Tromsø Group Summary: October 6

The Tromsoe group had its second meeting on Thursday (6th October) to discuss Marcus Kracht's paper on the semantics of locatives. Once again, discussion was lively and, we think, focused on slightly different things than the Utrecht group focused on. Here is a brief summary (from Gillian and Luisa's perspective).

THE LINGUISTIC REALITY OF LOCATIONS

Most of us were already convinced about `the linguistic reality of locations', but there were some elements of the discussion here that really gave us some extra food for thought. Treating a simple NP/DP as denoting an object or a place seemed to have linguistic and morphological ramifications beyond simple pragmatics. Gillian brought up the general point that a DP such as `book' can be used in a variety of different ways, e.g. to denote the physical object, the type of object, the content of the text etc. without much overt linguistic signalling. Changing mode in this sense does not even preclude using the same pronominal form:
(1) As for that book that John just put on the table, Mary has already read it. (not necessarily the same token).
One might think that the difference between referring to a location qua object, or referring to it qua location would be much the same phenomenon as the well known one above. It was interesting to discover that in many languages that wasn't so, but that the distinction had grammatical consequences. Even in English one might find hints of this. So, for example, in a recent paper on names, Ora Matushansky points out that while acronyms generally don't use the definite article (AIDS, UNICEF), abbreviations seem to need it (the CIA, the FBI, the RSPCA). One consistent exception to the need for `the' was the class of geographical and institutional locations (MIT, UCSC).

Another thing this reminded us of was a small class of location words in English that are sometimes used in complex prepositional forms (Peter talked about these in his seminar on prepositions a couple of weeks back). I am thinking here of things like.
(2) in front of the car; in back of the house (American); on top of the table.
Here, unusually, a definite article is not required either. This looks like a special group of localizers (the kind of thing that a place name, or a work like `Beijing', or `train-station' in Chinese might already incorporate syntactically).
Gillian thinks that this kind of `localizer' should be kept distinct from the `place' prepositions such as in, on, at, etc. When all three pieces (path, place and localizer) exist they seem to come in this order:
(3) to in front of the house
Path [Place [localizer (linker) GROUND OBJECT]]]


TECHNICAL ASPECTS: BUILDING IN TIME;REGIONS VS NEIGHBOURHOODS

We weren't convinced that one needs to make locative expressions sensitive to time, or at least that we shouldn't build it in to the denotation of the locative itself. This seems to us to beg important questions with respect to compositionality. The facts seem to be that extended locations are parasitic on verbal or tense material for their path-like or temporally ordered interpretation. We would prefer to think of paths as embodying some kind of concatenation/subpart relation (as in Zwarts' system) which is then homomorphically mapped onto some temporal scale (possibly via a homomorphism with the event subpart relations). We weren't convinced by the argument based on examples such as "Peter drove in front of John's car" . We think that this has the syntax/semantics of a static event description where the frame of reference is relativized to the (more or less) constant speeds of the two cars. Doing it any differently would be tantamount to trying to build in the rotation of the earth to statements about `the book being on the table'. (Actually, its a cool example, and its interesting that we can do this as speakers. It says something about the importance of contextual frames of reference.)

There was a brief discussion about the relationship between locations and participants as opposed to that between locations and events. Gillian actually agreed with the intuition that there was a deep difference here (which formalisms don't often reflect). The way she put it was that individuals are independently individuated entities which can then be `located' as one of the properties that can be true of them. Events on the other hand, do not have independent identity criteria---- they are not independently identifiable previous to being located. In fact, their locations are in some sense criterial of their identity.

Concerning the argument that we really need to be looking at neighbourhoods as opposed to simple regions, we basically had a discussion that replicated the Utrecht group's summary of this point. The notion of `touching' seemed crucial, but we thought we could rule out the hovering bird without making reference to neighbourhoods. The trick of course is how to exclude the bird from being `auf' when the top book on a very high stack still counts as being `on' the table (at least in English, according to Gillian's intuitions). Is this also true for German `auf' ? In any case, some fancy pragmatics is clearly needed here and its not clear to us that neighbourhoods help.

SELECTION AND THE EMPTINESS PRINCIPLE

Finnish is of course super cool, and the empirical generalization concerning the internal structure of locative cases was compelling. We had a discussion about the compositionality of the semantics for a language like English, which sometimes seems to show both M and L overtly, but we could not decide whether the semantics we got was the same as reported for the compositional M [L cases in the Finnish system. For example, in English (4) below, the path of motion never needs to change from being `inside'/`outside' the house as long as it starts at a location that could be so described.
(4) They crawled slowly from inside/outside the cave.
This shows that `from' in English does not necessarily create a path that is `diphasic', even though it is coinitial. We assume that the Finnish suffixes do need to be diphasic, but we had no Finnish speaker on hand to check this for something like talo-s-ta. Zhenya, who knows some Finnish, reported that if you really wanted to say someone came `from inside the house' you do use a full prepositional form (but once again, we didn't know what the judgements were).
(5) sisa\lta\ talosta
inside-ABL house-ELA
(from-on) (from-in)
We pondered the conundrum of the Ablative case on the `inside' word for a while just because we couldn't help ourselves, but then we gave up, noting merely that it would be interesting to know whether there were any semantic differences between full prepositions in Finnish and the suffixes (apart from lexical encyclopedic content of course).

We also had a long discussion about the notion of selection and the emptiness principle, which we didn't find satisfying at all. From an empirical point of view, Gillian pointed out the fact that it actually makes some semantic sense for a verb like Finnish "forget"/"leave" (I use the English words here) to always combine with cofinal and for Finnish "find" to combine with coinitial. `Forget' is a transition verb, but the location of the forgotten object is as described after that transition. With `find' it is the opposite: the stated location of the object is where it would have been before the transition. This seems suspiciously logical to us.

Of course, it is always technically possible to build in the semantics of the case form into the verb when the two always go together, leaving one with the illusion that the case form itself is vacuous in these cases. But this still leaves us with dumb `syntactic selection'. We think the difficulties of making syntactic selection work (especially for specific lexical exponents of a category head) are massively underestimated and very seldom worked out by the syntacticians in a satisfactory way. Syntactic selection is the problem, not the solution.

There are three options as far as we see it: (i) syntactic selection for something on the level of a category feature that can be checked in syntax (ii) semantic selection via unification of two regular and understood semantic bits in a compositional fashion; (iii) phrasal `idiom' formation. It is clear that (i) won't work here. Gillian would prefer to at least try for (ii). Even if (iii) were correct, there is still a lot to be explained since the idiom in this case would be a non-constituent, since it would exclude the nominal at the base of the M[L []] structure.


Furthermore, the memorized collocation account seems to suggest that the choice of mode, or mode+localizer is totally arbitrary -- it can change from verb to verb, and it can change from language to language for the same verb. For example, we don't think it is an accident of cross linguistic selection that in English and Indo-European static mode is chosen for a certain class of punctual verbs, whereas in Uralic languages and Finnish the selection is for `cofinal'. Treating it as an accident seems to be missing generalizations, in particular about the verbal functional and morphological structure of those languages. The selection account also misses generalizations concerning cross linguistic similarities. For example, it seems to miss the fact that many languages, not only German, choose things similar to 'vor' to combine with "afraid" , which seem to have some semantic rationale behind them.

The discussion was based on a handout that Luisa made and if anybody wants to have this handout, all you have to do is ask.