Browsing by Subject "Semantics"
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Item Definiteness marking in Moroccan Arabic : contact, divergence, and semantic change(2013-08) Turner, Michael Lee; Brustad, KristenThe aim of the present study is to cast new light on the nature of definiteness marking in Moroccan Arabic (MA). Previous work on the dialect group has described its definiteness system as similar to that of other Arabic varieties, where indefinite entities are unmarked and a "definite article" /l-/ modifies nouns to convey a definite meaning. Such descriptions, however, do not fully account for the behavior of MA nouns in spontaneous natural speech, as found in the small self-collected corpus that informs the study: on one hand, /l-/ can and regularly does co-occur with indefinite meanings; on the other, a number of nouns can exhibit definiteness even in the absence of /l-/. In response to these challenges, the study puts forth an alternate synchronic description the system, arguing that the historical definite article */l-/ has in fact lost its association with definiteness and has instead become lexicalized into an unmarked form of the noun that can appear in any number of semantic contexts. Relatedly, the study argues that the historically indefinite form *Ø has come under heavy syntactic constraints and can best be described as derived from the new unmarked form via a process of phonologically conditioned disfixation, represented {- /l/}. At the same time, MA has also apparently retained an older particle ši and developed an article waħəd, both of which can be used to express different types of indefinite meanings. To support the plausibility of this new description, the study turns to the linguistic history of definiteness in MA, describing how a combination of internal and external impetuses for change likely pushed the dialect toward article loss, a development upon which semantic reanalysis and syntactic restructuring of other forms then followed. If the claim that MA no longer overtly marks definiteness is indeed correct, the study could have a significant impact on work that used previous MA descriptions to make grammaticality judgments, as well as be of value to future work on processes of grammaticalization and language contact.Item Differential Effects of Association and Semantics on Priming and Memory Judgments.(Texas Tech University, 2008-08) Buchanan, Erin M.; Maki, William S.; Taraban, Roman M.; DeLucia, Patricia R.; Maki, Ruth H.Semantic memory is the storage of world knowledge or facts, while associative memory contains information about how words are related in context of speech or writing (Tulving, 1993; Nelson, McEvoy, & Dennis, 2000). For example, the word pair CAT-DOG is semantically related because cats and dogs have many of the same features, such as legs, tails, fur, house pets, etc. CAT-DOG is also associatively related because the words appear together frequently in text such as “it’s raining cats and dogs”. Research examined to see if these two types of memory are separable or if all context and dictionary knowledge are contained in one memory system (Lucas, 2000). Currently, results are mixed on the separability of these two memory systems, where effects are seemingly dependent on stimuli used. Previous studies had difficulty controlling for both relationships for word pairs, meaning that word pairs were dually related despite claims for single relationships. Several studies were designed using large semantic and associative word norm databases (Maki, McKinley, & Thompson, 2004; Nelson, McEvoy, Schreiber, 2004). These databases made it possible to create separate word lists; so only one relationship (semantic or associative) was present. From there, priming for both memory types was tested using a rapid serial visual presentation task (RSVP) and judgment task. In the RSVP task, participants watched a very fast presentation of symbols, which were either distractors or target words. Participants were required to name the target word they saw among the distractors. Priming occurred when target words that were related were named more than unrelated target words. In a judgment task, participants were asked to read two words and rate how much they thought the words belonged together based on their feature overlap (how many features they share) or their associative relationship (how many people out of 100 would put them together). Judgments were part of the related word pair for the RSVP task to create priming. Priming for both relationships was found, which indicated that these two systems were separate. Judgments showed that people could separate the two memory systems when making judgments. Associative judgments were processed by associative information but not semantics, while semantic judgments required both associative and semantic information. However, attentional differences in judgments found previously did not transfer to priming results (Buchanan, Maki, & Patton, 2007). These studies, including priming tasks, showed that information appeared to be readily accessible (including semantic information) but in a different order of processing. Associative information appears to be processed earlier at a word or lexical level while semantic information is processed later and in a separate store. From there, judgment processes might occur even later than information processing used for priming.Item Item A frame-semantic analysis of five English verbs evoking the Theft frame(2011-05) Dux, Ryan Joseph; Boas, Hans Christian, 1971-; Pierce, MarcAn important problem in lexical semantics is the explanation of how verbal meaning interacts with the syntactic realization of arguments. Levin (1993) recognizes the relation between syntax and semantics in her classification of English verbs, in which similar syntactic behavior among verbs is assumed to reflect shared meaning components. However, her classes do not accurately predict the verbs’ semantic and syntactic properties. Other researchers (Taylor 1996, Boas 2008) argue for the inclusion of detailed encyclopedic meaning in explanations of syntactic behavior. Frame Semantics provides the necessary tools for fine-grained analyses of