This is not me. In a larger sense, though, it’s profoundly me.
Dept. of
Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824
Email: my last name at msu.edu
Office: A-634 Wells Hall
Office hours (Spring): Monday 5:00–6:00 and Thursday
3:00–4:00
Stuff that’s here includes:
If they’re getting in your way, you can hide the short abstracts below. (It might even work.) If you want the short abstracts back, you can reveal them again.
Some more or less recent work:
Talk. ‘Metalinguistic Comparison in an Alternative Semantics for Imprecision’ (link is to an extended abstract). At NELS 38.
Despite all the attention the semantics of comparatives has received, there seems to be no formal account of ‘metalinguistic’ comparatives such as more dumb than ugly or more a semanticist than a syntactician. This paper proposes one, built on the intuition that these structures do not compare along scales introduced by gradable adjectives—as ordinary comparatives do—but rather along a scale of (im)precision, or of how much pragmatic slack must be afforded to judge an expression ‘close enough to true’. This is expressed by reformulating the pragmatic-halos theory of imprecision (Lasersohn 1999) in terms of a Hamblin-style alternative semantics (Hamblin 1973) in a way that allows degrees of imprecision—roughly, ‘halo size’—to be directly compared.
(Since writing this, I’ve become aware of Giannakidou and Stavrou 2007, which is a formal account of ‘metalinguistic’ comparatives.)
2007. ‘Differential Degrees and Cross-Categorial Measure-Phrase Modification’. Talk—actually given by Gillian Ramchand (impressively, on the basis of the handout alone)—at the workshop on the Syntax and Semantics of Measurability at CASTL, University of Tromsø. This is a more recent handout on this.
Recent work on the semantics of measure phrases has grappled with the insight that expressions like six feet tall—often taken to be the prototypical and most theoretically revealing cases of MP modification—are in fact unusual, and that differential MPs (as in six feet taller) are actually the unmarked case (Schwarzschild 2005 directly, and more indirectly Kennedy & Levin (to appear) and Svenonius & Kennedy 2006). This talk provides further evidence for this view, primarily from the grammar of by MPs across categories, and proposes a way of drawing a sortal distinction between differential degrees and ordinary ones in which differential MP modification emerges as grammatically simpler than its non-differential counterpart.
To appear (in 2008). ‘Nonrestrictive Modifiers in Nonparenthetical Positions’. In Louise McNally and Christopher Kennedy, eds. Adverbs and Adjectives: Syntax, Semantics and Discourse. Studies in Theoretical Linguistics. Oxford University Press.
The systematic but often subtle semantic differences between prenominal and postnominal adjectives noted by Bolinger (1967) and others in many respects remain poorly understood. A similar murkiness surrounds many of the differences between preverbal and postverbal adverbs. This paper examines an intriguing parallel between these domains: in English, a nonrestrictive interpretation is possible without parenthetical intonation for prenominal adjectives and preverbal adverbs, but not for postnominal adjectives and postverbal adverbs. This effect is derived here by exploring a possibility made available by the two-dimensional semantics proposed for nonrestrictive modification by Potts (2003): that different dimensions of meaning might observe fundamentally different rules with respect to the syntax-semantics mapping. Through a proposed structural asymmetry in the semantic mechanism that drives nonrestrictive interpretation, a cross-categorial account is developed of why nonparenthetical nonrestrictives occupy the positions that they do, and of how they can receive the proper interpretation in those positions.
2007. ‘Adverbial Modification of Adjectives: Evaluatives and a Little Beyond’. In Johannes Dölling, Tatjana Heyde-Zybatow, and Martin Schäfer, eds. Event Structures in Linguistic Form and Interpretation. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin.
(Mostly an abbreviated version of ‘Evaluative Adverbial Modification in the Adjectival Projection’, but also includes some discussion of subject-oriented(-like) interpretations of adverbs in the extended AP.)
2006. ‘Atelicity and Measure Phrases: Licensing Measure Phrase Modification Across AP, PP, and VP’. In Donald Baumer, David Montero, and Michael Scanlon, eds. Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL). Cascadilla Press, Somerville, Mass.
