paradigms

[Jonathan David Bobaljik]

Hi Dan,

Since my name came up in an earlier posting on 
this, I'll  make a couple of remarks, though I'm 
limited by (i) other pressing obligations this 
week, (ii) an imperfect undertanding (on my part) 
as to what the questions are, and (iii) a hazy 
recollection of the paper you mention, with no 
time to look it up (see (i)). If the discussion 
continues, I'll try to jump in again later.

Question 1:
(Apparent) non-compositional meaning is discussed 
in DM work on, e.g., idioms. Is there anything 
here that is specific to paradigms? In 
particular, is there any reason to suspect that 
existing approaches to (apparent) 
non-compositionality won't extend to cover the 
cases that are apparently "in paradgims"? My 
recollection was that one of the cases you 
discussed had a structure [A B] for something 
filling the role of a pronominal of some sort, 
while A's use elsewhere was as a determiner. Is 
this qualitatively different from (other) idioms, 
which may contain determiners without the (full) 
determiner sematnics... "on the run", etc.?

Question 2:
Relatedly, I am not sure I understand what is meant by:
>meaning corresponds exactly to what would be expected for
>individual  paradigm cells.

See the brief discussion of paradigms in Dave 
Embick's LI paper on Latin, where he responds 
directly to the "periphrastic cells" approach to 
Latin analytic passives in Börjars, Vincent & 
Chapman. One point Embick makes is that paradigms 
are a convenient device for "looking up" the 
output that corresponds to some set of input, 
defined, say in terms of admissible feature 
combinations and a base lexeme, but surely these 
are the observations we seek to have a theory of, 
not the theory itself.

If the observation is that the feature 
combination [leave, F1, F2] yields a word, while 
[leave, F1, F3] yields a phrase, simply listing 
these as such in a list somewhere seems (to me) 
to add little to our understanding. For F1 = 
past, F3 = neg, we get left  versus did not leave 
in English. Compare this with a language that has 
negative and positive forms of the verb, and one 
would be tempted to say that 'did not leave' is 
non-compositional (do does not have its regular 
meaning) and has a meaning corresponding exactly 
to the neg, past paradigm 'cell'. But rather than 
simply listing the periphrastic form in a cell, 
these observations formed the starting point for 
a syntactic analysis which seeks to explain the 
distribution of the forms, why the latter is 
(observationally) periphrastic, and why the 
particular pieces that are used have the forms 
they do. From this perspective, the argument "for 
paradigms" from meaning looks mis-constituted.

Since you asked earlier, in the Syncretism w/o 
Paradigms paper mentioned by Heidi and others, I 
engaged Edwin Williams's theory of paradigm 
structure (rather than the periphrastic 
arguments) because it was one of the few 
'paradigm theories' that I've seen (see also 
Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy's work, and in 
phonology, work by John McCarthy and Michael 
Kenstowicz; this list is not exhaustive) where 
paradigms are more than a listing of input-output 
correspondences, and the actual structure of the 
paradigm plays some non-trivial role. I happen 
not to be convinced by these theories, for 
reasons I've put forward elsewhere, but I'm less 
convinced (perhaps out of igorance) that the 
arguments from periphrasis actually require 
paradigms in a deeper sense than that (perhaps 
unfairly) sketched above.

Open to pointers to the arguments out there...

Best,

-Jonathan

--
_______________________
Jonathan David Bobaljik
University of Connecticut
Department of Linguistics, Unit 1145
337 Mansfield Road
Storrs, CT 06269-1145
USA

tel: (860) 486-0153
fax: (860) 486-0197

http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/
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