Tanya Reinhart

The Theta System – an overview

Abstract This paper presents an overview of a larger project in progress on the concepts interface. In part, it is based on the findings in Reinhart (2000), where several of the problems are discussed in greater details. However, many aspects of the system have been further developed, or changed, since that manuscript.

The Lexicon-Syntax Parameter: Reflexivization and Other Arity Operations

We argue that crosslinguistic variation regarding verbal reflexivization is parametric, reflecting a broader lexicon-syntax parameter: arity operationsoperations on -roles, which affect the valence of a predicatecan apply in the lexicon or in the syntax. The significant empirical coverage of this parameter supports the view that the lexicon must be an active component of the grammar. The discussion focuses mainly on the formation of reflexive verbs. We argue that the prevailing view that reflexive verbs have an unaccusative derivation cannot be maintained. Rather, the reflexivization operation bundles a -role with an external -role, forming a combination that must merge externally. Next, we also briefly review other arity operations: (a) reciprocalization, (b) decausativization, and (c) saturation, which is involved in the formation of passives, middles, and impersonals. Variation in auxiliary selection, owing to the application of reflexivization or other arity operations, is independent of the lexicon-syntax parameter and follows under our approach from a structural accusative Case parameter.

Conditions for Text Coherence

The first question in attempting to define text-coherence is what it is exactly we want to define. As in many other areas of linguistics or textual analysis there are two stands on this issue: The first is that we want to define the set of all texts which have been produced or are producible by speakers and are generally comprehensible or functional in their context of utterances, and the second is that we want to define a set of norms or conditions which apply to a (perhaps idealized) subset of the set of comprehensible actual or producible texts those texts which observe maximally, or ideally, the requirements of rationality and cooperation, or that reflect the speakers knowledge of what counts as a fully coherent text. I am taking the second stand. The conflict between the two approaches is an aspect of the familiar debate concerning the notions of norm and deviance. The aspect of this problem that has been widely discussed is the debate concerning grammaticality and semantic deviance, particularly in the treatment of metaphor. The central belief of those holding the first stand is that the distinction between grammatical and ungrammatical parallels, and is determined by, the distinction between meaningful or comprehensible and meaningless or incomprehensible. The second stand, taken by Chomsky (e.g., 1965), is that these are two distinct phenomena. Grammaticality is defined by the rules of the grammar, which are independent of meaning. Ungrammatical constructions can be meaningful and the converse is also possible grammatical constructions can be meaningless. Within this framework the difference between grammatically or semantically well-formed expressions and deviant linguistic expressions lies not in their comprehensibility, but in the types of operation required in the procedure of assigning meaning to them. While a grammatical expression is interpreted directly by a function mapping surface structures into semantic representations,

The Processing Cost of Reference Set Computation: Acquisition of Stress Shift and Focus

Reference set computation-the construction of a (global) comparison set to determine whether a given derivation is appropriate in context-comes with a processing cost. I argue that this cost is directly visible at the acquisition stage: In those linguistic areas in which it has been independently established that such computation is indeed at work, experiments have consistently found group performance at the range of 50% (in dual-choice tasks). The proposed explanation is that children are aware of the innately required computation, but they cannot carry it out because of their limited working-memory resources, and they resort instead to strategies that enable bypassing it. Previous studies have established already the 50% range of performance in the acquisition of 2 areas requiring reference set computation-coreference (Condition B) and implicatures. In this study, I examine the acquisition of stress shift and focus. I argue that computing the focus obtained by stress shift requires constructing a comparison set. Contrary to some prevailing views, there is no evidence that children have general problems with stress, but still, one finds the 50% range of performance when stress shift applies as predicted by the processing cost hypothesis. Analysis of the explanations children give for their answers has revealed that they are attempting to construct the relevant comparison derivation, but they get stuck at that stage. Combined with the analysis of individual responses, 2 bypassing strategies are found in this area: One is simple guessing, dominant in tasks involving switch reference with stress shift in which one finds individual performance at the range of 50%. The other, dominant in tasks involving semantic disambiguation, is the selection of an arbitrary default, which may be fixed for a given child across tasks. However, because the choice of the default is itself arbitrary, the group results remain at the 50% range.

Center and Periphery in the Grammar of Anaphora

In recent years serious attempts have been made to subject the anaphora, or ‘binding’, conditions proposed in theoretical studies to an empirical investigation using either adult anaphora or language acquisition data. Many of these studies concentrated mainly on problems of definite NP coreference. This reflects a prevailing assumption in theoretical studies of anaphora thajt the core issues in the case of pronominal anaphora (i.e. anaphora involving pronouns) are those of intended-coreference with definite NP’s. While an alternative interpretation of pronouns as bound variables is known to exist, it is assumed to be a restricted LF phenomenon.

Syntactic Domains for Semantic Rules

My concern in this paper is to characterize certain systematic ways in which the semantic interpretation of English sentences is constrained by the syntactic properties of the surface forms of such sentences.