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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
Friday, May 7, 3:30pm in 460-126:
Verbs, Nouns and Adjectives: Their Universal Grammar
Mark Baker (Rutgers)
The notion that there are different "parts of speech" has been central
to theories of language from ancient times until today. Yet formal
generative grammar has never had much to contribute to the understanding
of these distinctions. Serious questions remain about whether these
distinctions are fundamentally morphological, syntactic, or semantic in
character, whether they admit of precise and discrete formal
definitions, and whether they are found in all natural human languages.
I discuss my reasonably new view that attempts to answer these
questions. I claim that there are discrete formal syntactic definitions
that characterize what it is to be a noun or a verb or an adjective. In
brief, verbs are lexical categories that take a specifier, nouns are
lexical categories that (are associated with a Criterion of Identity and
hence) bear a referential index, and adjectives are lexical categories
that have neither a specifier nor a referential index. These
definitions (together with auxiliary assumptions) can be used to explain
the clusters of morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties that
we usually associate with nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Furthermore,
with these definitions in hand, one can see that all known human
languages have essentially the same three-way distinction between nouns,
verbs, and adjectives-a fact that emerges more clearly once the
interfering influence of functional categories is controlled for. As
time permits, I will go on to give an overview of how the axioms of this
theory can also be used to shed light on the nature of certain
problematic 'mixed' cases, such as the structure of gerund constructions
like "Pat's answering the question first surprised me" in English,
Mapudungun, and Lokaa.
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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