SE-LFG13 (15/02/2014, SOAS)

13th South of England LFG Meeting

We are planning the 13th South of England LFG meeting, a student-oriented meeting for presentations and discussion of various topics from an LFG perspective. It is planned for Saturday, 15 February 2014, at SOAS, London. Please feel free to attend if you are interested, or if you would like more information please get in touch with Mary Dalrymple.

Meeting Agenda:

11:00 - 12:00 Ash Asudeh, “Monads: Some Linguistic Applications”

(joint work with Gianluca Giorgolo)

Monads are a concept from category theory. They define structure-preserving mappings with certain attractive combinatory properties, particularly a) the property that in many interesting cases they can be combined with each other such that the result is also a monad and b) the property of having a ‘unit’ type (e.g., the unit for addition is 0, the unit for multiplication is 1). Monads are a useful tool for natural language semantics (Shan 2001), because they allow a type system (a collection of types and mappings between them) to be mapped to a more complex type system in a structure-preserving way: the original type system is ‘enriched’ but its combinatorial properties are not lost. This effectively means that we can use monads to model and explain certain complex semantic/pragmatic phenomena in a lexically controlled way, such that the general semantic lexicon can be kept relatively simple, but certain lexical items have more powerful interpretive possibilities. This is in contrast to the traditional Montagovian approach of ‘generalizing to the worst case’. In recent work, we have been integrating a monadic meaning language into an LFG+Glue framework. I will briefly review some of our previous work with monads on conventional implicature (Giorgolo & Asudeh 2011, 2012b) and missing arguments (Giorgolo & Asudeh 2012a), but will focus on more recent work, such as a non-scopal account of de re/de dicto ambiguities and a probabilistic meaning language.

12:00 - 1:00 John Payne, "Adjectives and the complement-modifier distinction"

In this paper, we present a corpus-based case study of adjectival pre-head dependents. Attributive adjectives are for the most part treated as modifiers rather than complements. However, in one class of examples such as those in (1a), the adjective transparently expresses a thematic argument of the predicate denoted by the head noun:

(1) a. electrical supply/archaeological student/presidential advisor

b. electricity supply/archaeology student/*president advisor

c. supply of electricity/student of archaeology/advisor of the president

In this class, there is typically (but not always) a semantically or derivationally related noun which occurs in a similar pre-head position forming a composite nominal, as in (1b), and the relation is also expressible by a post-head PP, as in (1c). Using a sample set of nominalisations such as those in (1), we argue that the thematic status of the adjective does not correlate with the syntactic properties claimed for thematic complements. e.g. forced adjacency to the head noun. Other modifiers which have a classificatory function typically occur closer to the head, as in presidential economic advisor, or medical research student. The casts further doubt on the sustainability of the complement-modifier distinction.

1:00 - 2:00 lunch

2:00 - 3:00 Maris Camilleri, "Ditransitive Predicates in Arabic"

(joint work with Louisa Sadler and Shaimaa ElSadek)

In this study we explore two possible a-structure alternations related with ditransitive predicates across Arabic vernaculars, focusing on prepositional and/or canonical dative constructions and dative shifted counterparts. We here provide data from Egyptian and Maltese, with some interesting contrasts with Modern Standard Arabic. While the data provided across the two vernaculars is not necessarily homogenous at times, it is indicative of an unstable state of affairs in Egyptian, and a more stable grammaticalised state in Maltese. We aim to provide a description of the ditransitive constructions available, and then delve into a discussion of what evidence we have for suggesting that the recipient thematic role, in particular, maps to specific GFs and not others. This is formalised by using Kibort's (2008) version of LMT in LFG.

3:00 - 3:30 E. Marie Thaut, "Inflected Infinitives in Sylheti" [presentation cancelled]

Sylheti is an Indo-Aryan language (named after the city of Sylhet, Bangladesh) that is spoken in the South Asian linguistic continuum between Bengali and Assamese. An interesting phenomenon in Sylheti complex predicates is agreement feature marked on infinitives. The Sylheti infinitive is inflected to agree with the grammatical subject of the phrase, even in causative and permissive constructions.

3:30 - 3:45 break

3:45 - 4:45 Anna Kibort, "The semantic component of Lexical Mapping Theory"

4:45 planning for next meeting