[lingtalks] Heidi Harley Colloquium: Nov 3, 2008

[Karma Dolma]

The Department of Linguistics at USC proudly presents:

Incorporation, Bare Nouns and the Canonical Use Constraint
 
Heidi Harley
University of Arizona

Monday, November 3, 2008 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Grace Ford Salvatori 118

Following the talk, dinner will be served in the Linguistics Conference Room

Abstract:

In recent syntactic theorizing, some proposals reminiscent of discredited
theories from the early 1970s have become current again. For example, in
work from 1993-2002, Ken Hale and Jay Keyser have argued that denominal
verbs like English 'paint' and 'corral' in sentences like "John painted the
wall" or "Amy corralled the horse" have a 'hidden' syntactic structure like
[John v [the wall [P paint]] or [Amy v [the horse [P corral]]], with rough
glosses like 'John caused the wall (to be) with paint' or 'Amy caused the
horse (to be) in the corral'. Many of the objections to the original
'decompositional' proposals have been answered in the literature, but some
remain. In particular, the 'canonical use' constraint remains unaddressed.
The CUC consists in the observation that 'John caused the wall to have paint
on it' could happen in any old way (e.g. he spills paint accidentally on it)
but 'John painted the wall' has to happen in a canonical, 'painting'
fashion. I address this question by considering the interpretive constraints
on bare N constructions in English. Contrast, "I went to school" with "I
went to the school". In the former, CUC effects appear: the speaker is going
to school for educational purposes; in the latter, the school is just a
location that is the destination of travel, and the speaker might be going
for any old reason. These cases show that the CUC is a constraint on the
interpretation of bare Ns not a constraint on these denominal verbs
specifically. Evidence from bare N constructions in other languages, with or
without incorporation, is presented to support the conclusion.




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