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<DIV>The Department of Linguistics at USC proudly presents:<BR><B><FONT
size=4><BR>Incorporation, Bare Nouns and the Canonical Use
Constraint</FONT></B><BR> <FONT size=4><BR>Heidi Harley<BR>University of
Arizona</FONT><BR><BR>Monday, November 3, 2008 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm<BR>Grace Ford
Salvatori 118<BR><BR>Following the talk, dinner will be served in the
Linguistics Conference Room<BR><BR>Abstract:<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR><BR><BR><BR>Email inquiries to: <A
href="javascript:main.compose('new','t=lingtalk@college.usc.edu')">lingtalk@college.usc.edu</A><BR><A
href="http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/ling/newsevents/colloquia.shtml"
target=1>http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/ling/newsevents/colloquia.shtml</A><BR><BR></DIV></BODY></HTML>