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Linguistics
Department
Stanford
University |
Stanford
Humanities Center
Mellon
Foundation
Graduate
Research Workshop Program
Stanford
Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop:
THE
CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING
Thursday, October 24, 5:30pm in 460-126:
The Semantic Provinces of 'have'
Tham Shiao Wei, Linguistics Department, Stanford
The forms expressing location and possession are closely linked
with one another, and these in turn bear much structural affinity with
the encoding of existential predication (Bach 1967, Clark 1970, Freeze
1992). The verb HAVE (in languages where it is available) is a point
of convergence in the structural encoding of these three categories of
meaning, able to express possession, location, and existential
predication, depending on the constituents it combines with. This talk
is a foray into the reason for the similarities in the structural
encoding of these meanings, and for their manifestation via HAVE. To
that end, I provide a case study of stative two-place 'have' sentences
in English, exemplified by (1)-(3).[1]
(1) Mowgli has a sister/a crooked nose. (inalienable possesion)
(2) Mowgli has a pen. (alienable possession)
(3) The desk has a lamp on it. (location)
Specifically, I argue that, although the case is not immediately
obvious, English `have' is an existential verb that contains an
underspecified relation. In addition, I propose that location and
possession fall within a natural class of relations which I label
"minimal involvement relations" (MIRs). MIRs impose very few, if any,
entailments on their participants -- they are not entailed to be
sentient, agentive, affected, in motion, etc. I suggest that this
characteristic makes MIRs more similar to predicates such as 'have'
than are other classes of predicates such as activity predicates
('hit', 'kick' etc.) or causative predicates ('break', 'kill'). If we
then assume that the range of meanings expressed by a lexical item or
a grammatical construction extends over similar classes of predicates,
we can explain why 'have' expresses location and possession but not
say, 'kick' or 'break'. Time permitting, I will discuss data
pertaining to 'you', the Mandarin HAVE, whose status as an existential
predicate is even more obvious (Huang 1987). Despite clear
differences from English 'have', Mandarin 'you' expresses the same
range of meanings, lending support to the validity of the treatment of
English 'have'.
[1] I use uppercase HAVE as a blanket term for the relevant verb
across languages, and reproduce in lowercase the particular verb for a
particular language, e.g. 'have' in English.
Please contact one of the workshop organizers
if you have suggestions for presentations or the workshop in general.
Back to the workshop homepage.
This workshop is sponsored by
the Stanford Humanities Center, and funded by a grant from the Mellon
Foundation.
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