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Recursion in semantics? : the case of binding [Online resource]
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In: Slides for a talk presented at: Interfaces + Recursion = Language, ZAS, Berlin, Germany. March 2005 (2005), -
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| 38 |
A Comprehensive Semantics for Agreement
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In: http://edocs.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/volltexte/2009/12735/pdf/SAUERLAND_A_Comprehensive_Semantics_for_Agreement.pdf (2004)
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Abstract:
Agreement can be characterized as the obligatory, multiple occurrence of a morphological feature. The two examples in (1) are from English and German: (1a) shows subject-verb agreement in English where the feature plurality is expressed both on the noun and on the verb. In the German example (1b), plurality is also expressed on the noun and on the verb, but furthermore expressed on the determiner and the adjective. (1) a. The small children[plur] are[plur] playing in the sand box. b. German Die the.plur kleinen little.plur Kinder children.plur spielen play.plur im in the Sandkasten. sand box Similar agreement processes are found in many other languages. Agreement is a very important phenomenon studied by many linguists. One reason for this is that, though it seems to introduce redundancy, agreement is in fact obligatory. In this paper, I look at agreement from a semantic perspective. Most work on agreement focusses on the morphology 1 and the syntax of agreement. I adopt one major conclusion from these works: that agreement has semantic content in some positions, while in others it is purely syntactic. This distinction is reflected in the terms controller and target of a agreement in some works, other works speak of interpretable and uninterpretable features, which I will also use in this paper. There are several well-known problems about the semantics of agreement features, that I will attempt a solution for in this paper. First consider two cases of split agreement, where the subject and the verb actually do not seem to agree in a language that otherwise exhibits subject verb-agreement. For one, (2) exemplifies the case of Committee-nouns in British English, where the subject noun is morphologically singular, but the verb can exhibit plural agreement morphology: (2) The committee[sing] are[plur] debating. Secondly, consider split agreement in the Russian example (3). The subject noun is inherently masculine, but if the referent is female, the verb can bear femine agreement, and this is in fact preferred by many speakers. (3) vrač doctor.masc prišla came.fem (Corbett 1983, 31) ‘The female doctor came.’ The second class of problems for a semantics of agreement are cases where the agreement feature does not seem to match the referent. One example of this is agreement with quantifiers as in (4), where the question is why every boy is singular.
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URL: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.487.7086
http://edocs.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/volltexte/2009/12735/pdf/SAUERLAND_A_Comprehensive_Semantics_for_Agreement.pdf
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| 39 |
Genitive Quantifiers in Japanese as Reverse Partitives
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In: http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/mitarb/homepage/sauerland/qplusno.pdf (2004)
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