The biolinguistic perspective regards the language faculty as an “organ of the body,” along with other cognitive systems. Adopting it, we expect to find three factors that interact to determine (I-) languages attained: genetic endowment (the topic of Universal Grammar), experience, and principles that are language- or even organism-independent. Research has naturally focused on I-languages and UG, the problems of descriptive and explanatory adequacy. The Principles-and-Parameters approach opened the possibility for serious investigation of the third factor, and the attempt to account for properties of language in terms of general considerations of computational efficiency, eliminating some of the technology postulated as specific to language and providing more principled explanation of linguistic phenomena

/pdf/three-factors-in-language-design-3ui5wze9cz.pdf

Three Factors in Language Design

This paper is devoted to the study of bare nominal arguments (i.e., determinerless NPs occurring in canonical argumental positions) from a crosslinguistic point of view. It is proposed that languages may vary in what they let their NPs denote. In some languages (like Chinese), NPs are argumental (names of kinds) and can thus occur freely without determiner in argument position; in others they are predicates (Romance), and this prevents NPs from occurring as arguments, unless the category D(eterminer) is projected. Finally, there are languages (like Germanic or Slavic) which allow both predicative and argumental NPs; these languages, being the ‘union’ of the previous two types, are expected to behave like Romance for certain aspects of their nominal system (the singular count portion) and like Chinese for others (the mass and plural portions). This hypothesis (the ‘Nominal Mapping Parameter’) is investigated not just through typological considerations, but also through a detailed contrastive analysis of bare arguments in Germanic (English) vs. Romance (Italian). Some general consequences of this view, which posits a limited variation in the mapping from syntax into semantics, for current theories of Universal Grammar and acquisition are considered.

/pdf/reference-to-kinds-across-language-4t96juuwlv.pdf

Reference to Kinds across Language

1. Introduction 2. A Preliminary Case for Conventional Implicatures 3. A Logic for Conventional Implicatures 4. Supplements 5. Expressive Content 6. The Supplement Relation: A Syntactic Analysis 7. A Look Outside Grice's Definition Appendix Bibliography

/pdf/the-logic-of-conventional-implicatures-1ywowc3e2k.pdf

The logic of conventional implicatures

Fragmentary utterances such as ‘short’ answers and subsentential XPs without linguistic antecedents are proposed to have fully sentential syntactic structures, subject to ellipsis. Ellipsis in these cases is preceded by A′-movement of the fragment to a clause-peripheral position; the combination of movement and ellipsis accounts for a wide range of connectivity and anti-connectivity effects in these structures. Fragment answers furthermore shed light on the nature of islands, and contrast with sluicing in triggering island effects; this is shown to follow from an articulated syntax and the PF theory of islands. Fragments without linguistic antecedents are argued to be compatible with an ellipsis analysis, and do not support direct interpretation approaches to these phenomena.

Fragments and ellipsis

One of the most astonishing features of human language is its capacity to convey information efficiently in context. Many theories provide informal accounts of communicative inference, yet there have been few successes in making precise, quantitative predictions about pragmatic reasoning. We examined judgments about simple referential communication games, modeling behavior in these games by assuming that speakers attempt to be informative and that listeners use Bayesian inference to recover speakers’ intended referents. Our model provides a close, parameter-free fit to human judgments, suggesting that the use of information-theoretic tools to predict pragmatic reasoning may lead to more effective formal models of communication.

/pdf/predicting-pragmatic-reasoning-in-language-games-2iech5yssd.pdf

Predicting pragmatic reasoning in language games.

In Economy and Semantic Interpretation, Danny Fox investigates the relevance of principles of optimization (economy) to the interface between syntax and semantics. Supporting the view that grammar is restricted by economy considerations, Fox argues for various economy conditions that constrain the application of "covert" operations. Among other things, he argues that syntactic operations that do not affect phonology cannot apply unless they affect the semantic interpretation of a sentence. This position has a number of consequences for the architecture of grammar. For example, it suggests that the modularity assumption, according to which a language's syntax must be characterized independently of its semantics, needs to be revised. Another consequence concerns new answers to the question of exactly where in the syntactic derivation the various constraints on interpretation apply.Linguistic Inquiry Monograph No. 35Copublished with the MIT Working Papers in Linguistics series.

