No description available.

Amongst the multiple and diverse meanings and functions passive constructions hold, this study considers that the primary function of passives in Japanese is to portray an event from the point of view of an affected entity. The thesis identifies three types of affectedness in Japanese passive constructions: emotive affectedness, direct / physical affectedness, and objective affectedness. Emotive affectedness, often referred to as �adversative� meaning, has drawn attention from many researchers. It has been strongly associated in the past with the syntactic category called the �indirect passive�, but is actually also observed in many instances of the �direct passive�. Direct / physical affectedness is detected mainly in the construction here referred to as the �direct sentient passive�. This meaning is common in passives in many other languages, including English. The last type � objective affectedness � is primarily associated with �non-sentient passives�, more specifically with what is here called the �plain passive�. Many previous researchers have claimed a complete and apparently transparent correlation between syntactic and semantic distinctions of the Japanese passive. The present study rejects these direct correlations. In analysing authentic data, it becomes evident that the correlation is much more subtle than has generally been recognised, and that is a matter of degree or continuum, rather than a discrete, black and white issue. To reflect this view, this study proposes separate sets of categories for syntactic and semantic distinctions. The ultimate aim of this study is to reveal how Japanese passives are actually used in real contexts. In order to achieve this aim, detailed examination of authentic written and spoken data is conducted. Some findings of the data analysis in the present study contradict previous claims, such as the finding of a large proportion of passives with a non-sentient subject and very low frequency of occurrence of indirect passives. This research also finds that, although more than half of the propositional meanings in the passive data examined are �negative�, a considerable number of passives still appear in a proposition with a neutral or positive meaning. Another prominent finding regarding propositional meaning is that it seems to be related to the degree of centrality of the passive subject to the event. With regard to the syntactic classification of passive, in particular, it is observed that the lower the degree of the centrality of the subject of the passive to the event, the greater the likelihood that the passive clause involves a negative proposition.

No description available.

Amongst the multiple and diverse meanings and functions passive constructions hold, this study considers that the primary function of passives in Japanese is to portray an event from the point of view of an affected entity. The thesis identifies three types of affectedness in Japanese passive constructions: emotive affectedness, direct / physical affectedness, and objective affectedness. Emotive affectedness, often referred to as �adversative� meaning, has drawn attention from many researchers. It has been strongly associated in the past with the syntactic category called the �indirect passive�, but is actually also observed in many instances of the �direct passive�. Direct / physical affectedness is detected mainly in the construction here referred to as the �direct sentient passive�. This meaning is common in passives in many other languages, including English. The last type � objective affectedness � is primarily associated with �non-sentient passives�, more specifically with what is here called the �plain passive�. Many previous researchers have claimed a complete and apparently transparent correlation between syntactic and semantic distinctions of the Japanese passive. The present study rejects these direct correlations. In analysing authentic data, it becomes evident that the correlation is much more subtle than has generally been recognised, and that is a matter of degree or continuum, rather than a discrete, black and white issue. To reflect this view, this study proposes separate sets of categories for syntactic and semantic distinctions. The ultimate aim of this study is to reveal how Japanese passives are actually used in real contexts. In order to achieve this aim, detailed examination of authentic written and spoken data is conducted. Some findings of the data analysis in the present study contradict previous claims, such as the finding of a large proportion of passives with a non-sentient subject and very low frequency of occurrence of indirect passives. This research also finds that, although more than half of the propositional meanings in the passive data examined are �negative�, a considerable number of passives still appear in a proposition with a neutral or positive meaning. Another prominent finding regarding propositional meaning is that it seems to be related to the degree of centrality of the passive subject to the event. With regard to the syntactic classification of passive, in particular, it is observed that the lower the degree of the centrality of the subject of the passive to the event, the greater the likelihood that the passive clause involves a negative proposition.

This thesis has two aims: The first is to establish that OSV word order sentences in Turkish, along with the related Oblique-NP SV word order sentences, can have two different syntactic structures, one resulting from A-movement, and the other from A’-movement; I refer to the structures resulting from A-movement as ‘subject suppression’ constructions. The second aim of the thesis is to analyze the syntactic structure of subject suppression constructions. I rely on novel tests based on the semantics of specificity in Turkish to delineate the subject suppression constructions. I then propose that these constructions have their external arguments merged in the specifier of VP, and semantically interpreted via a special composition rule, as suggested by Kratzer (1996, p. 113) before being dismissed in favour of her VoiceP proposal. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis is an investigation of phenomena at the interface between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, with the aim of arguing for a view of semantic interpretation as lexically driven yet contextually dependent. I examine regular, generative processes which operate over the lexicon to induce verbal sense shifts, and discuss the interaction of these processes with the linguistic or discourse context. I concentrate on phenomena where only an interaction between all three linguistic knowledge sources can explain the constraints on verb use: conventionalised lexical semantic knowledge constrains productive syntactic processes, while pragmatic reasoning is both constrained by and constrains the potential interpretations given to certain verbs. The phenomena which are closely examined are the behaviour of PP sentential modifiers (specifically dative and directional PPs) with respect to the lexical semantic representation of the verb phrases they modify, resultative constructions, and logical metonymy. The analysis is couched in terms of a lexical semantic representation drawing on Davis (1995), Jackendoff (1983, 1990), and Pustejovsky (1991, 1995) which aims to capture “linguistically relevant” components of meaning. The representation is shown to have utility for modeling of the interaction between the syntactic form of an utterance and its meaning. I introduce a formalisation of the representation within the framework of Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1994), and rely on the model of discourse coherence proposed by Lascarides and Asher (1992), Discourse in Commonsense Entailment. I furthermore discuss the implications of the contextual dependency of semantic interpretation for lexicon design and computational processing in Natural Language Understanding systems.

