Pseudo-grammaticalization: The anatomy of "come" in Modern Hebrew pseudo-coordination constructions

The paper examines the pseudo-coordination construction featuring the verb come preceding a lexical verb in Modern Hebrew, and shows that this is a mono-clausal mono-eventive construction, which did not emerge via a process of grammaticalization. That is, there is no tightening of internal dependencies between parts of the construction (Haspelmath 2004), nor evidence of a lexical unit starting to assume grammatical functions (Heine, Claudi & Hünnemeyer 1991). I go on to argue that, in this particular construction, the verb come is a “lexical restructuring verb” (Wurmbrand 2004, 2014), whose lexical properties do not differ from those of ‘simple’ change-of-location uses of come in that both feature a deictic meaning component. Particular attention will be paid to what looks like the absence of a motion component, suggesting that even if simple come selects for a prepositional complement, it does not necessarily encode a motion component, and therefore the absence of the PP, in a complex verb construction is not tied to loss of motion, but merely to a change in the type of complement. The current account provides substance to claims stressing a metaphorical relation between the two occurrences of come, since it points to the close similarities in the lexical-pragmatic properties of this lexeme in its two environments of use, and locates the difference between them in the choice of complement that produces the effect of transfer from the location realm to a more abstract one characteristic of metaphoric meanings

Deux concepts d’habitualité

Dans cet article, il sera proposé que les langues naturelles expriment deux concepts d’habitualité. L’un est le concept gnomique de récurrence régulière d’événements, et l’autre est le concept aspectuel de récurrence d’événements comme point de vue sur des épisodes singuliers. Les deux concepts sont modélisés comme deux opérateurs d’habitulalité distincts, HabMOD et HabASP, ayant en commun la récurrence d’événements sur une période de temps spécifiée comme contextuellement longue. Ils se distinguent par la position syntaxique qu’ils occupent, ainsi que par leur sémantique. HabMOD est un adverbe modifiant le VP, tandis que HabASP est une tête aspectuelle. Il sera démontré que l’anglais et l’hébreu moderne sont deux langues qui grammaticalisent ces deux concepts par deux formes verbales, l’une périphrastique, l’autre simple. L’article montre comment l’analyse proposée de la syntaxe et de la sémantique de ces opérateurs rend compte des propriétés des deux formes habituelles dans ces langues.In this paper, it is proposed that natural languages express two concepts of habituality: a gnomic and an aspectual concept of regular event recurrence. The two concepts are modelled as distinct habituality operators, HabMOD and HabASP, sharing a semantic core of event recurrence over a contextually long interval. The operators differ syntactically and semantically. HabMOD is an adverb which modifies VP, whereas HabASP is an aspectual head. The paper shows first that English and Modern Hebrew grammaticalize these two concepts by two verbal forms, a periphrastic form and a simple form. Secondly, the paper shows how the proposed syntactic and semantic analysis of the operators accounts for the properties of the two habitual forms in these languages

Discourse update at the service of mirativity effects: the case of the Discursive Dative

The classic model of conversation based on the Common Ground (CG), introduced by Karttunen (1974), Lewis (1979) and Stalnaker (1978), was shown to be insufficient for accounting for various conversational phenomena (inter alia Portner 2004, 2007, Farkas & Bruce 2009, Murray 2014). This paper further strengthens this line by analyzing a type of non-truth conditional non-core dative termed the Discursive Dative (DD) as a discourse management device (Krifka 2008, Repp 2013). The DD signals that the asserted proposition p constitutes an exception to a normative generalization believed by the speaker to be shared by the speech event participants. In order to capture the notion of exception we propose to divide the CG into two sets of worlds, those consistent with previous assertions and their presuppositions (CGA) and those consistent with generalizations (CGG). The DD signals a non-inclusion relation between the asserted proposition and the CGG. This enables us to distinguish between different types of mirativity effects, by drawing a distinction between adding a proposition p that was not previously in the speaker's expectation-set (inter alia DeLancey 1997, 2001, Rett 2009, Peterson 2013, Rett & Murray 2013) and the present case of the DD, where p can very well be in the speaker's expectation-set, but objectively expected that ~p

The construction of viewpoint aspect: the imperfective revisited

This paper argues for a constructionist approach to viewpoint Aspect by exploring the idea that it does not exert any altering force on the situation-aspect properties of predicates. The proposal is developed by analyzing the syntax and semantics of the imperfective, which has been attributed a coercer role in the literature as a de-telicizer and de-stativizer in the progressive, and as a de-eventivizer in the so-called ability (or attitudinal) and habitual readings. This paper proposes a unified semantics for the imperfective, preserving the properties of eventualities throughout the derivation. The paper argues that the semantics of viewpoint aspect is encoded in a series of functional heads containing interval-ordering predicates and quantifiers. This richer structure allows us to account for a greater amount of phenomena, such as the perfective nature of the individual instantiations of the event within a habitual construction or the nonculminating reading of perfective accomplishments in Spanish. This paper hypothesizes that nonculminating accomplishments have an underlying structure corresponding to the perfective progressive. As a consequence, the progressive becomes disentangled from imperfectivity and is given a novel analysis. The proposed syntax is argued to have a corresponding explicit morphology in languages such as Spanish and a nondifferentiating one in languages such as English; however, the syntax-semantics underlying both of these languages is argued to be the same

Dispositions and characterizing sentences

The aim of this study is to delineate how the dispositional reading patterns and interacts with other readings stemming from characterizing sentences (Krifka et al. 1995). It is claimed that dispositionals are indistinct from simple habituals, as opposed to restricted ones, and that there seem to be no linguistic arguments to favor an analysis attributing an existential quantificational force to dispositions in characterizing sentences. At the same time, it is argued that dispositionals in simple characterizing sentences cannot be readily subsumed under the standard generic operator GEN, rather these readings are due to DISP, a stativizing dispositional VP-level operator necessarily involving event plurality. The picture that emerges argues in favor of the line of thought promoted in Boneh & Doron (2010; 2013), whereby habituality is reducible to other existing categories: to genericity in restricted characterizing sentences and to dispositions in simple ones

Intersecting PPs and the locative semantics of possession

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To PPs in their proper place

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