Revisiting Olga, the beautiful dancer: An intersective A-analysis

The paper presents a novel semantic account of the so-called "intersective/non-intersective" ambiguity of structures such as beautiful dancer. The proposal contrasts with Larson's (1998) famous N-analysis in taking the adjective as the ambiguity trigger and in unmasking the bracketing paradox perception of the non-intersective reading as a grammatical illusion. The adjective has no compositional access to the verbal root's event argument but is always linked to the referential argument of the noun. -er nominals are analyzed as a special kind of role noun (such as king, guest, judge). They introduce a social role r that manifests itself via the verbal root's e-argument. (However, neither r nor e are compositionally active.) An evaluative adjective such as beautiful introduces an underspecified trope variable, which calls for a pragmatic specification of the adjectival predicate's ultimate target. A general pragmatic parsimony condition ensures that referents introduced by linguistic material are chosen as best target candidates whenever possible. The -er nominal's social role r is an ideal choice in this respect. The linking of the adjective to the verbal root's e-argument is mediated via r and thus a secondary pragmatic effect. The proposal provides a unified analysis for modified -er nominals (beautiful dancer) and other instances of role- and event-related interpretations for adnominal modification such as, e.g., just king.

Compounds, composability, and morphological idiosyncrasy

Working within the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993, 1994), this paper offers a derivational analysis of the range of structures and the types of idiosyncrasy associated with compounding. Building on prior analysis by Harley (2009), compound structures are argued to vary according to the ways in which the head and the non-head of a compound are categorised. Specifically, if the non-head of a compound is acategorial, then the relationship between the compound head and non-head is non-decomposable. Based on data from Hebrew (Borer 2009), it is shown that this also makes the non-head inaccessible to independent syntactic-semantic operations, including coordination, and coreference with a pronoun. It is additionally shown that morphologically-conditioned allomorphy (Bobaljik 2012) may be conditioned between the compound head and a suffix, as constitutes part of a bracketing paradox (Williams 1981). Where categorisation of the head of the compound gives rise to effects of headedness, however, this allomorphy may be ‘blocked’ by the structure associated with exocentricity. The final sections of the paper consider exocentricity, and other interactions between idiosyncratic meanings and phonology, in further detail.

Morpho-semantic bracketing paradox and compositionality: The implications of the sized inalienable possession construction in Japanese

One challenge to lexical (or, more specifically, morphological) integrity – and more generally to compositionality of meaning – is bracketing paradox. Sized inalienable possession(SIP) in Japanese (e.g. ko-kubi‘small-neck’ in [VP[NPko-kubi-o]kasigeru] ‘small-neck-acctilt’) is an instance of bracketing paradox where morphological bracketing (such as above) and semantic bracketing (below) conflict with each other. Specifically, a prefix likeko- above acts as an adverbial modifier for a VP, not as a nominal modifier (i.e. [VPslightly (ko) [VPneck tilt]] ‘tilt one's neck slightly’). It is proposed that: (a) syntactically, an SIP expression and its ‘host’ verb are collocationally dependent, and (b) Semantically, either argument or adjunct SIP expressions are Montagovian functors. They take (or act upon) a predicate meaning as an argument to give rise to an appropriate interpretation. This has the effect of confining the unusual adverbial modification within SIP expressions. Without additional stipulations, the current proposal solves hitherto unnoticed empirical problems faced by previous syntactic accounts. In doing so, it avoids employing mechanisms contradicting morphological integrity, namely LF movement of a bound morpheme or co-indexing a word-internal element. Thus, at least in the domain of SIP, the current approach enables us to remain faithful to morphological integrity. A broader issue touched upon here is how compositional semantics is accomplished when it is superficially violated as above. This paper shows that strict adherence to iconicity between syntax and semantics is by no means a necessity for compositional semantics.

Solving the bracketing paradox: an analysis of the morphology of German particle verbs

Inflectional affixes are sensitive to morphological properties of the stems of the verbs they attach to. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that the inflectional material is combined with both the verbal stem of simplex verbs and the verbal stem of particle verbs. It has been argued that this leads to a bracketing paradox in the case of particle verbs since the semantic contribution of the inflectional information scopes over the complete particle verb. I will discuss nominalizations and adjective derivation, which are also problematic because of various bracketing paradoxes. I will suggest a solution to these paradoxes that assumes that inflectional and derivational prefixes and suffixes always attach to a form of a stem that already contains the information about a possible particle, but without containing a phonological realization of the particle. As is motivated by syntactic properties of particle verbs, the particle is treated as a dependent of the verb. The particle is combined with its head after inflection and derivation. With such an approach no special mechanisms for the analysis of particle verbs are necessary.

morphology of German particle verbs

The fact that inflectional affixes always attach to the verbal stem leads to the bracketing paradox in the case of particle verbs since the semantic contribution of the inflectional information scopes over the complete particle verb. I will discuss nominalizations and adjective derivation, which are also problematic because of various bracketing paradoxes. I will suggest a solution to these paradoxes that assumes that inflectional and derivational prefixes and suffixes always attach to a form of a stem that contains the information about particles already, but without containing a phonological realization of the particle. The particle is a dependent of the verb and is combined with its head after inflection and derivation. With such an approach no rebracketing mechanisms are necessary.

Bound morphemes, coordination and bracketing paradox

Elements necessary for a proper interpretation of a sentence can sometimes be missing from the ‘surface’ representation involving coordination (ellipsis, gapping, etc.). Though different methods have been proposed to recover missing elements, it is not clear how such recovery can be accomplished when they correspond to bound morphemes. Assuming lexicalism, this paper shows how such missing elements are recovered semantically without employing empty place holders, abstract functional categories or invisible movement. Bound verbal morphemes in Japanese introduced here give rise to morpho-semantico bracketing paradoxes which prove to be problematic for a syntactic view of morphology.