Reading for Tu 4/13: Cruse 1986, Ch. 9

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For Tuesday 4/13, please read the following book chapter, which can be downloaded from the “Readings” section of this website (PDF format):

Cruse, D. Alan. 1986. Opposites, Part I: Complementaries and antonyms. From Lexical Semantics (Chapter 9).  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

(Note: sections 9.1-9.5 are required.  Sections 9.6-9.8 are optional.)

Reminder: No Class Th 4/8, McCloskey lectures Th 4/8 and Fr 4/9

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Remember that I’ve cancelled our class meeting for Thursday April 8, in order to provide you with an opportunity to attend the following two lectures by Prof. James McCloskey (University of California, Santa Cruz):

“Sex and the Irish Language: The Cultural Politics of Language Attrition”

Thursday April 8 @ 7:30pm, KCB 101

Abstract: A belief frequently expressed about the Irish language is that ‘there are no words for sex in Irish’. This talk considers the veracity of this strange belief, tries to uncover its origins, and uses that exploration as a probe to better understand the mechanisms of language destruction.

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“Yes, No, and the Construction of Finite Verbs in a VSO Language”

Friday April 9 @ 3:30pm, KCB 106

Abstract: Irish is one of those languages often said to lack works for ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. Where other languages use such words, Irish instead uses so-called ‘responsive forms of the verb’–single word sentences consisting only of an inflected verb. This talk addresses the following two related questions:
1. How does the grammatical device of the ‘responsive’ relate to the polarity particles (words like ‘Yes’ and ‘No’) found in other languages? Put differently, why is it possible to render with these single word sentences what other languages render by means of words like ‘Yes’ and ‘No’?
2. How does this effect relate to, and interact with, the single most famous fact about Irish, namely that it is a Verb-Subject-Object language?

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The Friday afternoon talk is particularly relevant to our course, and I strongly encourage you to attend if at all possible.  (I might even conjure up an extra credit question about the Friday afternoon talk, if you need any further enticement.)

Reading for Th 4/1: Postal 2004

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For Thursday 4/1, please read the following paper, which can be downloaded from the “Readings” section of this website (PDF format:)

Postal, Paul. 2004. The structure of one type of American English Vulgar Minimizer. In Skeptical Linguistic Essays (Chap. 5). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Reading for Tu 3/23: Martin & Wolfram 1998

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For Tuesday 3/23, please read the following paper, which can be downloaded from the “Readings” section of this website (PDF format):

Martin, Stefan and Walt Wolfram. 1998. The sentence in African-American Vernacular English. In African-American English: Structure, history, and use, S. Mufwene et al. (eds), 11-36. London: Routledge.

Pay particular attention to the discussion of negative concord and negative inversion on pgs.  17-27.  (But do read the whole paper–it’s not too long, and the discussion isn’t very technical, so it should go by fairly quickly.)

Reading for Tu 3/2: Ladusaw 1980, Fauconnier 1978

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For next Tuesday, please read the following papers, which can be downloaded from the “Readings” sections of this website:

1. Ladusaw, W. (1980) “On the notion ‘affective’ in the analysis of negative-polarity items” (pages 1-7)

2. Fauconnier, G. (1978) “Implication reversal in a natural language” (pages 289-295; those of you who have taken Semantics 1 should read all the way to the end)

Both of these papers are concerned with describing the linguistic contexts in which negative polarity items may grammatically occur.  As I mentioned in class, the Fauconnier paper draws from the language of First-Order Predicate Logic, which is a quasi-mathematical language used by linguists, philosophers, and mathematicians to concisely represent the meanings of natural language sentences, as well as to investigate meaning relationships between sentences.  I’ve posted a “crash course” primer along with the Fauconnier paper for those of you who are unfamiliar with First-Order Predicate Logic.  (The important thing to grasp in both papers is the systematic meaning relationships amongst certain kinds of sentences that the authors uncover, so try not to get too bogged down with the technical details.)

Reading for Th 2/18: Zwicky & Pullum 1983

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For next Thursday, please read the following paper, which can be downloaded from the “Readings” section of this website:

Zwicky, Arnold M. & Geoffrey K. Pullum. 1983. Cliticization vs. Inflection: English n’t. Language 59: 502-513.

In the paper, Zwicky and Pullum ask whether n’t should really be considered a contracted form of not (as ‘ve in we’ve is considered a contracted form of the verb have).  So-called ‘contracted’ forms are one example of what linguistics refer to as a ‘clitic’.  Roughly speaking, a clitic is a morpheme that has an independent morphological/syntactic existence, but is phonologically dependent on an immediately adjacent word.  (Note, for instance, that we’ve is pronounced as a single word.)

The other possibility is that n’t is not a contracted form/clitic, but is in fact an (inflectional) verbal suffix (as -s in eats is considered an inflectional suffix).  Suffixes are one example of what linguists refer to as a ‘bound morpheme’.  Unlike a clitic, a bound morpheme is complete dependent (morphologically/syntactically/phonologically) on some other word or (more generally) morpheme.  Put another way, a clitic is a “semi-word”, while a bound morpheme can never stand alone as its own word.

Zwicky and Pullum review the evidence for these two views of n’t, with some (perhaps) suprising results!

Reading for Tu 2/9, Th 2/11: Zanuttini 1994

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For next week, please read the following paper, which can be downloaded from the “Readings” section of this website:

Zanuttini, Raffaella. 1994. Re-examining negative clauses. In Paths Towards Universal Grammar: Studies in Honor of Richard S. Kayne, G. Cinque et al. (eds), 427-451. Georgetown University Press.

Most likely, we will not get to the reading until Thursday 2/11.  Tuesday’s class (2/9) will be devoted to some residual issues in the syntax of English clauses, as well as an introduction to negative sentences in the Romance languages.  This will provide the necessary background for the Zanuttini paper, which considers the relative position of negation and the main verb across a wide variety of Romance languages.

A quick note on the reading:  Zanuttini uses the labels T and TP where we have been using I and IP.

A longer note on the reading:  while you should certainly read all of the Zanuttini paper, certain sections of it rely on some theoretical assumptions with which you will not be familiar.  Do the best that you can with it, and in Thursday’s lecture, I will highlight those aspects of the paper that are most important for our purposes.  In particular, you should focus on:

(a) the central research questions listed on pg. 428,

(b)  the Romance data presented in section 2 of the paper,

(c) the central features of Zanuttini’s proposal in section 4, and how it accounts for the facts from section 2

Section 3 of the paper should be looked it, since it is referenced in section 4.  But don’t worry too much if the theoretical discussion in this section proves difficult to follow.