16.1499, Review: Semantics/Syntax: ter Meulen & Abraham (2004)

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Subject: 16.1499, Review: Semantics/Syntax: ter Meulen & Abraham (2004)

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1)
Date: 10-May-2005
From: Catherine Fortin < fortinc at umich.edu >
Subject: The Composition of Meaning 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 01:09:05
From: Catherine Fortin < fortinc at umich.edu >
Subject: The Composition of Meaning 
 

EDITORS: ter Meulen, Alice G.; Abraham, Werner
TITLE: The Composition of Meaning
SUBTITLE: From lexeme to discourse
SERIES: Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 255
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins 
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-3165.html


Catherine R. Fortin, Department of Linguistics, University of Michigan

INTRODUCTION

This volume contains eight new papers which explore issues relating 
to interfaces with syntax; the first four deal with phenomena on the 
syntax-semantics interface, while the second four are concerned with 
syntax-pragmatics interface.  Following an introduction by editors ter 
Meulen and Abraham in Chapter 1, Part I of the book contains four 
papers dealing with issues on the syntax-semantics interface, 
including the composition of meaning of morphologically complex 
compounds (Olsen); aspect and its syntactic properties, specifically 
with respect to the diachronic morphophonological changes in English 
infinitives (van Gelderen); the issue of unintelligibility within Optimality 
Theory (OT) (de Hoop); and unaccusative verbs (Abraham). Part II of 
the book, which contains four papers dealing with issues on the 
syntax-pragmatics interface, is motivated by the question of how best 
to integrate syntax and discourse-sensitive phenomena, with the goal 
of eliminating information-structural features (e.g. [+foc]) in favor of 
relying on the interface between the grammar itself and more general 
cognitive processes.  Topics covered include English either, both and 
neither (Hendriks); the interaction of case morphology and word order 
in Middle Bavarian (Weiß); the way information structure is encoded in 
a sentence (von Heusinger); and negative concord in Afrikaans 
(Molnárfi).

DESCRIPTION

In 'Coordination in morphology and syntax: the case of copulative 
compounds', Susan Olsen addresses the issue of the composition of 
meaning of a certain type of morphologically complex compound, the 
so-called copulative compound (e.g. bartender-psychologist).  
Copulative compounds are semantically unique in that they represent 
a coordinative (not subordinate) relation between two (or more) 
constituents, which are predicated equally of the same referent.  
Olsen argues that the semantic composition of a morphological 
copulative compound is not equivalent to its syntactic analogue, 
the 'coordinative apposition', as shown in (1) (her (4)), and hence is 
governed by different principles.
(1)
a. Henry Kissinger, diplomat and lightning rod, returns to the corridors 
of power.
b.* The diplomat-lightning rod returns to the corridors of power.

Olsen proposes a cognitive principle, the Principle of Ontological 
Coherence (POC), which states that 'a complex concept as the 
denotation of a morphological object picks out a coherent individual 
from one of the domains of individuals' (p. 19). The POC holds only in 
the morphological component - not in the syntax - accounting for the 
grammaticality contrast shown in (1). Olsen proposes a 'compound 
template' according to which the meaning of determinative compounds 
(those characterized by a subordinate relation, e.g. computer monitor) 
is computed.  The semantics of this template consists of a context-
independent level containing an open parameter that is instantiated by 
a specific relation at a context-dependent level.  This context-specific 
relation is suggested to be the relevant difference in interpretation 
between the different types of determinative compounds, and that 
copulative compounds are simply a type of determinative compound; 
the copulative interpretation is the 'most neutral' and is obtained as a 
default, when the context does not provide another meaning.

In 'Aspect, infinitival complements and evidentials', Elly van Gelderen 
argues against Giorgi & Pianesi's (G&P) (1997) analysis of eventive 
infinitives lacking the ending -en (as in English, and unlike German 
and Dutch) as inherently perfective. G&P argue that these verbs carry 
a perfective feature, because perception verb complements (PVCs) in 
English (but not German and Dutch) are perfective.  van Gelderen 
uses diachronic changes in English eventive infinitives to support her 
claims that they do not carry a perfective feature, and that the 
incipience of the perfective interpretation of bare eventive infinitives 
did not coincide with the loss of -en (contra G&P).  van Gelderen 
hypothesizes that bare eventive infinitives in English became 
perfective as the result of two diachronic changes: the reanalysis of -
ing as a checker of the imperfective feature in Asp° (following the loss 
of ge- as a marker of perfectivity in Asp°), and a parametric change in 
unmarked aspect (from unmarked imperfectivity to unmarked 
perfectivity).

van Gelderen argues that not all PVs uniquely require perfective 
complements.  She claims that there are three kinds of perception 
verbs (PVs) in English, and hence, three kinds of PVCs in English.  
More specifically, there are three kinds of 'see': a (rare) activity see, 
as in (2a) (her (79)); a stative see, as in (2b) (her (3)); and a modal 
see, as in (2c) (her (1)), which van Gelderen argues has become 
grammaticalized as an auxiliary/evidential.
(2)
a. Poirot was seeing the face of a girl with red hair.
b. I see him crossing the street.
c. I saw/*see him cross the street.

