blogpost: Meaning contrasts: generated or parasitic?

 Posted by on 10/20/2019  24 Responses »
Oct 202019
 

I just got home from Oslo, where I had many really interesting interactions with several linguists. One of them was a conversation with fellow visitor Jonathan Bobaljik. We were talking about the relatively well-known observation that for many alleged “syntax-semantics mapping phenomena,” the expected mappings only go through if the syntax independently allows at least two different configurations. As Jonathan helpfully points out, this is an observation that goes back to Grice, if not Jespersen. But just because an observation is “old,” we shouldn’t overlook the consequences it has for contemporary syn-sem theories. And the consequences are very interesting. […]  [read more]

blogpost: The occasional value of imprecise recall

 Posted by on 10/03/2019  1 Response »
Oct 032019
 

Here's a thing that I'm sure happens to everyone from time to time:

  1. You read or hear about phenomenon X or generalization X or theoretical proposal X.
  2. Time passes.
  3. You happen upon some new data or a new idea, for which X proves relevant.
  4. However, it turns out that you have imperfect recall of X. Unbeknownst to you, what you have in your head is actually some rejiggered version of X – let's call it X' – which conveniently-and-suspiciously suits your current theoretical or empirical needs. [...]

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Talk in Oslo

 Posted by on 09/19/2019  Comments Off on Talk in Oslo
Sep 192019
 

In October 2019, I will be giving a talk titled The Anaphor Agreement Effect: further evidence against binding-as-agreement, at the University of Oslo. See my talks & handouts page for further information. […]  [read more]

blogpost: Listemes and morphemes and other things

 Posted by on 08/07/2019  5 Responses »
Aug 072019
 

This is a post about listedness: what is the nature of the idiosyncratic information that is listed in the grammar.

In traditional, lexicalist approaches, the listed atoms were lexical items. A lexical item contained, at minimum, a phonological form, a semantic interpretation, [...]

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blogpost: The problem with “morphosemantics”

 Posted by on 06/08/2019  7 Responses »
Jun 082019
 

There’s been a fair amount of generative linguistics work over the past 15 years or so that identifies itself as “morphosemantics.” There are several reasons why I don’t think morphosemantics is a coherent notion. In this post, I’d like to detail some of these reasons. You’ve probably heard ~1.5 of them before, though, so if that’s the case feel free to skip ahead as needed.

The =&0=& is conceptual. As 

already discussed on this blog […]  [read more]

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