Documents Incorporated–Incorporating Documents

This chapter analyses the importance of including documents of originally distinct origin for the construction of a session’s record. It discusses the annotations affixed to documents in the process for their certain identification. It analyses the orders given by council leaders for the acceptance, reading, and filing of documents and their effects on the shape of the record. The council leadership also determines the exact order and placement of documents; our investigation can show that principles of social hierarchy govern such placing as much as the sequence of ‘recitation’ or use. Deliberate arrangement of documents serves to lay out an—often implicit—argument for the case made in the session. In later councils this practice increasingly dominates over ‘live’ speech-acts. The chapter can in this way also show the complex relationship between orality and writing, and the possibilities of editorial composition.

Local versus long-distance bound implicit arguments of inalienable relational nouns in Chinese

This paper argues that inalienable relational nouns in Mandarin Chinese, specifically kinship nouns (KNs, e.g. father, sister) and body-part nouns (BPNs, e.g. head, face), have an implicit reflexive argument. Based on a syntactic comparison between KNs, BPNs, locally and long-distance bound reflexives, we argue that the implicit reflexive arguments of BPNs must be locally bound, whereas that of KNs can either be locally or long-distance bound. We conclude that these two types of implicit arguments in Mandarin Chinese correspond to locally and long-distance bound reflexives, respectively. We analyze this difference in connection with binding theory and a theory of logophoricity. We argue that the implicit argument of BPNs is a locally bound anaphor and cannot be used as a logophor, whereas that of KNs can, supporting a proposal that the logophoric property leads to long-distance binding, as argued by Huang & Liu’s (2001) for reflexives in Mandarin Chinese.

Violence and the Christian Life in the Light of Martyrdom

This final chapter applies the notion developed early in the book of martyrdom as a “spotlight” that illuminates the contours of discipleship. Through a final sharpening of the criteria of martyrdom, it contends that the only violence that Christians should sanction as “justified” is violence congruent with martyrdom’s implicit argument about the faithful Christian life. This requires significant constraints on the “realism” and conceptions of military “necessity” that Christians can affirm, and thus points to a just war ethic with significant restraints (both ad bellum and in bello) that reflect the sacrificial texture of the following of Jesus. While the chapter focuses on Christian martyrdom in relation to the dilemmas of war, it also analyzes what a martyrdom-shaped sense of Christian responsibility looks like in other arenas of sword-bearing, especially policing.

Active Existential in Lithuanian: Remarks on Burzio’s Generalization

Evidence from the Lithuanian active existential construction shows that Lithuanian has a type of VoiceP that assigns structural accusative case in the absence of a syntactically projected implicit argument in Spec,VoiceP. This construction violates Burzio’s (1986) Generalization and its later versions (e.g., Marantz 1991, Kratzer 1994, 1996, Woolford 2003, McFadden 2004, Legate 2014). This article offers a revised version of Burzio’s Generalization by proposing that while accusative case must be assigned by a thematic Voice, the assignment of accusative case by Voice may vary independently from the selection of a specifier.

Salvation and Persons Outside the Faith

Besides the problem of suffering and evil, and the problem of scientism, Lewis knew that the problem of religious diversity is another seemingly negative factor in the formulation of a coherent Christian worldview. Simply stated, the problem concerns how an omnipotent, wholly good God could have created a world in which many different religions arise and vie for the allegiance of countless millions of people. Is it rational to think that only one of these religions is completely true? It is fascinating how Lewis navigated this issue. Rejecting his early belief that all religions are myths in the sense of being falsehoods, deceptions, and frauds, Lewis explains that all religions are expressions of the God-implanted search for the divine. In fact, the pervasive pattern of the repetitively dying-and-rising god (annually in ahistorical fertility religions) becomes a kind of foreshadowing of the singular event of Jesus as the God-man dying in the midst of human history. Lewis’s analysis of salvation in light of world religions is based on the implicit argument that God’s perfect wisdom, justice, and love are fulfilled in God’s ability to discern and judge each person’s heart, desire, and life trajectory, regardless of mistaken beliefs about God himself.

On the Implicit Argument of Icelandic Indirect Causatives

The goal of this article is to understand the syntax of Icelandic indirect causatives (ICs), especially with respect to the implicit causee. We show that the complement of the causative verb must be at least as large as a VoiceP, and that it shares some properties with active VoicePs and others with passive VoicePs. We make sense of this state of affairs by proposing that the causee, while phonetically silent, has an explicit syntactic representation, but as a φP rather than a DP. We further propose that ICs are built by stacking a second VoiceP on top of the lexical verb’s first VoiceP, and that this configuration, along with the underspecified interpretation of φP, leads to a special thematic interpretation of both the causer and the implicit causee. Our analysis suggests that there are certain core ingredients involved in building ICs—such as stacked VoicePs and an underspecified causee—but that the source of these ingredients can vary across languages and constructions, depending on the formal primitives that grammars make available to the languages more generally.

Implicit Argument Prediction as Reading Comprehension

Implicit arguments, which cannot be detected solely through syntactic cues, make it harder to extract predicate-argument tuples. We present a new model for implicit argument prediction that draws on reading comprehension, casting the predicate-argument tuple with the missing argument as a query. We also draw on pointer networks and multi-hop computation. Our model shows good performance on an argument cloze task as well as on a nominal implicit argument prediction task.

Middle constructions in Romanian

The present paper aims to present an inventory of Romanian middle contructions (se‑verbal constructions), and to extend the analysis to other structures (with or without se) that were not previously investigated, but exhibit the same characteristics, and seem to allow middle reading (adjunct middles). Since Jespersen (1927), middles were attested cross-linguistically, and the focus on middles is justified if we consider the fact that this is an interesting testing ground for theories of syntax, semantics and their interaction (Fagan 1992). Starting from Grahek’s definition (2008, 44), in this paper, middles are a heterogeneous class of constructions that share formal properties of both active and passive structures: on the one hand, they have active verb forms, but, on the other hand, like passives, they have understood subjects and normally display promoted objects. The corpus analysis will focus on the particular contexts in which the middle reading is triggered: i) the adverbial modification; ii) the modal/procedural interpretation of the event; iii) the responsibility of the subject; iv) the arbitrary interpretation of the implicit argument which follows from the generic interpretation (Steinbach 2002).

Covert reflexive argument in inalienable relational nouns

This paper argues that inalienable relational nouns in Mandarin Chinese, specifically kinship nouns (e.g. father, sister) and body-part nouns (e.g. head, face), have an implicit reflexive argument. Based on a syntactic comparison between kinship nouns, body-part nouns, local- and long-distance bound reflexives, we argue that the implicit reflexive arguments of kinship nouns and body-part nouns differ from each other: The implicit argument of kinship nouns must be locally bound, whereas that of body-part nouns can either be locally bound or long-distance bound. Therefore, we conclude that these two types of implicit arguments in Mandarin Chinese correspond to local- long-distance bound reflexives, respectively. Finally, we relate this difference to binding theory concerning local and long-distance anaphors.