Linguistics Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2787

Browse

Subject: search.filters.subject.semantics

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Finding modal force
    (2021) Dieuleveut, Anouk; Hacquard, Valentine; Williams, Alexander; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation investigates when and how children figure out the force of modals, that is, when and how they learn that can/might express possibility, whereas must/have to express necessity. Learning modal force raises a logical “Subset Problem”: given that necessity entails possibility, what prevents learners from hypothesizing possibility meanings for necessity modals? Three main solutions to other Subset Problems have been proposed in the literature. The first is a bias towards strong (here, necessity) meanings, in the spirit of Berwick (1985). The second is a reliance on downward-entailing environments, which reverse patterns of entailment (Gualmini & Schwarz, 2009). The third is a reliance on pragmatic situational cues stemming from the conversational context in which modals are used (Dieuleveut et al., 2019). This dissertation assesses the viability of each, by examining the modals used in speech to and by 2-year-old English children, through a combination of corpus studies and experiments testing the guessability of modal force based on their context of use. I show that negative and other downward-entailing contexts are rare with necessity modals, making them impractical on their own. However, the conversational context in which modals are used in speech to children is highly informative about both forces. Thus, if learners are sensitive to these conversational cues, they, in principle, do not need to rely either on a necessity bias nor on negative environments to solve the Subset Problem. Turning to children’s own productions, I show that children master possibility modals very early: by age 2, they use them productively, and in an adult-like way. However, they struggle with necessity modals: they use them less frequently, and not in an adult-like way. Their modal uses show no evidence for a necessity bias. To assess how children actually figure out modal force, and which of the available cues children use to figure out modal force, I then examine which aspects of children’s input best predict their mastery of modals. Preliminary results suggest that negation is predictive of children’s early success with necessity modals, and that frequency of modal talk, but not of particular lexemes, also contributes to their early success.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    MODALS AND THEIR COMPLEMENTS IN DUTCH AND BEYOND
    (2020) van Dooren, Annemarie; Hacquard, Valentine; Polinsky, Maria; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In this dissertation I investigate the syntax and semantics of modals like can and must and their counterparts in other languages. Modals like can and must can be used to express both obligations (as in employees must wash their hands, called deontic modality) and possibilities given what is known (as in John must be home; his car isn't in the parking lot, called epistemic modality), but previous work shows that the availability of these different 'flavors' of modality are constrained by their syntactic environment. My main claim is that in all languages discussed, modal meanings are specifically restricted by their complement size. For English modals, which are treated as functional items that are part of the functional projections from the verb, this is often captured by having modals appear in different positions in the functional projection of the verb based on their modal flavor: Epistemic modals are located high, above tense, while non-epistemic modals, such as deontics, are located low, below aspect (Cinque 1999, Hacquard 2006, 2008, a.o.). I argue that in Dutch, modals are verbs (following Aelbrecht 2010), and as such, they host their own functional projections. Despite this, some of the same syntactic restrictions on the availability of modal flavor hold, which argues for a recasting of the cross-linguistic generalizations not in terms of position of the functional projection, but in terms of complement size. I claim that cross-linguistically, different flavors require different types of complements: epistemics need a complement the size of a Tense Phrase (in line with Cinque 1999, Hacquard 2006), deontics need the size of an Aspectual Phrase (building on Rubinstein 2012), while other non-epistemics can combine with a smaller-sized complement. I will provide two case studies in favor of the claim that complement size restricts the availability of modal flavors: In chapter 3, I will discuss the interaction between tense and modality, and in chapter 4, I will discuss the case of modals with non-verbal complements.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Without Specifiers: Phrase Structure and Events
    (2012) Lohndal, Terje; Pietroski, Paul M; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation attempts to unify two reductionist hypotheses: that there is no relational difference between specifiers and complements, and that verbs do not have thematic arguments. I argue that these two hypotheses actually bear on each other and that we get a better theory if we pursue both of them. The thesis is centered around the following hypothesis: Each application of Spell-Out corresponds to a conjunct at logical form. In order to create such a system, it is necessary to provide a syntax that is designed such that each Spell-Out domain is mapped into a conjunct. This is done by eliminating the relational difference between specifiers and complements. The conjuncts are then conjoined into Neo-Davidsonian representations that constitute logical forms. The theory is argued to provide a transparent mapping from syntactic structures to logical forms, such that the syntax gives you a logical form where the verb does not have any thematic arguments. In essence, the thesis is therefore an investigation into the structure of verbs. This theory of Spell-Out raises a number of questions and it makes strong predictions about the structure of possible derivations. The thesis discusses a number of these: the nature of linearization and movement, left-branch extractions, serial verb constructions, among others. It is shown how the present theory can capture these phenomena, and sometimes in better ways than previous analyses. The thesis closes by discussing some more foundational issues related to transparency, the syntax-semantics interface, and the nature of basic semantic composition operations.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Relating Movement and Adjunction in Syntax and Semantics
    (2010) Hunter, Timothy; Weinberg, Amy; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In this thesis I explore the syntactic and semantic properties of movement and adjunction in natural language, and suggest that these two phenomena are related in a novel way. In a precise sense, the basic pieces of grammatical machinery that give rise to movement, also give rise to adjunction. In the system I propose, there is no atomic movement operation and no atomic adjunction operation; the terms "movement" and "adjunction" serve only as convenient labels for certain combinations of other, primitive operations. As a result the system makes non-trivial predictions about how movement and adjunction should interact, since we do not have the freedom to stipulate arbitrary properties of movement while leaving the properties of adjunction unchanged, or vice-versa. I focus first on the distinction between arguments and adjuncts, and propose that the differences between these two kinds of syntactic attachment can be thought of as a transparent reflection of the differing ways in which they contribute to neo-Davidsonian logical forms. The details of this proposal rely crucially on a distinctive treatment of movement, and from it I derive accurate predictions concerning the equivocal status of adjuncts as optionally included in or excluded from a maximal projection, and the possibility of counter-cyclic adjunction. The treatment of movement and adjunction as interrelated phenomena furthermore enables us to introduce a single constraint that subsumes two conditions on extraction, namely adjunct island effects and freezing effects. The novel conceptions of movement and semantic composition that underlie these results raise questions about the system's ability to handle semantic variable-binding. I give an unconventional but descriptively adequate account of basic quantificational phenomena, to demonstrate that this important empirical ground is not given up. More generally, this thesis constitutes a case study in (i) deriving explanations for syntactic patterns from a restrictive, independently motivated theory of compositional semantics, and (ii) using a computationally explicit framework to rigourously investigate the primitives and consequences of our theories. The emerging picture that is suggested is one where some central facts about the syntax and semantics of natural language hang together in a way that they otherwise would not.