmatics. The chapters are organized into six units: (1) Foundational concepts; (2) Word meanings; (3) Implicature (including indirect speech acts); (4) Compositional semantics; (5) Modals, conditionals, and causation; (6) Tense & aspect. Most of the chapters include exercises which can be used for class discussion and/or homework assignments, and each chapter contains references for additional reading on the topics covered. As the title indicates, this book is truly an INTRODUCTION: it provides a solid foundation which will prepare students to take more advanced and specialized courses in semantics and/or pragmatics