The difference between these three types of see is reducible to their 
complements: activity 'see' selects CP; stative 'see' selects AspP; and 
auxiliary 'see' selects vP.  If perfectivity in English is unmarked, and 
the PVC selected by the evidential see does not contain Asp° (the 
locus of (im)perfectivity), the unavailability of an imperfective reading 
in (2c) is accounted for. 

Helen de Hoop's 'The problem of unintelligibility' is the only paper 
included in this volume couched within a non-Chomskyan theoretic 
framework.  de Hoop uses a bi-directional Optimality Theoretic 
framework (which assumes that both speaker and hearer take into 
account the other's perspective) to explore unintelligibility, which 
obtains when a syntactically well-formed expression fails to give rise to 
a felicitous interpretation, such as (3) (her (18)).
(3) Most female professors are men with beards or glasses.

Within OT, unintelligibility arises when there is not an optimal 
interpretation within a candidate set of interpretation outputs for a 
given syntactic expression.  (The counterpart of intelligibility is 
ineffability, which obtains when a given semantic input does not yield a 
well-formed syntactic expression as its output.)  de Hoop argues that 
the problem of unintelligibility with OT can be circumvented by simply 
extending the candidate set of outputs to include contradictory 
interpretations, which may be calculated to be the optimal candidate.  
She posits a set of five (pragmatically-oriented) ranked constraints 
which govern the matching between a syntactic input and its semantic 
output, and suggests that ranking a constraint 'Be Informative' first, 
over other constraints such as 'Avoid Contradiction', will yield the 
correct result in cases such as (3) (i.e., the number of female 
professors who are men with beards or glasses is greater than the 
number of female professors who are not).

Werner Abraham's 'VP-internal subjects as "unaccusatives": 
Burzio's "Object Account" vs. the "Perfectivity Account"', is the second 
of two papers in this volume to deal with perfectivity.  Abraham argues 
that both unaccusativity and Burzio's Generalization (BG), which links 
a verb's ability to assign accusative case to its ability to license an 
external argument, are epiphenomena with roots in Aktionsart 
perfectivity (the 'Perfectivity Account').  Abraham refutes one of BG's 
empirical tests - the use of existential clauses to test whether a 
predicate's single argument is internal - as inadequate.  Compare (4a) 
(his (5a)), containing an unaccusative verb, to (4b) (his (5c)), 
containing an unergative; if the single argument is definite, an 
existential clause is similarly ungrammatical (5) (his 5b).
(4)
a. There appeared a/some/many/few/three dog(s) in the garden.
b. * There ran a/some/many/few/three dog(s) in the garden.
(5) * There appeared the/all/most/both/every dog(s) in the garden. 

Abraham adopts Diesing's (1992) Mapping Hypothesis, which states 
that while definite object NPs must move to positions outside of the VP 
by LF to take scope, indefinite object NPs remain within the VP.  
Specifically, Abraham proposes that definite NPs must move to [Spec, 
AgroP], a position by hypothesis unavailable in the clause structure of 
existentials.  Consequently, he argues that existential clauses are not 
effective as a diagnostic of unaccusativity, and that semantic 
properties such as telicity, change of state, and the possibility of an 
agentive reading must be used as diagnostics instead.  Abraham 
proposes that the relevant difference between (4a) and (4b) is 
perfectivity: namely, appear (and other so-called unaccusatives) is a 
perfective verb, while run is not.  Ultimately, the question of how to 
represent the syntactic difference between verbs such as appear and 
verbs such as run remains somewhat open.  Abraham assumes that 
the syntactic representation of perfectives contains a small clause, 
whence the single argument's logical subject status; for details, the 
reader is referred to earlier work.  He also assumes that all structural 
cases except for nominative are structurally/lexically inherent. 

