seminaire P8 aujourd'hui: CHANGEMENT DE LIEU

Mon Feb 27 07:21:30 UTC 2012

Bonsoir,
En raison de l'annonce de dernière minute concernant la fermeture du site de Paris 8 demain,
les deux séminaires prévus pour demain lundi 27 février dans le cadre de l'équipe Architecture grammaticale (Structure Argumentale et Langues sans Articles)
se tiendront à l'UPS Pouchet (salle annoncée à l'entrée).
Les horaires restent ceux qui étaient annoncés initialement.

Karen Ferret, Paris 3, UMR 7023 SFL

Construction des noms déverbaux dénotant un Instrument ou un Lieu: étude des noms en -oir(e) du français.

Date : le lundi 27 février 2012

Heure : 10h30 – 12h30

Lieu :  UPS Pouchet salle 159 à confirmer
Plan d'accès : http://www.umr7023.cnrs.fr/Plans-d-acces,672.html

 Résumé
 http://www.umr7023.cnrs.fr/Calendrier-des-reunions,862.html

Jacqueline Guéron, Université de Paris 3

Minimal Verbs in Space and Time

Date : le lundi 27 février 2012

Heure : 14h – 16h30

Lieu :  UPS Pouchet - salle 159 (à confirmer)
Plan d'accès : http://www.umr7023.cnrs.fr/Plans-d-acces,672.html

Abstract
We will examine two puzzles concerning the syntax and semantics of the  minimal verbs (auxiliaries or light verbs) HAVE, BE, and NEED.
1. Puzzle one:  HAVE vs BE.
     Although HAVE and BE lack descriptive content, they seem to have sufficient formal content to provide the verbal base for a series of stative propositions with varying semantics, i.e.,  Existential, Possessive, Psychological, Perfect, and Modal. And although they are not interchangeable, (cf. "Madame Bovary has a book" vs "Madame Bovary is a book") HAVE and BE  can project  sentences with the very same semantic construals, both  over languages (cf. Eng. Poss. "I have a book" vs. Russian "U menya ect' kniga") and within a single language  (Latin  Poss. "Mihi est liber" vs "habeo librum"; English Exist. "There is a book on the table" vs "The table has a book on it"; Modal "John has to leave'" vs "John is to leave"; Russian Poss. "U Ivana bila (was) mashina" vs "Ivan imel (had) mashinu"; or French Perf. "Jean a parlé" vs "Jean est venu"). To distinguish "HAVE languages" from "BE languages" for any of these sentence types, as is commonly done, is thus an oversimplification.
       In the general case, HAVE and BE derive identical logical forms by means of a distinct syntax, however. To account for this, I  propose that (i) HAVE and  BE have partially  distinct lexical content: they share  the minimal V Features  T, Aspect, and Agr (which exhaustively define BE),  but HAVE contains in addition a P element which determines  transitivity in syntax (cf. Freeze 1992, Kayne 1993, Guéron 1995); (ii) identical interface conditions can be  satisfied by two different types of syntactic structures in UG.
2. Puzzle two: HAVE vs NEED.
   Extending an observation of  Isachenko for Slavic,  Harves and Kayne (2008/2012) assign to the verb NEED, cross-linguistically, a syntactic structure in which verbal HAVE incorporates nominal NEED.  Following earlier work by  Ross and McCawley, Den Dikken, Larson & Ludlow (1996) and Schwartz (2006) propose, rather, that the verb NEED merges in syntax with an embedded verb HAVE. Structure (2) can account for the ambiguity of (1): the temporal adverbial may modify either matrix NEED or embedded HAVE.
    (1) John needed spare change [before the concert]
         a. But he doesn't need it any more.   (wide scope of T-Adv)
         b. rather than after the concert.          (narrow scope of T-Adv)
    (2) John NEEDED [to HAVE spare change] (before the concert]
     We consider both proposals partially redundant, however, since intuitively, NEED already means something like (3). Moreover, the N NEED in (4) admits  the same adverbial ambiguity as the V NEED in (1) – this is a problem for Harves and Kayne- as does  the N LACK –  this is a problem for the Ross-McCawley approach.
(3)    NEED = not to have a thing or situation (which it is otherwise necessary or desirable to have).
    (4) [John's NEED for/ LACK of spare change [before the concert]] was disconcerting.
3. I already proposed that HAVE lexically contains (the formal Fs which constitute) BE (Guéron,1995) and that NEED lexically contains (the formal Fs which constitute) HAVE  plus a NEG F (Guéron, 2000).  Here I develop the latter proposal in a direction compatible with  Moltmann's  (2008)  focus on the situation of satisfaction evoked by NEED and Copley and Harley's (2011) investigation of situations in which normal inertial results fail to obtain.
       Adopting the hypothesis (Guéron, 2004) that the  sentence structure is divided into two distinct domains/phases for construal, vP  the domain of spatial construal, and TP/CP the  domain of temporal construal, I propose that the formal F content of NEED is distributed independently over the two domains. In vP, the purely spatial content of P and its arguments defines a relation between two disjoint objects. In TP, the purely verbal Fs of HAVE  (T and Asp) plus the NEG F of NEED  merge with the tense morpheme in T,  projecting a temporal interval characterized by the absence of  the spatial configuration vP denotes. The spatial configuration cannnot be annuled (no backtracking). Rather, it is placed on the boundary  of the privative temporal interval T denotes where it functions as its natural telos.  The distribution of the spatial and temporal Fs of  NEED over two syntactic domains results in a separation of the Reference Time from the Event time (cf. the NEG+T particles laa, lan, and lam in Arabic  (Derraz, 2011)) which can account for the ambiguity of  (1) without multiplying predicates in syntax.
        Finally, the intentional component of NEED (in parentheses in (3)),  responsible for deriving a psych interpretation of NEED+DP and a modal interpretation of NEED+(bare) verbal complement, depends on  the presence or absence of a syntactic subject and more generally on the way in which the syntactic structure satisfies  an output condition on the construal of temporal intervals. (We will propose relevant output constraints in the talk.)
        Alternatively, NEED may correspond to NEG+BE. This derives an unaccusative syntactic structure - not only in e.g. Russian, which uses BE for Possession, but also in e.g., Rumanian or French, which use HAVE for Possession - rather than the transitive structures of  English or Spanish. In the absence of a P element,  the aspectual content of BE+T is the source of  the   existential connotation of NEED noted by Ciucivara (2010) for Rumanian.