Economy and Semantic Interpretation

This paper proposes an architecture for the mapping between syntax and phonology — in particular, that aspect of phonology that determines ordering. In Fox and Pesetsky (in prep.), we will argue that this architecture, when combined with a general theory of syntactic domains ("phases"), provides a new understanding of a variety of phenomena that have received diverse accounts in the literature. This shorter paper focuses on two processes, both drawn from Scandinavian: the familiar process of Object Shift and the less well-known process of Quantifier Movement. We will argue that constraints on these operations can be seen as instances of the same property of grammar that explains the fact that movement is local and successive cyclic. We begin by sketching a model in which locality and successive cyclicity are consequences of the architecture that we propose, rather than specific facts about movement itself. We next present our proposal in somewhat greater detail, and show how it can account for a wide range of apparent limitations on movement — in particular, superficially contradictory restrictions on Object Shift and Quantifier Movement. The restrictions on Object Shift include those grouped under the rubric of Holmberg's Generalization, which Quantifier Movement does not seem to obey. We will argue that Quantifier Movement instead obeys a near mirror-image of Holmberg's Generalization (an "Inverse Holmberg Effect"), but that both Holmberg's Generalization and its mirror image are expected if our proposed architecture is correct. Our discussion will be for the most part informal, but we will conclude by offering a more formal implementation of our proposals. This implementation will belong to a family of

/pdf/cyclic-linearization-of-syntactic-structure-34xw7u284v.pdf

Cyclic Linearization of Syntactic Structure

This chapter will be concerned with the conjunctive interpretation of a family of disjunctive constructions. The relevant conjunctive interpretation, sometimes referred to as a ‘free choice effect,’ (FC) is attested when a disjunctive sentence is embedded under an existential modal operator. I will provide evidence that the relevant generalization extends (with some caveats) to all constructions in which a disjunctive sentence appears under the scope of an existential quantifier, as well as to seemingly unrelated constructions in which conjunction appears under the scope of negation and a universal quantifier.

Free Choice and the Theory of Scalar Implicatures

This article investigates interactions between the scope of QPs and the restrictions imposed by binding theory. It presents new evidence that Condition C applies at (and only at) LF and demonstrates that this condition can serve as a powerful tool for distinguishing among various claims regarding the nature of LF and the inventory of semantic mechanisms. The conclusions reached are these: (1) Scope reconstruction is represented in the syntax (semantic type-shifting operations are very limited). (2) Ā-chains have the following properties: (a) Scope reconstruction results from deleting the head of the chain and interpreting a copy at the tail. (b) Non-scope-reconstruction results from interpreting the head of the chain with a copy of the restrictor at the tail (unless this option is impossible, as in antecedent-contained deletion, in which case the copy is changed to a variable as in standard notations). (c) VP adjunction is an intermediate landing site. (3) A-chains are different in a way that at the momen...

http://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/classes/nu/460/S04/fox99.pdf

Reconstruction, Binding Theory, and the Interpretation of Chains

Antecedent-contained deletion poses a problem for theories of ellipsis, a problem that, according to much literature, is solved by Quantifier Raising. The solution, however, conflicts with the copy theory of movement. This article resolves this new conflict with the aid of a theory of extraposition and covert movement proposed by Fox and Nissenbaum (1999), together with certain assumptions about the structure of relative clauses and the way chains are interpreted. The resolution makes various new predictions and accounts for a range of otherwise puzzling facts.

/pdf/antecedent-contained-deletion-and-the-copy-theory-of-5a5w48589e.pdf

Danny Fox

Papers

Economy and Semantic Interpretation

Cyclic Linearization of Syntactic Structure

Free Choice and the Theory of Scalar Implicatures

Reconstruction, Binding Theory, and the Interpretation of Chains

Antecedent-Contained Deletion and the Copy Theory of Movement