This paper relates two issues normally considered separately: the licensing conditions on AP- and PP-modifying measure phrases (such as six feet in six feet above the barn) and the atelicity restriction imposed by certain temporal adverbials. These questions are given a common answer: both classes of expressions are subject to an independently-motivated cross-categorial monotonicity condition on measure-phrase modification, the Modification Condition (Zwarts and Winter 2000, Winter 2001, 2004) of Vector Space Semantics. To make this connection, the vector space approach is extended to temporal semantics and independent evidence is marshaled for assimilating some temporal adverbials to measure phrases. I also pursue a cross-categorial syntax and semantics for measure-phrase modification that may blunt certain arguments in favor of the ontological enrichments advocated in Vector Space Semantics.
(This builds on ‘Measure DP Adverbials: Measure Phrase Modification in VP’ below and, less directly, ‘Interpreting Measure DP Adverbials’.)
2006. ‘Size Adjectives and Adnominal Degree Modification’. In Effi Georgala and Jonathan Howell, eds. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistics Theory (SALT) XV. CLC Publications, Ithaca, New York. (The link is to the abbreviated proceedings version. A longer and more self-indulgent one is available here.)
Although the traditional focus of research into degree modification has been the adjectival extended projection, it has long been recognized that degree modification or something quite like it is possible in other categories as well. The conditions under which it is possible, though, and mechanisms that bring it about remain largely mysterious. This paper examines one peculiar species of such modification, exemplified by that enormous idiot or a big beer-drinker, in which a size adjective characterizes a degree associated with the modified noun. Across a number of languages, these readings manifest two intriguing properties: they are possible prenominally but not postnominally, and systematically with adjectives that predicate bigness but not with ones that predicate smallness. In the compositional semantics ultimately proposed here, these generalizations follow from a restriction on how degrees on one scale can be mapped to degrees on another and from an independently-motivated close syntactic parallel between the nominal and adjectival extended projections.
Some older stuff:
2004. ‘Measure DP Adverbials: Measure Phrase Modification in VP’. Ms., Université du Québec à Montréal.
This paper seeks to establish that measure phrases in the extended AP and PP—such as six feet tall and twenty minutes before midnight—have a direct counterpart in the verbal domain. These verbal measure phrases, exemplified in English in e.g. He slept several hours, constitute a natural class distinct from other DP adverbials and characterized by obligatorily narrow scope, low structural position, an Aktionsart-related presupposition, and quantificationally weak interpretations. This constellation of characteristics is shown to follow naturally from the view that these expressions mirror core syntactic and semantic properties of AP and PP measure phrases. In particular, it will be argued here that these expressions have a syntax that places them in the specifier of a functional projection, just as has long been assumed for AP/PP measure phrases and as has been proposed in a different and independent line of research for adverbials more generally; and that they have a semantics in which they are interpreted as arguments of the head of this licensing projection, and therefore scopally and distributionally constrained and implicated in the aspectual semantics of the clause. Aktionsart information which cannot plausibly come from the DP itself is thereby attributed instead to a verbal feature responsible for licensing the adverbial. Independent evidence for this approach is adduced from true adverbs and parallels with proposals made in the analysis of accusative adverbials in Slavic and in Finnish.
2004. ‘Evaluative Adverbial Modification in the Adjectival Projection’. Ms., Université du Québec à Montréal. (An abbreviated and in other respects somewhat elaborated version of this is ‘Adverbial Modification in AP: Evaluatives and a Little Beyond’.)
Among the principal problems in the syntax and semantics of adverbial modification is how the position and interpretation of adverbs should be related. Efforts toward addressing aspects of this question (from Jackendoff 1972 and McConnell-Ginet 1984 to Cinque 1999 and Ernst 2002) have focused primarily on adverbial modification in the verbal and sentential domain. There are, however, less prototypical uses of adverbs in the adjectival extended projection as well, and interestingly, the interpretation adverbs receive there varies predictably from the one they receive elsewhere. In this respect, adverbial modification in AP offers another perspective on the larger problem. This paper addresses the syntax and semantics of certain such ‘ad-adjectival’ adverbs, presenting an analysis of how their interpretation arises and of how it relates to the interpretation of their counterparts outside the adjectival domain. Along the way, it touches on broader questions about how degree semantics relates to event(uality) semantics, and about how the structure of the extended AP relates to that of the extended VP with respect to adverb licensing.
2004. ‘Feature Bundles, Prenominal Modifier Order, and Modes of Composition Below the Word Level’. Ms., Université du Québec à Montréal.
