twotiersemanticsforrelativeclauses.docVIP

TWO TIER SEMANTICS FOR RELATIVE CLAUSES Fred Landman Tel Aviv University 2007 PART ONE: CLASSICAL SEMANTICS AND TWO TIER SEMANTICS CLASSICAL SEMANTICS: 0. Compositionality: The meanings of complex expressions are built from the meanings of the parts. 1. Restricted set of available operations -functional application -function composition -type shifting operations (algebraic lifts, domain shifts, general grammatically significant operations like intersection, closure under sum, supremum, existential closure, projection…) 2. Restricted notion of meaning Meaning are truthfunctional contents. 3. Restricted domain of application: locality: An operation used at a stage of the derivation can only use the information that is locally available (No access to earlier or later stages of the derivation). CAVEATS: The classical theory is aware of the following: -Context: contextual restriction, contextual comparison class, etc. -Pragmatic aspects of meanings, implicatures, scalarity effects, etc. -Meanings that are not used in situ: wide scope effects. -Information that is transferred through anaphoric connections, including discourse anaphora. THE TOPIC OF THIS TALK: -I will discuss some cases where a semantic meaning is used by the semantics at more than one stage of the derivation. These cases concern generalized quantifiers (DPs), where the information concerning what was the interpretation of the head noun has to stay available in the derivation. -I argue that these are violations of the classical theory. -I propose a modification of the classical theory, two tier semantics. CLAIM: IN THE CLASSICAL THEORY, WE USE THE MEANINGS OF THE DETERMINER DET AND THE NOUN NOUN TO FORM THE MEANING OF THE DP [DP DET NOUN]. ONCE THE DP MEANING IS FORMED, THE DET-MEANING IS NO LONGER GENERALLY SEMANTICALLY ACCESSIB