Conf érence Partee & Borschev le lundi 22 mars à 12h00 - Institut Jean Nicod

[Benjamin Spector]

Barbara Partee et Vladimir Borschev seront invités à l'institut Jean Nicod
du 22 au 24 mars prochain. Vous trouverez ci-dessous les informations pour
leur présentation (en anglais) le lundi 22 mars de 12h à 13h.

Quand: Lundi 22 mars - 12h-13h
Où: Institut Jean Nicod, 29 rue d'Ulm, Salle Paul Lapie

Titre:
The Semantics of Russian Genitive of Measure and Container Constructions

Barbara H. Partee
Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst and Russian State Univ. for the Humanities,
Moscow

Vladimir Borschev
VINITI - Russian Academy of Sciences, and University of Massachusetts,
Amherst

Abstract:

There is a distinction between sortal and relational nouns, but nouns can be
coerced to cross the border, and some nouns like *teacher*have robust
meanings of both kinds. The line between relational and functional nouns is
even less sharp, and one can question the robustness of the separate
category of functional nouns.

But there are some constructions specific to functional nouns. We first
briefly describe two interesting “minor” constructions: (i) parameter-headed
NPs as modifiers in English, as in *a dress that length* (Partee 1986), and
(ii) a construction in Russian known as “genitive with obligatory third
term” (Borschev and Knorina 1990), similar to English *person of medium
height, *person of height.*

The main topic of the talk is a third family of constructions in Russian
involving container nouns, commonly known as the “genitive of measure”
construction(s), illustrated by *stakan moloka *‘glass of milk’, involving a
quantity of substance contained in a container, earlier studied in (Borschev
and Partee 2001, 2004). *Stakan moloka *may refer to the quantity of milk or
to both the milk and the glass (Pustejovsky’s “dotted type”); *stakan* has
also developed a measure reading analogous to *litr* ‘liter’, and some
readings in between the concrete container reading and the measure reading.
We investigate the semantics and ontology of the different readings of such
functional “container-nouns” and the constructions they occur in. On our
current analysis, building on work of Landman and Rothstein, the role of the
function-noun ends up being quite different in these different
constructions. We include some observations on the relation between
linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of the “natural language metaphysics
of containers”.



Borschev, V.B., and Knorina, L.V. 1990. Tipy realij i ix jazykovoe
vosprijatie [Types of entities and their perception in language]. In *Language
of Logic and Logic of Language*, ed. V.V. Ivanov, 106-134. Moscow: Akademija
Nauk SSSR.

Borschev, Vladimir, and Partee, Barbara H. 2001. Genitive modifiers, sorts,
and metonymy. *Nordic Journal of Linguistics* 24:140-160.
http://people.umass.edu/partee/docs/genitive_modifiers.pdf

Borschev, Vladimir, and Partee, Barbara H. 2004. Genitives, types, and
sorts: The Russian genitive of measure.
http://people.umass.edu/partee/docs/B&P_PossWkshp04.pdf

Partee, Barbara H. 1986. Noun phrase interpretation and type-shifting
principles. https://udrive.oit.umass.edu/partee/Partee86_NPInterp.pdf




-- 
Benjamin SPECTOR

Institut Jean-Nicod
CNRS - EHESS - ENS
Ecole Normale Supérieure
Pavillon Jardin
29 rue d'Ulm
75005 Paris
France

Webpage: http://lumiere.ens.fr/~bspector/

Tel: (33) 1 44 32 26 63
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