Andreas Kathol (kathol@socrates.berkeley.edu)
Thu, 3 Jul 1997 12:58:34 -0700 (PDT)
Forwarded message: Date: Sun, 29 Jun 97 16:29:12 PDT From: "Ivan A. Sag" <sag@Csli.Stanford.EDU> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Construction Theory: A Symposium July 20, 1997 1997 Linguistic Institute & HPSG-97 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Polarity and interrogative form in pragmatically loaded constructions Charles Fillmore University of California at Berkeley In this paper I will try to demonstrate a way to argue for the existence of an independent grammatical construction, by examining a family of pragmatically loaded constructions that use interrogative form, and exploring the role of polarity in them. The set wil include exclamatives (``Was I ever mad!'') for which there is no negative counterpart; rhetorical questions (``Wasn't that a mess?'') for which an answer signalling agreement is sought; recommendations (``Why don't you be the leader?'' - compare ``Why aren't you the leader?" and ``Why don't you invite some of your friends?" - compare ``Why don't you [ever] invite any of my friends?"); loaded negative Y/N questions (``Didn't you like the wine?"), and a few others. An attempt will be made to identify the role of each construction type in ongoing discouse. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Interrogative Constructions in English Jonathan Ginzburg Ivan A. Sag Hebrew University of Jerusalem Stanford University In this paper, we develop a treatment of the syntactic and semantic properties of English interrogative constructions that extends the theory of constructions developed by Sag (1992/97) and Kathol (1995), marrying this with the theory of interrogative semantics developed by Ginzburg (1995a,b). Central to our sign-based approach to constructions is the use of multiple inheritance hierarchies, familiar from computational work on nonlinguistic problems, to the task of expressing cross-classifying syntactic and semantic generalizations about phrasal constructions. Our work is thus part of a tradition that includes the approach to lexical analysis started by Flickinger 1987 and Pollard and Sag 1987 and work in the framework of Construction Grammar by Fillmore, Kay, Goldberg, Lambrecht, Koenig, Jurafsky and others (including Hudson and Zwicky). In our type-based treatment of interrogatives, which includes an account of multiple wh-questions, pied piping effects, and in-situ wh, we have been led to reexamine and abandon two fundamental tenets common to many past treatments: Assumption 1: Wh-phrases are quantifiers semantically. Assumption 2: Wh-phrases are operators syntactically. Hence, they must move at some stage in the derivation. On our analysis, there is no movement -- wh-in-situ is truly in situ. The syntactic and semantic work is done entirely by constraints on feature structures of diverse types. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- The First Position in German Main Clauses: A Constructional Account Gert Webelhuth University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill German is well known for enforcing the restriction that the finite verb has to appear in the second position of declarative main clauses. The first position of these clauses can be occupied by a wide variety of single-constituent expressions, e.g. arguments of the predicate, adjuncts, a non-finite main verb, or even a non-finite main verb with some or all of its arguments. This relative "promiscuity" seems to suggest that there are no limits on what can occur in the first position. After supporting the empirical claims above, my talk will show that there are systematic exceptions to the generalization that everything can occur in the first position. In particular, certain pronouns, the copula, and the verbal parts of complex predicates are barred from the pre-finite slot in main clauses. The talk will proceed by demonstrating that neither the items that can nor those that cannot be fronted form a natural grammatical class that can be characterized through the setting of a standard parameter of the sentence grammar. It goes on to show that the data can, however, be handled by an approach that views German main clauses as intimately tied into the German discourse system that requires each main clause to perform one of a restricted set of discourse functions. The performance of these discourse functions is arbitrarily tied to certain sentence-syntactic properties of the clause expressing this function and this "Saussurean" combination of form and function can be expressed as a set of language-particular constructions. It is argued that the theoretical implications of this data and its analysis lie in the realization that there is at least one language (namely German) which has a core construction (main clauses) whose properties cannot be satisfactorily captured in a grammatical system that relies only on universal principles and parameters of sentence grammar to the exclusion of language-particular constructions. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Deconstructing Constructions and the Syntax-Discourse Interface Ellen F. Prince University of Pennsylvania In this paper, I shall review the history of the notion 'construction' in generative linguistics and present some evidence that suggests that (a) contra Chomsky 1993, constructions do have an important place in a complete theory of language competence, (b) contra at least some proponents of Construction Theory, they are not basic, if by basic is meant 'primitive', 'unanalyzable', and (c) they are best seen as situated not in the syntax or semantics but at the level of metalinguistic competence, the level at which speakers consciously or unconsciously view their language and the level at which I believe the syntax-discourse interface is located. The evidence I shall cite comes primarily from language contact phenomena, in particular from cases where discourse functions associated with syntactic forms in one language have been borrowed into a contact language where they come to be associated with syntactic forms of that language. The most familiar example to be presented of the results of such borrowing is the `Yinglish' Yiddish-Movement exemplified in (1) [+ = grammatical in Yinglish]: (1) +Egg creams you want, bananas you'll get. (Ross 1967:267) To make sense of Yiddish-Movement, one has to take into account (a) its syntax, which is identical to the syntax of Standard English Focus-Movement, exemplified in (2)a, (b)the discourse function of Standard English Focus-Movement, (c) the syntax of Yiddish Focus-Movment, which is exemplified in (2)b, and the discourse function of Yiddish Focus-Movement: (2) a. `She was here two years. [checking transcript] Five semesters she was here.' (K.Miselis) b. `Dvorem-beteylem vilst du zol ikh mit dir redn?' (GFII.77) `Baby-talk you want me to talk with you?' It will be argued that the discourse function of English F-M is a special case of the discourse function of Yiddish F-M, i.e. that the set of contexts in which Yiddish F-M can felicitously occur properly includes the set of contexts in which English F-M can, and that Yiddish-English bilinguals presumably associated the more general discourse function of the Yiddish form with the English form, all the while keeping the syntax distinct, in the creation of Yinglish Yiddish-Movement. Further, it will be argued that this is a common phenomenon and that it demonstrates that a notion of 'construction' as an unanalyzable form-function unit is inadequate. Rather, it appears that syntactic form and discourse function are arbitrarily associated at some supra-syntactic and supra-conceptual level, much as phonological form and lexical meaning are associated at some supra-phonological and supra-conceptual level in a theory of lexical competence.
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