33.3607, Confs: Semantics, Syntax/Czech Republic

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3607. Sat Nov 19 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.3607, Confs: Semantics, Syntax/Czech Republic

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Editor for this issue: Everett Green <everett at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2022 03:42:12
From: Vaclav Jonas Podlipsky [vaclav.j.podlipsky at upol.cz]
Subject: The grammar of results

 
The grammar of results 

Date: 08-Jun-2023 - 10-Jun-2023 
Location: Olomouc, Czech Republic 
Contact: Éva Kardos 
Contact Email: kardoseva at unideb.hu 
Meeting URL: http://olinco.upol.cz/#sessions 

Linguistic Field(s): Semantics; Syntax 

Meeting Description: 

In this workshop we would like to explore the syntax and semantics of
result-denoting elements such as verbal particles, prefixes and resultative
secondary predicates across languages. We invite submissions addressing, but
not limited to, the following questions:

1. What kind of constraints characterize the number and type of results that
can be expressed in a single clause? This question can, for example, be
addressed in the context of Slavic prefixes and English expressions such as
knock someone unconscious to the ground and knock someone down dead. According
to Ausensi and Bigolin (2021), these English examples illustrate structures
with a low depictive and a result state complement and so do not pose a
challenge for the Unique Path Constraint (Tenny 1987, 1994, Goldberg 1991) on
the condition that it is understood as a syntactic constraint. As for Slavic
prefixes, it has been proposed by a number of scholars that they fall into two
(or three) classes based on their (in)ability to stack and their position
before the verb (and some other diagnostics) (Svenonius 2004, Tatevosov 2008).
For instance, lexical prefixes have been argued to be unable to stack and
occupy a VP-internal position, whereas superlexical prefixes can stack and are
often assumed to sit further away from the verbal root in a VP-external
position (Svenonius 2004). Recently, however, Marušič et al. (2022) have
carried out a corpus analysis of prefixes in Slovenian and found that a small
set of prefixes do appear in stacking environments (see, for example, vz-peti
‘climb’ vs. po-vz-peti ‘climb’ and po-staviti ‘put/stand’ and vz-po-staviti
‘establish’) in spite of the fact that they express idiosyncratic or spatial
meanings, typical of lexical prefixes. They propose based on Žaucer (2013)
that they should be analyzed as result and result-modifying prefixes and so
again argue against the hypothesis that two results of the same type appear
within the VP. It would be interesting to examine whether such structures are
also available in other (Slavic) languages and, if so, how it is best to
represent their syntax and semantics. If, by contrast, they are not available,
it would be good to see what alternative strategies languages use to express
what the Slovenian doubly prefixed verbs like those above do.

2. What kind of semantics characterizes result-denoting elements across
languages? English-type verbal particles like up in eat up and resultative
secondary predicates seem to just express result states, whereas
result-denoting verbal particles like meg in Hungarian have been shown to be
also associated with event quantification (Halm 2015, Kardos 2016). Some
Slavic prefixes have also been argued to encode event quantification, but they
are also known to have adverbial meanings rather than resultative ones (see
Svenonius’s (2004) superlexical prefixes). We would like to see if resultative
elements in other languages have a quantificational effect on events and
whether this has any consequences for their structural representation.

3. What is the relationship between the expression of results and telicity? In
English it has been argued that these notions are independent of each other
(Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2010) as many result verbs such as cool and warm
are not lexically telic and “some instances of telicity cannot be analyzed in
terms of a result state” (ibid. 27) (see, for example, telic read a book),
whereas in languages like Hungarian a morphologically complex result verb is
often necessary for telic interpretations (contextual cues do not generally
play a role in telicity) and so the two notions can more easily be equated
here. It would be useful to look into other languages, as well, and see how it
is best to model the relationship that holds between these notions.
 






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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3607	
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