Contradiction and grammar : the case of weak islands

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 135-138).This thesis is about weak islands. Weak islands are contexts that are transparent to some but not all operator-variable dependencies. For this reason, they are also sometimes called selective islands. Some paradigmatic cases of weak island violations include the ungrammatical examples involving manner and degree extraction in (1)a and (2)a, as opposed to the acceptable questions about individuals in (1)b and (2)b: (1) a. *How does John regret that he fixed the car? b.Who does John regret that he invited to the party? (2) a. *How much milk haven't you spilled on your shirt? b.Which girl haven't you introduced to Mary? The main questions that an account of weak islands should address are the following: * What contexts create weak islands and why? + Which expressions are sensitive to weak islands and why? * Why do weak islands sometimes improve? This thesis develops a semantic account for weak islands, whose core idea can be summarized as follows. What sets apart the expressions that are sensitive to weak islands from the ones that are not is that in the case of the former the domain of quantification is such that its elements stand in a particular logical relationship with each other. The island creating contexts are those in which this property of the island-sensitive expressions leads to a problem, namely a contradiction. This contradiction might manifest itself in one of two forms: In some cases, the question will presuppose that that a number of mutually incompatible alternatives is true at the same time, therefore it will necessarily lead to a presupposition failure in any context.(cont.) In other cases, the presupposition that there be a complete answer will not be met in any context, because the domain of question alternatives will always contain at least two alternatives that have to-but cannot-be ruled out at the same time. The present proposal therefore fits in the family of proposals (most importantly Szabolcsi and Zwarts (1993), Honcoop (1998), Rullmann (1995), Fox and Hackl (2005)) which argue that it is independently necessary principles of semantic composition that lead to the oddness of weak islands, rather than abstract syntactic locality constraints. As such, it provides a further piece of evidence against the view which holds that principles governing the well-formedness of sentences necessarily belong to the realm of syntax as we know it. However, when we will examine the nature of the contradiction that arises in the cases of weak island violations, we will observe that it is only a special type of contradiction-identified by Gajewski (2002) as L-analytic-which leads to ungrammaticality: namely one that results from the logical constants of the sentence alone. In this sense the violation that can be observed might be argued to be "syntactic": it can be read from the logical form of the sentences.by Márta Abrusán.Ph.D

A Szintaktikai Lokalitás Minimalista Megközelítése: A szintaktikai lokalitási feltételekért felelős nyelvi alrendszerek munkamegosztásának vizsgálata = A Minimalist Approach to Syntactic Locality: A study of the division of labour of linguistic subsystems underlying syntactic locality effects

