|
|
BEING IN THE WORLD: PREDICATION, WORLDS, AND THE MORPHOSYNTAX OF EXISTENTIALS
Itamar Francez
Stanford University
Monday, December 5, 12:00 PM MJH Rm 126
Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center/Mellon Foundation
Graduate Research ProgramAcross languages, existential sentences, such as English (1), are marked in two ways. First, they show non-canonical morphosyntactic patterns (agreement, case, word oder). Second, they show semantic restrictions on possible post-copular constituents, such as the so-called Definiteness Effect. (1) (Imagine) there's no countries... Extensive research on the syntax and semantics of such sentences has not yielded any systematic account of the relation between their form and meaning. In this talk I outline a characterization of the semantics of existentials that predicts their marked morphosyntax. I propose, contrary to most existing proposals, that the single NP in existential sentences is semantically a predicate rather than an argument. I suggest that the predication in existentials is not over entities in the domain of quantification, but over worlds or sub-parts of worlds. I argue that such an account better captures the meaning of existentials as well as difference between them and copular constructions. I show that such an analysis of existentials has some appealing consequences in modern Hebrew: (a) It accounts for the puzzling coincidence of accusative case marking and agreement in Hebrew existentials, a pattern that has so far eluded explanation. (b) It helps explain the suspension of agreement in a class of intransitive verbs in Hebrew not captured by the traditional unaccusative/unergative distinction. Finally, I argue that this analysis captures the modal flavor of existentials and predicts the cross-linguistic resemblance between existential and modal constructions, as exemplified in the Yucatec Maya sentences in (2). (2)
a. yan bu'ul.
exist beans 'There are beans.' b. yan in bin. exist I go 'I have to go'. 
|
