Structure sensitive interpretation : a case study in Tagalog
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- How are indefinite or definites interpreted in languages which lack definite or indefinite articles? Previous works which have addressed this question have observed that cross-linguistically indefinite and definite readings of bare noun phrases are at least partly determined by the broader syntactic structure of their containing clause. However, these analyses often do not consider the reasoning that interlocutors engage in when calculating the meanings of bare noun phrases. In this dissertation, I explore the issue of noun phrase interpretation in article-less languages using a case study in the Philippine language Tagalog. Compared to English, Tagalog demonstrates very different strategies of expressing (in)definiteness. Tagalog uses a complex interaction of case marking, voice affixes and word order in order to signal a nominal as definite or indefinite. I argue that this system sheds light on how we should understand the compositional semantics and pragmatic reasoning underlying definiteness. I argue for a particular compositional semantics for Tagalog which captures the observed patterns of definite and indefinite readings of bare noun phrases. I give an account for the cross-linguistically common observation that bare NPs which are syntactically local to their selecting verb are interpreted as indefinites, while bare NPs in other syntactic positions are not subject to this restriction. The account deals with the conventional meanings of definite and indefinite expressions, however, in order to consider the entire empirical picture, I also consider meanings which arise as non-conventionalized pragmatic enrichments. I discuss how interlocutors calculate conversational implicatures in a language which lacks articles. I argue for a model of pragmatic competition which assumes that interlocutors take the broader grammatical structure of an utterance into consideration when calculating a conversational implicature. If pragmatic alternatives are ruled out by the morphosyntactic and lexical idiosyncrasies of the interlocutors' language, conversational implicatures can fail to emerge.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2017 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Collins, James N |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Linguistics. |
| Primary advisor | Condoravdi, Cleo A, 1962- |
| Thesis advisor | Condoravdi, Cleo A, 1962- |
| Thesis advisor | Gribanova, Vera |
| Thesis advisor | Kiparsky, Paul |
| Thesis advisor | Potts, Christopher, 1977- |
| Advisor | Gribanova, Vera |
| Advisor | Kiparsky, Paul |
| Advisor | Potts, Christopher, 1977- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | James N. Collins. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Linguistics. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2017. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2017 by James Neil Collins
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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