tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post7185568526577889193..comments2024-03-28T04:04:55.806-07:00Comments on Faculty of Language: David Adger; Baggett Lecture 2Norberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-68638413107690845192016-02-03T08:04:54.914-08:002016-02-03T08:04:54.914-08:00So I still want to hold to the principle that non ...So I still want to hold to the principle that non one-to-one hierarchical relations better map onto semantic distinctions. A mother bearing distinct relations to two daughters entails that there's a semantic distinction being made. Equally a syntactic object entering into distinct relations to two containing objects, as happens in Internal Merge, entails there's a semantic distinction being made. With this principle in hand, as a principle that says that the design of he syntactic system is optimised to the semantics in this way, lots of analyses involving copy creation (for head movement and for roll up movement, as I argued) end up being cases of bad design. Completely agree that Howard's `Tabs are likely to be kept on him' A-movement examples are a problem. <br /><br />I think my jet lag was making me stupid in the question period, as I was finding it difficult to see how my proposals were worse than classical proposals (in fact, I tried hard not to say anything new about the semantic side of things in my system as I thought already I was going to have a hard time getting people to buy unary branching structures with no functional heads or head movement, and mirror word order effects being analysed as a switcheroo of the complement lines in Extended Projections). <br /><br />I think I now understand the issue, but maybe not: if the derived object is complex, and the semantics gets to see the whole thing, then it can do pretty much anything it wants. I thought my semantic rules preclude this, as they operate bottom up, object by object, in a manner that's pretty reminiscent of directly compositional approaches. But the issue that was being further raised is that there are no constraints on what the label of the constructed object can do semantically. So that needs a separate theory. I still think, however, that that places my system in no worse a place than other systems that have functional heads having some semantics: what is the theory that restricts these? Give me some such theory (say that mother daughter relations in an Extended Projection are always functional application, and specifier mother relations are always variable identification, and mothers can never have higher than second order abstraction) and that will be the theory of the syntax-semantics relation, ruling out Construction Semantics (shudder!).<br /><br />Ok, better go finish my slides for today! How to constrain Merge by making it operate over a teensy-weency memory buffer, thus improving computational complexity, and increasing restrictiveness in making sideways move unstatable. davidadgerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00821774928618824698noreply@blogger.com