George Tsoulas

Computations and Interfaces: Some Notes on the Relation between the Language and the Music Faculties

Developments in linguistic theory over the last 20 years have led to a view of the different components of language as a whole that consists in a computational system whose syntactically structured output is interpreted by (mind internal) external systems. This paper suggests that music and language share the computational system and differ in the nature of external systems and the basic units of the lexicon of each system. Furthermore it is suggested that so-called formal meaning in music should be considered (along with syntactically created meaning in language) as nonconceptual representational content.

Predicative Possessives, Relational Nouns, and Floating Quantifiers

Green (1971) notes the apparent unacceptability of certain quantificational expressions as possessors of singular head nouns. We provide data from a range of English dialects to show that such constructions are not straightforwardly unacceptable, but there are a number of restrictions on their use. We build on Kayne’s (1993, 1994) analysis of English possessives in conjunction with considerations on floating quantifiers to explain both the types of possessive that are permitted in the relevant dialects and their distribution, which is restricted to predicative position.