the syntax-semantics interface because it offers a rigorous method for the description of meaning and documents syntactic information about argument realization from corpus data. This report uses concepts from Frame Semantics and data from its practical application, FrameNet (http://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu), to assess the importance of fine-grained verbal meaning for argument realization by comparing the verbs embezzle, pilfer, shoplift, snatch and steal. Each verb construes the general semantics of the Theft frame differently, emphasizing or specifying individual participants in the event (frame elements). They also exhibit subtle differences in whether and how these frame elements are syntactically realized. In linking their syntax to their semantics, I show that the verbs’ syntactic distribution may be influenced by aspects of meaning such as their degree of descriptivity, the detailed specification of certain frame elements, and their occurrence as LUs in different frames.Item A frame-semantic approach to selectional restrictions in German support verb constructions : the case of [in X geraten](2011-12) Halder, Guido Frank; Boas, Hans Christian, 1971-; Beavers, John; Wechsler, Stephen; Pierce, Marc; Abrams, Zsuzsanna; Straubhaar, SandraSupport verb constructions (henceforth: SVCs) are constructions consisting of a verb with a reduced meaning (when compared to the full verb) and a noun. Previous analyses (e.g. von Polenz 1963, Winhart 2002) provide a detailed account of the function of the verb in SVCs. However, neither of the two approaches fully explains why certain verb-noun combinations are unacceptable. Geraten ('to get into') can combine with Brand ('fire') in but not with Feuer ('fire') even though the two nouns are synonyms. This dissertation proposes a novel approach towards identifying selectional restrictions in German support verb constructions by applying insights from Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1985) and Construction Grammar. It differs from syntactic-centric and lexical-conceptual structure approaches in that frame-semantic information is shown to directly influence a verb's and a noun's ability to combine with each other. I argue that the nominalization Feuer cannot combine with the support verb because the frame- semantic information evoked by Feuer is incompatible with the frame semantics of geraten. Thus, either the verb and/or the noun blocks the formation of a support verb construction. My analysis demonstrates that in order for the support verb and the noun to be able to combine, their frame-semantic information needs to be compatible. However, in some circumstances SVCs need to be listed as idioms in the lexicon because there do not seem to be any compositional restrictions that allow geraten to combine with Brand ('fire'), but not Feuer ('fire'). Based on a corpus of more than 1000 SVCs with geraten, I show that there are different patterns of productivity and idomaticity. Some SVCs, such as ins Rollen geraten ('to start rolling'), allow widespread replacement of the noun with near-synonyms. Other SVCs, such as in Brand geraten ('starting to burn'), do not allow such replacement. In this view, both the abstract meaning of an SVC (e.g., in X geraten 'to get into X') and item-specific knowledge needs to be captured to be able to account for the full range of SVCs headed by geraten. Therefore, I posit a new construction that captures all the meanings expressed by SVCs with geraten.Item The French c'est-cleft : empirical studies of its meaning and use(2013-05) Destruel, Emilie; Beaver, David I., 1966-This dissertation contributes to a fuller description of the French c'est-cleft by reporting on three empirical studies on its meaning and use, and presenting a unified account of the cleft couched in Stochastic Optimality Theory. The first two studies in this dissertation explore the meaning of the cleft, more specifically the exhaustive meaning. First, the results from a forced-choice task, designed to test the level of exhaustivity of the cleft compared to exclusive sentences and canonical sentences, show that the cleft does not behave like the other two sentence forms. This is taken to indicate that the exhaustivity associated with the cleft is not truth-conditional. Instead, I argue that exhaustivity arises from a pragmatic constraint on the way speakers use language. This argument is supported further in the second study, a corpus study that shows there is no categorical ban on the type of NP that can occur in post-copular position in a cleft. In fact, the cleft interacts felicitously with a number of expressions such as universal quantifiers and additives, which have been claimed to never appear in post-copular position. This corpus study further shows that the primary aspect of the cleft is not to convey exhaustivity, but instead to convey contrast or correction. Finally, the third study, a semi-spontaneous production experiment, helps make precise the situations in which an element is clefted. The results demonstrate that there is a clear asymmetry between the way grammatical subjects or non-subjects are marked: focused subjects are mostly clefted whereas focused non-subjects generally remain in situ. Moreover, the experiment shows that there exists some amount of free variation: subjects can be realized via prosody and non-subjects can be clefted. I conclude my research by proposing that the non-random alternation cleft/canonical is not a categorical phenomenon, but is gradient and explained by a set of constraints on French' syntax, prosody and pragmatics. The cleft is used to provide contrast or a total answer to the question under discussion.Item Groups : a semantic and metaphysical examination(2013-05) Ritchie, Katherine Claire; Dever, Josh; Sainsbury, R. M. (Richard Mark)Since the linguistic turn, many have taken semantics to guide metaphysics. By examining semantic theories proposed by philosophers and linguists, I argue that the semantics of a true theory in a natural language can serve as only a partial guide to metaphysics. Semantics will not always lead to determinate answers to questions of the form 'Does theory T carry