In 'Either, both and neither in coordinate structures', Petra Hendriks 
advances the argument that these three lexical items are focus 
particles quantifying over a set of relevant alternatives, contra the 
traditional analysis of these lexical items as conjunctions.  She 
considers each lexical item individually, in comparison with clear focus 
particles such as 'only', with respect to their distribution, their 
interaction with sentential intonation, and their contribution to the 
interpretation of the sentence. The second and third criteria - that 
focus particles must c-command the element in the first conjunct 
receiving contrastive stress, and that sentences with focus particles 
entail the sentence without the focus particle - most clearly 
demonstrate that these three lexical items are subject to the same 
constraints and receive the same interpretation as other focus 
particles. Hendriks concludes that 'either' and 'neither' (akin to 'only') 
are restrictive focus particles, quantifying over alternatives that are 
excluded, while 'both' (similar to 'also') is an additive focus particle, 
quantifying over alternatives that may be included.  (She further notes 
that 'both' is not unambiguously a focus particle; in some contexts - 
i.e., where 'both' does not c-command the contrastively focused 
element - 'both' is a floated quantifier.) 

In 'Information structure meets Minimalist syntax: On argument order 
and case morphology in Bavarian', Helmut Weiß advances an analysis 
of two types of short scrambling in double object constructions in 
Middle Bavarian:  the obligatory scrambling of a definite direct object 
over an indefinite direct object, and the optional object inversion for 
reasons related to focus (wherein the unfocused element precedes 
the focused element).  Weiß argues that, because the Bavarian case 
system is morphologically impoverished, the first type of (obligatory) 
scrambling is feature-driven, occurring within the narrow syntax; 
however, the second type of (optional) scrambling is a 'stylistic' 
operation occurring in a post-syntactic component.

To capture the typological distinction between 'free' and rigid word 
order languages (e.g. Bavarian and English), Weiß proposes the 
Principle of Strong Morphology (PSM), which supposes that overt 
morphology and feature checking are related; namely, strong 
morphology (e.g. case in Bavarian, but not in English) delays feature 
checking until LF.  He further assumes a distinction between core 
features (e.g. case) and peripheral features (e.g. focus); although 
both types of features drive movement, only the core features must be 
checked within the narrow syntax; peripheral features may, possibly, 
instead be checked within the phonological component (cf. Chomsky 
2000).  Specifically, Weiß proposes that definite NPs carry a [D] 
feature which indefinite NPs lack; since in Bavarian, this feature is not 
morphologically encoded (and, according to the PSM, must be 
checked prior to LF), the definite DO must raise to AgrP overtly, over 
the indefinite IO, which remains in situ.

In 'Focus particles, sentence meaning and discourse structure', Klaus 
von Heusinger proposes an alternative to semantic theories of 
information structure (e.g. Alternative Semantics and Structured 
Meanings) which hold that sentences are semantically composed of 
two disjunctive units (e.g. the 'background', or given/presuppositional 
information, and 'focus', new information).  von Heusinger's 
Foreground-Background Semantics holds that the information 
structure of sentences is composed of two overlapping units:  the 
foreground (the new information, which for von Heusinger is the entire 
sentence) and the background (the foreground minus focused 
expressions).  He seeks to demonstrate that focus-sensitive 
expressions, such as focus particles like only and adverbs of 
quantification like usually, are operators which take two arguments, 
the foreground (not the focus alone) and the background. 

von Heusinger provides support for his proposal by showing that 
approaches which rely on a distinction between focus and background 
(instead of foreground and background, as his does) are unable to 
account for complex NPs, as in the following example (his 6a).
(6) Sam only talked to the SWISS artist.

Here, Swiss receives contrastive focus.  Theories of focus semantics 
make the incorrect prediction here; namely, they hold that the two 
arguments of only would be the focus (Swiss) and the background 
(Sam talked to --- artist) This would presuppose a uniqueness 
requirement on the set of alternatives which is not met if the set 
contains, for example, two German artists.  Using a framework of 
Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, von Heusinger shows 
that his theory, supplemented with the additional assumption the 
uniqueness requirement of the definite article is presuppositional, not 
semantic, is able to account for these examples.

In 'On the interpretation of multiple negation in spoken and written 
Afrikaans', Laszlo Molnárfi seeks to account for a phenomenon - 
negative concord (NC) - that is manifested differently in written and 
spoken varieties of Afrikaans.  In written Afrikaans, NC forms a 
negation bracket, which is interpreted semantically as a single 
sentential negation; the first negative particle opens the scope of 
negation, while the second marks the right periphery of the sentence, 
as in (7) (his (23c)).  In spoken Afrikaans, however, additional copies 
of the negative particle can appear within the scope of negation, as in 
(8) (his (2)).  In spoken Afrikaans, additional copies of the negative 
particle do not effect the interpretation of negation, while in written 
Afrikaans, additional copies are interpreted as the logical cancellation 
of negation.
(7)
Ek het  niemand gesien nie.
I  have nobody  seen   not
'I have not seen anybody'
(8)
Ek het  niemand nie gesien nie.
I  have nobody  not seen   not
'I have not seen anybody' (Spoken Afrikaans)
'I have seen everybody' (Written Afrikaans)

