An Integrational Approach to Possessor Raising, Ethical Datives, and Adversative Passives

Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session Dedicated to the Contributions of Charles J. Fillmore (1994

Sociolinguistics and Transformational Grammar

The success of transformational ·grammar owes a great deal to its high degree of idealization. By assuming an unrealistic ideal speaker/ hearer in a homogeneous linguistic community, and by proposing the explication of this speaker's linguistic ability to be its ultimate goal, transformational grammar devised a system of grammar which has even become one of the standard notions of the discipline today. Sociolinguistics, on the other band, is a discipline that has developed itself with a methodology which diametrically opposes that of transformational grammar. Its ·remarkable progress in recent years has led Dell Hymes, William Labov, and M.A.K. Halliday to assert that sociolinguistics is linguistics, and hence the prefix "socio-·" is redundant and unnecessary (Halliday,1974:81). The recent rise of sociolinguistics is not unrelated to inherent problems in the transformational approach. In fact, Labovian sociolinguistics has developed by challenging the methodology utilized in transformational grammar. In this paper I want to attempt an .analysis of reasons behind this rise of sociolinguistics, focusing particularly on those .aspects of transformational grammar which ate questioned by sociolinguists and others

On the Nature of Synonymy in Causative Expressions

In recent issue of Language Research (vol. 10, no. 1), In-Seok Yang attempted to show that the two Korean causative forms, the productive -key ha-ta construction and the lexical causative, are synonymous. To my mind Yang did not succeed in showing that they are indeed truly synonymous, and I still maintain that they are not, as even original proponents of the synonymy hypothesis, e.g. G. Lakoff, no longer maintain that even the English cause form and the corresponding lexical causative are truly synonymous. Rather than arguing against Yang's paper point by point, which I don't think would be very productive, I want to show in a rather informal manner how one might proceed in explicating the semantic differences between the productive form and the lexical causative

SYLLABIFICATION PHENOMENA IN KOREAN

Despite the superficial difference in the environments where the phenomena of consonant cluster simplification and the change of obstruents to unreleased stops occur, a deeper analysis of the syllabification phenomena has revealed that the cases in (l), (2), (4), and (5) involve processes that in fact take place at the same environment, namely a syllable boundary. Thus the above study presents a case where integration of the concept of syllables in phonological theory yields a more general and revealing account

Extra argumentality - affectees, landmarks, and voice

This article investigates sentences with additional core arguments of a special type in three languages, viz. German, English, and Mandarin. These additional arguments, called extra arguments in the article, form a crosslinguistically homogeneous class by virtue of their structural and semantic similarities, with so-called "raised possessors" forming just a sub-group among them. Structurally, extra arguments may not be the most deeply embedded arguments in a sentence. Semantically, their referents are felt to stand in a specific relation to the referent of the/a more deeply embedded argument. There are two major thematic relations that are instantiated by extra arguments, viz. affectees and landmarks. These thematic role notions are justified in the context of and partly in contrast to, Dowty's (1991) proto-role approach. An affectee combines proto-agent with proto-patient properties in eventualities that are construed as involving causation. A landmark is a ground with respect to some spatial configuration denoted by the predication at hand, but a figure at the highest level of gestalt partitioning that is relevant in a clause. Thereby, both affectees and landmarks are inherently hybrid categories. The account of extra argumentality is couched in a neo-Davidsonian event semantics in the spirit of Kratzer (1996, 2003), and voice heads are assumed to introduce affectee arguments and landmark arguments right above VP

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

Dative subject constructions twenty-two years later

published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Relational Grammar and Korean Syntax : So-called double-subject and double-object constructions revisited

In constructing a viable theory of universal grammar, it is becoming increasingly clear that grammatical relations such as subject and direct object must be considered as theoretical primitives and that they play a central role in the formulation of syntactic rules and constraints_ This position, recently advocated by the proponents of a syntactic theory known as relational grammar, is motivated in part by the facts such as: l) Chomsky's derivative definitions of 'subject-of' and 'object-of' may not be applicable universally, 2)the universal properties of certain syntactic processes cannot be adequately captured unless alternations in grammatical relations that accompany transformations are properly expres' sed, and 3) a series of universal constraints on syntactic rules can be stated in terms of possible alternations of grammatical relations