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Item The Psycho-logic of Universal Quantifiers(2021) Knowlton, Tyler Zarus; Lidz, Jeffrey; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A universally quantified sentence like every frog is green is standardly thought to express a two-place second-order relation (e.g., the set of frogs is a subset of the set of green things). This dissertation argues that as a psychological hypothesis about how speakers mentally represent universal quantifiers, this view is wrong in two respects. First, each, every, and all are not represented as two-place relations, but as one-place descriptions of how a predicate applies to a restricted domain (e.g., relative to the frogs, everything is green). Second, while every and all are represented in a second-order way that implicates a group, each is represented in a completely first-order way that does not involve grouping the satisfiers of a predicate together (e.g., relative to individual frogs, each one is green).These “psycho-logical” distinctions have consequences for how participants evaluate sentences like every circle is green in controlled settings. In particular, participants represent the extension of the determiner’s internal argument (the cir- cles), but not the extension of its external argument (the green things). Moreover, the cognitive system they use to represent the internal argument differs depend- ing on the determiner: Given every or all, participants show signatures of forming ensemble representations, but given each, they represent individual object-files. In addition to psychosemantic evidence, the proposed representations provide explanations for at least two semantic phenomena. The first is the “conservativity” universal: All determiners allow for duplicating their first argument in their second argument without a change in informational significance (e.g., every fish swims has the same truth-conditions as every fish is a fish that swims). This is a puzzling gen- eralization if determiners express two-place relations, but it is a logical consequence if they are devices for forming one-place restricted quantifiers. The second is that every, but not each, naturally invites certain kinds of generic interpretations (e.g., gravity acts on every/#each object). This asymmetry can po- tentially be explained by details of the interfacing cognitive systems (ensemble and object-file representations). And given that the difference leads to lower-level con- comitants in child-ambient speech (as revealed by a corpus investigation), children may be able to leverage it to acquire every’s second-order meaning. This case study on the universal quantifiers suggests that knowing the meaning of a word like every consists not just in understanding the informational contribu- tion that it makes, but in representing that contribution in a particular format. And much like phonological representations provide instructions to the motor plan- ning system, it supports the idea that meaning representations provide (sometimes surprisingly precise) instructions to conceptual systems.Item Measuring Predicates(2014) Wellwood, Alexis; Hacquard, Valentine; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Determining the semantic content of sentences, and uncovering regularities between linguistic form and meaning, requires attending to both morphological and syntactic properties of a language with an eye to the notional categories that the various pieces of form express. In this dissertation, I investigate the morphosyntactic devices that English speakers (and speakers of other languages) can use to talk about comparisons between things: comparative sentences with, in English, "more... than", "as... as", "too", "enough", and others. I argue that a core component of all of these constructions is a unitary element expressing the concept of measurement. The theory that I develop departs from the standard degree-theoretic analysis of the semantics of comparatives in three crucial respects: first, gradable adjectives do not (partially or wholly) denote measure functions; second, degrees are introduced compositionally; and three, the introduction of degrees arises uniformly from the semantics of the expression "much". These ideas mark a return to the classic morphosyntactic analysis of comparatives found in Bresnan (1973), while incorporating and extending semantic insights of Schwarzschild (2002, 2006). Of major interest is how the dimensions for comparison observed across the panoply of comparative constructions vary, and these are analyzed as a consequence of what is measured (individuals, events, states, etc.), rather than which expressions invoke the measurement. This shift in perspective leads to the observation of a number of regularities in the mapping between form and meaning that could not otherwise have been seen. First, the notion of measurement expressed across comparative constructions is familiar from some explications of that concept in measurement theory (e.g. Berka 1983). Second, the distinction between gradable and non-gradable adjectives is formally on a par with that between mass and count nouns, and between atelic and telic verb phrases. Third, comparatives are perceived to be acceptable if the domain for measurement is structured, and to be anamolous otherwise. Finally, elaborations of grammatical form reflexively affect which dimensions for comparison are available to interpretation.Item Anaphors and the Missing Link(2013) Gagnon, Michael Roland; Williams, Alexander; Hacquard, Valentine; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Three types of nominal anaphors are investigated: (i) pronouns, (ii) partitive ellipsis and (iii) the contrastive anaphor `one'. I argue that in each case, the representational basis for anaphora is the same, a semantic variable ranging over singular or plural entities, rather than syntactic as previous approaches have suggested. In the case of pronouns, I argue against syntactic D-type approaches (Elbourne 2005) and semantic D-type approaches (Cooper 1979). Instead, I present arguments in favor of the set variable representation assumed under Nouwen (2003)'s approach. Following this, I consider a number of cases usually taken to involve the elision of a noun phrase, and argue that instead they involve the deletion of a partitive phrase containing an anaphoric plural pronoun. Third, I turn to the contrastive anaphor `one' and its null counterpart in French. Here again, I argue that the basis for anaphora is a semantic set variable, where this anaphor differs from pronouns in being of category N rather than D, and in having a pragmatic requirement for contrast. This analysis differs from previous ones which hold that this expression is a syntactic substitute of category N′, or the spell-out of the head of a number phrase followed by ellipsis of a noun phrase. Finally, I discuss the phenomenon of event anaphora. Given the phenomenon's interaction with the anaphors discussed prior in this dissertation, I argue that it is better seen as a case of deferred reference to an event on the basis of anaphoric reference to a discourse segment, following Webber (1991). This contrasts with what I call metaphysical approaches, which hold that the anaphor directly resumes an event introduced to the context by a previous clause (Asher 1993; Moltmann 1997).