One of the obstacles to identifying the syntactic notion of interpretability (as applied to e.g. interpretable features) with the formal-semantic notion is that there is no agreed-upon way of assigning a denotation to bundles of more than one interpretable feature. This paper explores one means of doing so—loosening the type-theoretical demands a bit by extending the idea that function composition is available in the morphology (which is not new) to feature bundles, though in a modified form. The advantage of this is that a single denotation can be given to an interpretable feature irrespective of whether it occupies its own node or is bundled with others, thereby making possible more representationally conservative phrase structures where desirable without precluding more articulated ones where necessary. The proposal is developed and motivated in the empirical context of otherwise mysterious constraints on the relative order in English of classificatory adjectives, color adjectives, and attributive nouns of a particular sort.
With Meredith Landman. 2003. ‘Event-Kinds and Manner Modification’. In Nancy Mae Antrim, Grant Goodall, Martha Schulte-Nafeh, and Vida Samiian, eds. Proceedings of the Western Conference in Linguistics (WECOL) 2002. California State University, Fresno. (Held at the University of British Columbia.)
In English, expressions introduced by such—as in such a dog—can be taken to involve instantiations of a contextually-provided kind (in the sense of Carlson 1977). Such an understanding is quite natural in part because it is well-established that reference to kinds is possible in the nominal domain. Surprisingly, though, in Polish the analogue of English such—taki, as in taki pies (lit. ‘such-masc dog’)—also occurs in its bare form in the verbal domain, as tak in e.g. tańczyć tak (lit. ‘dance-inf such’; ‘dance that way’). It is possible to extend the kind-reference analysis of adnominal taki to its adverbial counterpart by exploiting the parallelism between individuals and Davidsonian events. But this quite straightforward path leads to an understanding of adverbial tak in terms of a less familiar and perhaps unexpected notion: reference to kinds of events. This paper formulates an analysis framed in these terms and explores its consequences for the semantics of manner.
2002. ‘Wholes and Their Covers’. In Brendan Jackson, ed. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) XII. CLC Publications, Ithaca, New York.
It is a natural and common assumption that adjectives such as whole and entire involve universal quantification over parts of an individual. This paper argues that in a sense exactly the opposite is true: that DPs containing whole and entire are obligatorily non-quantificational expressions. An account is developed in which these adjectives are instead maximizing modifiers in the sense of Brisson (1998). This approach leads to explanations of their scopal and discourse-anaphoric properties, as well as of the determiner restrictions they impose and of how they differ from e.g. complete. In implementing this, the notion of covers (Schwarzschild 1996) is imported in a somewhat modified form from the semantics of plurals into the semantics of singular individuals. Along the way, evidence emerges for a particular conception of choice-function indefinites (Winter 1997, Reinhart 1997, Kratzer 1998, Matthewson 1999).
2001. ‘Almost and Its Kin, Across Categories’. In Rachel Hastings, Brendan Jackson, and Zsofia Zvolenszky, eds. Proceedings of SALT XI. CLC Publications, Ithaca, New York.
2001. ‘Interpreting Measure DP Adverbials’. In K. Megerdoomian and L. A. Bar-el, eds. Proceedings of WCCFL XX. Cascadilla Press, Somerville, Mass.
If you’re looking for something even older or otherwise unavailable, you probably shouldn’t be. But email me anyway.
Semantics, syntax, and their interface.
My work centers chiefly on various aspects of the grammar of modification. I’m particularly interested in puzzles that might shed light on the lexical semantics of various modifiers, the nature of the distinction between modifiers and arguments, how the syntactic position of modifiers affects their interpretation, how different classes of modifiers vary from each other, what the grammar of modification might reveal about natural language ontology, and what generalizations about modifier semantics hold across syntactic categories.
This semester:
I also frequently teach:
Semantics-related stuff:
Not necessarily semantics-related:
‘[I]n 1918, as the National Anthem was being played … the walls of College Hall began to collapse … Saint’s Rest, the first dormitory, … burned during the December 1876 vacation … On January 1, 1919, fire consumed [Williams Hall] … The botanical lab, built in 1880, was destroyed by fire in 1890. … [T]he first Wells Hall was built in 1877 as a dormitory that served 130 students. It burned in 1905 … [T]he Engineering Building was the most prominent building on campus when on Sunday morning, March 5, 1916, fire destroyed the structure …’