References
Ciucivara, O.S. (2010) "A Few Notes on the "Need" Field in Romanian" Bucharest Working
     Papers in Linguistics, 12,2.
Copley, B. & H. Harley (2011) "Force dynamics for event semantics: reifying causation in
     event structure" draft, CNRS/Paris VIII and U. of  Arizona.
Derraz, N. (2011) Temps et aspect en anglais et en arabe, Diss. U. Paris 3.
Guéron, J. (1986) "Le verbe avoir", Recherches Linguistiques, 14, U. Paris 8.
Guéron, J. (1995) "On HAVE and BE", NELS 25, GLSA, U.Mass Amherst, 191-206).
Guéron, J. (2000) "From Need to Necessity: a Syntactic Path to Modality" in J. van der Auwera
     & P. Dendale, eds., Modal Verbs n Germanic and Romance Languages, Belgian Journal of
      Linguistics 14,  3-87.
Guéron, J. (2004) "Tense Construal and Auxiliaries" in Guéron & Lecarme, eds., The Syntax
      of Time, MIT Press, 299-328
Harves, S. & R. Kayne (2008/2012) "Having Need and Needing Have in Indo-European"
Moltmann, F. (2008) "Intensional verbs and their intentional objects" Nat. Lang.Semantics, 16,
     239-270.
Schwarz, F. (2006) "On needing Propositions and looking for Properties"

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/parislinguists/attachments/20120227/ee9aecf7/attachment.htm>