Molnárfi argues that NC should not be captured in terms of a formal 
operator-licensing/feature-checking mechanism, and proposes instead 
that NC follows top-down percolation of the NEG feature, whereby 
silent copies of NEG percolate downward to all terminal nodes. The 
spoken and written varieties differ only according to the constraints 
that govern Spell Out of intermediate copies of negation: the written 
variety requires a rule stipulating that only the lowest copy of negation 
is Spelled Out, while the spoken variety allows for more liberal Spell 
Out of additional copies within the phonological component, 
to 'facilitate parsing of the negation bracket' (p. 201).  To account for 
the different interpretations available for (8), Molnárfi argues that 
spoken and written languages employ different strategies for 
information processing, arising from 'different communicative needs' 
with respect to sentence planning and processing, noting that in 
texts 're-reading is always possible' (p. 214) if the negation bracket is 
parsed incorrectly, a strategy which is unavailable in spoken language.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

The papers collected in this volume present a more coherent selection 
than might have been expected of a wide-ranging volume of this type, 
which considers issues on both the syntax-semantics and syntax-
pragmatics interfaces. There are two papers (Abraham's and van 
Gelderen's) which discuss perfectivity; two which discuss focus 
particles (those of Hendriks and von Heusinger); and two which touch 
on definiteness effects (Abraham's and Weiß's).  Each pair of papers 
is complementary, considering the phenomenon in question from 
different angles.  Overall, the papers grapple with deep issues (how 
semantic and pragmatic/discourse-related phenomena are or are not 
rooted in the syntax) in a principled and meaningful way by closely 
considering specific Germanic phenomena.  For example, Weiß' study 
on object scrambling in Middle Bavarian supports the Minimalist thesis 
that pragmatic considerations do not constrain or govern syntactic 
operations, and he effectively argues that pragmatically well-formed 
derivations are the 'side effects' of syntactic operations.

Not all of the papers contained herein commit to a specific theory of 
syntax, and it is not immediately clear how some of the proposals 
advanced would be compatible with recent developments within 
generative syntax.  For example, it's not clear if Molnárfi's proposed 
downward percolation of the negation feature could be captured in 
e.g. a phase-based theory, given that this percolation can cross 
clausal boundaries and has phonetic consequences.  (This is not 
necessarily a criticism, of course; but given that these papers deal 
with interfaces with syntax, it would be interesting to see how the 
proposals are implementable within syntactic theory.)  Also, given the 
cross-disciplinary nature of this volume, some readers may wish that 
papers representative of a range of syntactic theories had been 
included; only one was explicitly framed within a non-Chomskyan 
theory (de Hoop's, in bi-directional OT).

The papers in this volume do contain some minor errors, which range 
from misspellings (e.g. 'suboordonated' for 'subordinated' on page 
221; 'prefigation' for 'prefixation' on p. 101) to incorrectly numbered 
footnotes to unclear citations. For example, on page 2, Abraham, 
Epstein, Thráinsson & Zwart , eds. (1996) is cited as a 1995 
publication; in the list of references this same work is titled 'Studies in 
Minimalism' where 'Minimal Ideas: Syntactic Studies in the Minimalist 
Framework' was intended. There are a few instances where the lists 
of references are incomplete; for example, Chapter 5 cites 'Burzio 
1993' several times, yet this work is not found in the list of references 
for this chapter.  Nonetheless, these typographic errors should not 
detract from the high quality of the papers contained in this volume, a 
welcome addition to the body of research on the syntax-semantics 
and syntax-pragmatics interfaces.

REFERENCES

Abraham, Werner, Samuel Epstein, Hoskuldur Thráinsson & Jan-
Wouter Zwart, eds. (1996) Minimal Ideas: Syntactic Studies in the 
Minimalist Framework.  Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Chomsky, Noam.  (2000) Minimalist inquiries: the framework.  In 
Martin, Michaels & Uriagereka (2000), 89-155.

Diesing, Molly. (1992) Indefinites.  Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press.

Giorgi, Alessandra and Fabio Pianesi. (1997) Tense and Aspect.  
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Martin, Roger, David Michaels and Juan Uriagereka, eds.  (2000)  
Step by step: Minimalist essays in honor of Howard Lasnik.  
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Catherine Fortin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics 
at the University of Michigan.  Her research interests primarily concern 
the interface of syntax and discourse/pragmatics, including the syntax 
and interpretation of nonsententials. She is also interested in the 
syntax of argument structure of Austronesian languages, most 
especially Indonesian and Minangkabau.





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