FYI: Pending Grant Proposal to NFR
Dear All,
Firstly for information: I have applied for a grant from the Norwegian Research Council for a project on scalar structure across categories. We will know in November whether we have been successful and if we can advertise a postdoc position. Luisa Marti and I are going to be organising a reading group here on the stuff related to this grant this term, also starting with prepositions. More on the schedule as it develops. I wonder if it might be a good idea to coordinate reading schedules so that members of the blog are reading the same things? Oh, and we should get Luisa onto this blog. How do I do that, Øystein?
In the mean time, I append the introduction to the grant here for your interest. Any comments and reactions most welcome. If you wish to see the whole 12 page document, just send me an email and I can send you an attachment.
Gillian
Scalar Structure Across Syntactic Categories
1. Introduction and Summary
In our first grammar classes we are often told that ‘A Noun is a name for a person, place, animal or thing’, or, ‘A Verb is a ‘doing’ word.’, with similar notional definitions for the other basic lexical categories (Adjective and Preposition). Although modern syntactic theory has not managed to improve very much on traditional notional definitions of the major parts of speech, practically every theory of grammar makes use of distinct syntactic categories, justified on the basis of formal morphological and distributional criteria. This is particularly true of the traditional ‘lexical’ categories Noun, Verb, Adjective, and to a lesser extent Preposition which have been argued to exist in most, if not all of the world’s languages (see Baker 2003 for a recent study). While it has long been acknowledged, since the advent of X-bar syntax that there are structural parallels across categories (Chomsky 1970, Abney 1987), it has often been implicitly assumed that the major categories are semantically different. In this project, I propose to look critically at this assumption and examine phenomena where the different syntactic categories share important semantic properties and internal relations. In particular, I will examine the
phenomenon of scalar or part-whole structure within the reference types of the major syntactic categories. I seek to demonstrate that all categories show pervasive semantic properties and internal relations. In particular, I will examine the phenomenon of scalar or part-whole structure within the reference types of the major syntactic categories. I seek to demonstrate that all categories show pervasive and linguistically relevant denotational distinctions with respect to reference, systematically contrasting homogenous undifferentiated reference with extended, or linearly ordered scalar structures. The idea here is that the abstract structuring principles of reference are the same across categories, even though the basic ontological domains are different--- Substance (N) vs. Space (P) vs. Property (A) vs. Time (V).
The project will study a three basic domains where part-structure or scalar structure has been shown to be linguistically relevant, and where elements of different syntactic categories interact: (i) explicit measure constructions internal to V, N, A and P; (ii) interactions between temporal and nominal structure in Verb-Object collocations; and (iii) interactions with V and secondary predicates of the A and P type in resultatives. Detailed data of semantic judgements and entailments will be gathered for three main languages: English (representing the Germanic group), Spanish (representing the Romance group where differences within the expression of goal and result have already been noticed), and one non-IndoEuropean language. The first aim of the project is thus empirical and seeks to establish for a group of different languages exactly in which linguistic constructions we find constraints requiring mapping relationships between distinct scalar paths. The second major goal is to formalize a set of semantic composition rules that are sufficiently abstract and flexible to yield parallel results for syntactic categories representing semantically distinct ontological categories (Space, Time, Property and Substance). The final goal of the investigation is to provide a basis for arguing whether the different syntactic categories involve either exactly the same, or merely similar and parallel functional structure within the context of a universal grammar of hierarchically ordered elements. To this end, we will examine the extent to which the morphological and derivational relationships among categories support a common core. The project is built around a project leader and named postgraduate researcher with skills in formal semantic theory and designed to integrate with the more purely syntactic research issues currently being pursued at the Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics (CASTL) at the University of Troms\o \ (see sections 3.4 and 4).
Firstly for information: I have applied for a grant from the Norwegian Research Council for a project on scalar structure across categories. We will know in November whether we have been successful and if we can advertise a postdoc position. Luisa Marti and I are going to be organising a reading group here on the stuff related to this grant this term, also starting with prepositions. More on the schedule as it develops. I wonder if it might be a good idea to coordinate reading schedules so that members of the blog are reading the same things? Oh, and we should get Luisa onto this blog. How do I do that, Øystein?
In the mean time, I append the introduction to the grant here for your interest. Any comments and reactions most welcome. If you wish to see the whole 12 page document, just send me an email and I can send you an attachment.
Gillian
Scalar Structure Across Syntactic Categories
1. Introduction and Summary
In our first grammar classes we are often told that ‘A Noun is a name for a person, place, animal or thing’, or, ‘A Verb is a ‘doing’ word.’, with similar notional definitions for the other basic lexical categories (Adjective and Preposition). Although modern syntactic theory has not managed to improve very much on traditional notional definitions of the major parts of speech, practically every theory of grammar makes use of distinct syntactic categories, justified on the basis of formal morphological and distributional criteria. This is particularly true of the traditional ‘lexical’ categories Noun, Verb, Adjective, and to a lesser extent Preposition which have been argued to exist in most, if not all of the world’s languages (see Baker 2003 for a recent study). While it has long been acknowledged, since the advent of X-bar syntax that there are structural parallels across categories (Chomsky 1970, Abney 1987), it has often been implicitly assumed that the major categories are semantically different. In this project, I propose to look critically at this assumption and examine phenomena where the different syntactic categories share important semantic properties and internal relations. In particular, I will examine the
phenomenon of scalar or part-whole structure within the reference types of the major syntactic categories. I seek to demonstrate that all categories show pervasive semantic properties and internal relations. In particular, I will examine the phenomenon of scalar or part-whole structure within the reference types of the major syntactic categories. I seek to demonstrate that all categories show pervasive and linguistically relevant denotational distinctions with respect to reference, systematically contrasting homogenous undifferentiated reference with extended, or linearly ordered scalar structures. The idea here is that the abstract structuring principles of reference are the same across categories, even though the basic ontological domains are different--- Substance (N) vs. Space (P) vs. Property (A) vs. Time (V).
The project will study a three basic domains where part-structure or scalar structure has been shown to be linguistically relevant, and where elements of different syntactic categories interact: (i) explicit measure constructions internal to V, N, A and P; (ii) interactions between temporal and nominal structure in Verb-Object collocations; and (iii) interactions with V and secondary predicates of the A and P type in resultatives. Detailed data of semantic judgements and entailments will be gathered for three main languages: English (representing the Germanic group), Spanish (representing the Romance group where differences within the expression of goal and result have already been noticed), and one non-IndoEuropean language. The first aim of the project is thus empirical and seeks to establish for a group of different languages exactly in which linguistic constructions we find constraints requiring mapping relationships between distinct scalar paths. The second major goal is to formalize a set of semantic composition rules that are sufficiently abstract and flexible to yield parallel results for syntactic categories representing semantically distinct ontological categories (Space, Time, Property and Substance). The final goal of the investigation is to provide a basis for arguing whether the different syntactic categories involve either exactly the same, or merely similar and parallel functional structure within the context of a universal grammar of hierarchically ordered elements. To this end, we will examine the extent to which the morphological and derivational relationships among categories support a common core. The project is built around a project leader and named postgraduate researcher with skills in formal semantic theory and designed to integrate with the more purely syntactic research issues currently being pursued at the Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics (CASTL) at the University of Troms\o \ (see sections 3.4 and 4).
posted by Gillian Ramchand at 15:55
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