A projekt a szintaxis és az azzal érintkező grammatikai komponensek munkamegosztását vizsgálta a mozgatási és polaritás engedélyezési függőségekben jelentkező szintaktikai lokalitási hatások területén. A projektnek a generatív grammatika mai, Minimalista kutatási programjába illeszkedő radikális tézise szerint a természetes nyelvi szintaxis egyáltalán nem is tartalmaz külön lokalitási megszorítás(oka)t. Kimutattuk, hogy az általunk vizsgált, a szintaxisban jelentkező lokalitási hatások (i) a szintaktikai komputációs rendszer általános tulajdonságaiból, különösen a komputációs komplexitása minimalizálásának igényéből, valamint (ii) a szintaxis és a vele érintkező grammatikai alrendszerek munkamegosztásából fakadnak. A projekt olyan területeken vizsgálta a lokalitási hatások természetét, mint a főnévi kifejezések által képviselt szigetek, a szintaktikai fejmozgatás, a kvantorhatókör-értelmezés, a fókuszálás, a határozói módosítás, a mondatbeágyazás, a preszuppozíciós, a tagadó és a kérdő típusú gyenge szigetek, és egyes, a polaritásengedélyezésben szerepet játszó intervenciós hatások. A több nemzetközi együttműködést is kezdeményező kutatócsoport munkájának sikerességét a számos jelentős publikáció, köztük egy sor nemzetközi folyóiratcikk és nagy presztízsű nemzetközi kiadónál megjelenő könyvfejezet is jelzi. A kutatás keretében egy megvédett DSc értekezés és egy leadott PhD disszertáció is született, és egy további doktori disszertáció készül el még ebben az évben. | This project studied the division of labour between syntax and its interface subsystems in giving rise to some of the central syntactic locality properties of dependencies like movement and polarity licensing. Implementing the current Minimalist research program of transformational generative grammar, it explored the radical proposal that natural language syntax itself includes no special syntactic locality conditions per se. Instead, the locality effects under scrutiny are reduced to (i) the elementary properties of the syntactic computational system, including its quest to keep computational complexity to a minimum, which in turn subsumes its cyclic mapping to the interpretive systems of sound and meaning; and (ii) the division of labour between syntax and the interface subsystems, in particular, semantics and information structure. The topics investigated include the locality effects involved in noun phrase islands, syntactic head movement, quantifier scope interpretation, focusing, adverbial modification, clausal embedding, weak islands like presuppositional, negative, and wh-islands, and some apparent intervention effects in polarity licensing. The project established fruitful international co-operations, and its results have appeared in the form of a number of international journal and book chapter publications. The project has also yielded a completed PhD dissertation, a PhD thesis to be submitted later this year, and a DSc dissertation

Contextual blindness in implicature computation

In this paper, I defend a grammatical account of scalar implicatures. In particular, I submit new evidence in favor of the contextual blindness principle, assumed in recent versions of the grammatical account. I argue that mismatching scalar implicatures can be generated even when the restrictor of the universal quantifier in a universal alternative is contextually known to be empty. The crucial evidence consists of a hitherto unnoticed oddness asymmetry between formally analogous existential sentences with reference failure NPs. I conclude that the generation of mismatching scalar implicatures does not require contextual access

Wh-islands in degree questions: A semantic approach

It is proposed that wh-islands with degree questions are unacceptable because they cannot be given a most informative true answer. Wh-islands thus are shown to be similar to other cases of weak islands which have been argued to result from Maximization Failure, in particular negative islands (cf. Fox & Hackl 2007). Permanent DOI link: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.4.5">http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.4.5</a> <a href="http://semantics-online.org/sp-bib/abrusan-2011.bib">BibTeX info</a

Islands of Contradiction: Presuppostion and Negative Islands

No abstract

Content vs. function words: the view from distributional semantics

Counter to the often assumed division of labour between content and function words, we argue that both types of words have lexical content in addition to their logical content. We propose that the difference between the two types of words is a difference in degree. We conducted a preliminary study of quantificational determiners with methods from Distributional Semantics, a computational approach to natural language semantics. Our findings have implications both for distributional and formal semantics. For distributional semantics, they indicate a possible avenue that can be used to tap into the meaning of function words. For formal semantics, they bring into light the context-sensitive, lexical aspects of function words that can be recovered from the data even when these aspects are not overtly marked. Such pervasive context-sensitivity has profound implications for how we think about meaning in natural language

Content vs. function words: the view from distributional semantics

International audienceCounter to the often assumed division of labour between content and function words,we argue that both types of words have lexical content in addition to their logical content. Wepropose that the difference between the two types of words is a difference in degree. We conducteda preliminary study of quantificational determiners with methods from DistributionalSemantics, a computational approach to natural language semantics. Our findings have implicationsboth for distributional and formal semantics. For distributional semantics, they indicatea possible avenue that can be used to tap into the meaning of function words. For formal semantics,they bring into light the context-sensitive, lexical aspects of function words that canbe recovered from the data even when these aspects are not overtly marked. Such pervasivecontext-sensitivity has profound implications for how we think about meaning in natural language.Keywords: function words, lexical semantics, determiners, distributional semantics