Pauline Jacobson

On the Quantificational Force of English Free Relatives

The late 70’s and early 80’s witnessed considerable debate as to the correct syntactic analysis of free relatives in English and other languages with a similar construction: is the internal structure of an NP free relative basically like that of an ordinary NP, or is its internal structure instead like that of other wh constituents such as wh questions? The underlying concern surrounding this debate was whether the gap in a free relative could be analyzed as the result of wh movement; this question in turn, of course, bore on the status of Subjacency and on the feasibility of reducing a large class of phenomena to wh movement. But the correct syntactic analysis of free relatives also has significant implications for the syntax/semantics map and for the theory of NP meanings, and it is to this question that this paper is addressed. In particular, I wikk present some ecidence suggesting that English free relatives do indeed have the internal strcture of other wh constituents — they contain no overt lexical head and therefore also contain no overt quantificational element.1 Just how and why, then, du these have NP-type meanings and — given the claim that there is no overt lexical quantifier — what is it that supplies them with their particular quantificational force?

Raising without Movement

The Raising construction — as exemplified in (1) — has traditionally been seen as providing among the most robust evidence for syntactic movement: (1) John seems to be tall.

Binding without Pronouns (and Pronouns without Binding)

This paper is rooted in the hypothesis of “direct compositionality” (cf. Montague, 1974). In its broadest formulation, this hypothesis is that the syntax and semantics work in tandem in such a way that the syntactic combinatory operations specify a set of well-formed expressions and each such operation is coupled with a semantic operation which provides a model-theoretic interpretation for the expression. I also assume a general Categorial Grammar (CG) implementation of this, whereby the syntactic category of an expression encodes its combinatory possibilities and its semantic type and where the semantic operation associated with any syntactic operation is predictable. (Moreover, as in most modern versions of CG, I assume that there is a small and very general set of syntactic/semantic operations—although the question at issue here is just how small.) Of crucial importance is the claim that each syntactic expression is directly assigned a model-theoretic interpretation, and hence no expression needs to be mapped into some other level such as LF in order to be interpreted.

A Pragmatic Account of Complexity in Definite Antecedent-Contained-Deletion Relative Clauses

Hackl, Koster-Hale & Varvoutis (2012; HKV) provide data that suggest that in a null context, antecedent-contained-deletion (ACD) relative clause structures modifying a quantified object noun phrase (NP; such as every doctor) are easier to process than those modifying a definite object NP (such as the doctor). HKV argue that this pattern of results supports a ‘quantifier-raising’ (QR) analysis of both ACD structures and quantified NPs in object position: under the account they advocate, both ACD resolution and quantified NPs in object position require movement of the object NP to a higher syntactic position. The processing advantage for quantified object NPs in ACD is hypothesized to derive from the fact that—at the point where ACD resolution must take place—the quantified NP has already undergone QR whereas this is not the case for definite NPs. Although in other work it is shown that HKV’s reading time analyses are flawed, such that the critical effects are not significant (Gibson et al. submitted), the effect in HKV’s acceptability rating is robust. But HKV’s interpretation is problematic. We present five experiments that provide evidence for an alternative, pragmatic, explanation for HKV’s observation. In particular, we argue that the low acceptability of the the / ACD condition is largely due to a strong pressure in the null context to use a competing form, by adding also or same. This pressure does not exist with quantified

Some People Think There Is Neg Raising, and Some Don’t: Neg Raising Meets Ellipsis

The interaction of Neg raising (NR) with VP-ellipsis (VPE) shows that if NR is a rule of grammar, then the conditions on VPE must be exact syntactic identity and must be insensitive to major semantic differences between the so-called antecedent and the meaning understood at the ellipsis site. In particular, the conditions on ellipsis must be so blind to the semantics that they allow a polarity reversal between the antecedent and the understanding at the ellipsis site. But the behavior of indexicals shows quite clearly that meaning is what counts for the understanding of VPE, not form. This in turn provides new evidence against a syntactic process of NR.

The syntax/semantics interface: compositionality issues

This paper explores the hypothesis of Direct Compositionality, which is the hypothesis that natural language syntax and semantics work in tandem. The syntax is a system proving expressions well-formed (often proving larger expressions well-formed on the basis of their smaller constituent parts) while the semantics works directly with this to supply a model theoretic interpretation to each expression as it is built in the syntax. The paper considers a few apparent challenges to this hypothesis, and exposits the types of tools which have been used in order to meet these challenges. We begin with some classic results from Montague [1]; turn to extensions of this program that were explored in subsequent work, and end with some recent work of the present author. The goal is to show that many of the apparent challenges can easily be met by simply viewing meanings as slightly more complex packagings than an initial naive view would have it; the tools for accomplishing this themselves are quite simple.