Hungarian 'focus position' is typically thought of as a central example of a 'discourse configurational' phenomenon, since it not only involves the expression of information-structural (or 'discourse semantic') meaning through the manipulation of word order but also interacts syntactically with other elements of the sentence. In this thesis, I argue that this kind of phenomenon highlights fundamental theoretical problems with conventional assumptions about the relationships between linguistic form and different kinds of meaning and demonstrate that these problems have led to empirical inadequacies in the syntactic analysis of Hungarian. I propose an alternative analysis that makes use of a dynamic, incremental parsing-based approach to grammar, which in turn allows for the influence of inferential pragmatic operations (investigated in terms of Relevance Theory) at all stages in the process of interpreting linguistic form. This opens up possibilities of structural and interpretive underspecification that allow for the interpretation of the 'focus position' to be unified with the information-structural interpretation of sentences that do not contain a syntactically focused expression. This analysis explains the interaction of syntactic foci with other pre-verbal items. The burden of explanation is thus shifted away from specialised, abstract syntactic representations and onto independently necessary aspects of cognitive organisation. The use of 'discourse semantic' primitives---whether in terms of focus or exhaustivity---to encode the effects of the 'focus position' is shown to be both theoretically problematic and empirically inadequate. The information-structural meanings associated with the position must be viewed not as the input to interpretive processes but instead as the result of inferential processes performed in context. Reanalysis of the syntactic evidence shows the relevant position to be not merely pre-verbal, but underlyingly pre-tense, showing that the unmarked position of the main verb is essentially the same as that of syntactically focused expressions. This leads to an analysis whereby both 'neutral', topic-comment readings and cases of narrow focus emerge from inferences over a common interpretive procedure. This procedure is identified as 'main predication': the point in the parsing of a sentence at which the application of a single predicate effects the conversion of a mere description of an event into a truth-conditional assertion. Main predication is represented using neo-Davidsonian, event-based semantics (the effect of the main predicate being equivalent to that of the application of an existential quantifier over an event variable in the neo-Davidsonian approach) and made dynamic by the use of the epsilon calculus. This analysis predicts the postposing of any (otherwise pre-tense) 'verbal modifier' (VM) in the presence of a syntactic focus and the apparent information-structural ambiguity of VMs when they are pre-tense. Certain constraints on the distribution of quantifiers are also predicted, one such constraint being adequately characterisable only within a semantically underspecified, procedural account. The behaviour of the negative particle "nem" is also given a maximally simple explanation. The apparently variable scope of the negative operator is explicable without ad hoc syntactic mechanisms: the apparent wide scope reading associated with 'sentential' negation follows inferentially from narrow scope negation of temporal information. The syntactic positions of negation are predictable on this basis. In addition, the assumption of consistent narrow scope negation correctly predicts that VMs must postpose or receive a narrow focus reading in the presence of "nem".

The dissertation investigates syntactic and semantic aspects of the indefinite pronoun system in Modern Hebrew and consists of an experimental part and a theoretical part. The experimental part presents the grammaticality judgment task conducted to test three theoretical questions: (1) the relation between negation and the licensing of AF `any' and KOL `any'; (2) the contrast between EYZE `some' and EYZESEHU `some' in terms of specificity; and (3) the correlation between syntactic position and free choice readings. Three main theoretical findings are contributed by this work. First, it is shown that from a typological viewpoint, Hebrew, a Semitic language, patterns with Romance and Germanic languages, rather than Japanese-type languages, in having indefinite pronouns specialized for particular operators available in the discourse. Second, the thesis proposes a novel unified syntax-semantics for KOL which accounts for its interpretational variability. Working with the Kratzer and Shimoyama (2002) framework where indefinite pronouns generate sets of individual alternatives, the semantics of a KOL--modified noun phrase is formalized as a variable and containing a restriction. When this restriction ranges over kinds, KOL receives a generic reading; when the restriction is over a contextually specified set of entities, KOL has an episodic reading. In these cases, the KOL--phrase moves to the argument position of a universal quantifier which binds the individual alternatives generated by the KOL--phrase. If KOL stays in situ, the individual alternatives are allowed to expand into propositional alternatives, resulting in the free choice reading. Third, I discuss the DP-internal structure of [eyze(N)se-hu (N)] and [(N) kol(N)se-hu], treating 'se-hu' as a CP. I propose that there is a correlation between the postnominal position and the free choice readings of these pronouns, suggesting that domain restrictions, usually derived in the semantics-pragmatics, may also be encoded in the syntax. If this hypothesis is on the right track, it could provide us with a better understanding of how and when in the process of language acquisition domain restrictions found with indefinite pronouns are acquired.