an ontological commitment to Fs?' Further, semantics will never deliver answers to questions regarding the nature of Fs. If semantics is to be our guide, we must look to our best semantic theories to determine whether a theory carries ontological commitments to Fs. I develop criteria to determine when a semantic treatment is semantically adequate and should be counted amongst our best theories. Given these criteria, there can be more than one empirically adequate semantic treatment of a natural language theory. To determine ontological commitments I appeal to Quine's Criterion, which states that a theory has Fs in its ontology just in case it says or entails that there are Fs. To determine what a theory says and entails, we must appeal to semantic treatments. Since different equally adequate semantic treatments can yield different contents and entailments, Quine's Criterion delivers ontological commitments only relative to a semantic treatment. I then argue for a supervaluationist principle that delivers unrelativized, but possibly indeterminate, ontological commitments of a theory. Next, I apply my methodology to two case studies which exemplify two kinds of answers the supervalutationist principle might deliver concerning ontological commitments. I argue through an examination of data and formal treatments that plural expressions carry indeterminate ontological commitments to summed entities, while collective nouns carry determinate ontological commitments to group-like entities. Finally, I undertake an examination of what groups, things like teams, committees and courts, might be that accords with the minimal verdict delivered by the semantics of collective noun -- that they exist -- but which goes beyond this to examine their nature. I assess and reject the views of groups currently on offer and propose and defend a novel view of groups as realizations of structures.Item Half-drawn arrows of meaning : a phenomenological approach to ambiguity and semantics in the Urdu Ghazal(2011-05) Kirk, Gwendolyn Sarah; Keating, Elizabeth Lillian; Stewart, Kathleen C.In this paper I explore the role of ambiguity in the creation of meaning in the Urdu ghazal. Ghazal, the predominant genre of Urdu poetry, consists of a series of thematically unrelated yet metrically and prosodically related couplets, each densely packed with multiple and complex meanings. Ambiguity, both lexical and grammatical, is a key technique in the poetics of this genre. Here I not only analyze the different ways ambiguity manifests itself but also the way it has historically been and continues to be mobilized by poets and practitioners of the genre to further imbue each couplet with culture-specific, socially relevant meanings. Breaking with previous approaches to Urdu poetry and poetics, I examine ambiguity in the ghazal with reference to theoretical traditions in linguistic anthropology of ethnopoetics, performance and verbal art, and ethnographic examination of poetic praxis. Finally, addressing various phenomenologies of language, I propose a phenomenological turn in the study of this poetry in order to better theorize processes of meaning creation on both an individual and wider ethnographic level.Item INUS abnormalism: the semantics of singular causal statements(Texas Tech University, 2004-08) Williams, RobertNot availableItem The linguistic repertoire of deaf cuers: an ethnographic query on practice(2008-05) Mirus, Gene R., 1969-; Keating, Elizabeth Lillian; Meier, Richard P.Taking an anthropological perspective, this dissertation focuses on a small segment of the American deaf community that uses Cued Speech by examining the nature of the cuers' linguistic repertoire. Multimodality is at issue for this dissertation. It can affect the ways of speaking or more appropriately, ways of communicating (specifically, signing or cueing). Speech and Cued Speech rely on different modalities by using different sets of articulators. Hearing adults do not learn Cued Speech the same way deaf children do. English-speaking, hearing adult learners can base their articulation of Cued Speech on existing knowledge of their spoken language. However, because deaf children do not have natural access to spoken language phonology aurally, they tend to learn Cued Speech communicatively through day-to-day interactions with family members and deaf cueing peers. I am interested in examining the construct of cuers' linguistic repertoire. Which parts of their linguistic repertoire model after signed languages? Which parts of their linguistic repertoire model after spoken languages? Cuers' phonological, syntactal and lexical repertoire largely depends on several factors including social class, geography, and the repertoire of hearing cuers whom they interacted with on a daily basis. For most deaf cuers, hearing cuers including parents, transliterators and educators serve as a model for the English language. Hearing cuers play a role as unwitting gatekeepers for the maintenance of 'proper' cueing among deaf users. For this dissertation, I seek to study the effects of modality on how cuers manage their linguistic repertoire. The statement of the problem is this: Cued Speech is visual and made with the hands like ASL but is ultimately a code for the English language. The research questions to be examined in this dissertation include how cuers adapt an invented system for their purposes, what adjustments they make to Cued Speech, how Cued Speech interacts with gesture, and what language play in Cued Speech looks like.Item Negation in vernacular Brazilian Portuguese(2013-05) Martínez, Cristina, active 2003; Hensey, Fritz; Toribio, Almeida Jacqueline, 1963-As Haegeman and Zanuttini (1996:117) discuss, when two negative elements are present in a specific syntactic domain, two possible situations may arise: "(i) the two negative elements may cancel each other out, or (ii) the two elements may contribute, together, one single instance of negation". The former 'negation cancellation' is referred to as Double Negation and can be exemplified in the standard English sentence 'I didn't say nothing', meaning 'I said something'. In many languages, traditionally known as Negative Concord languages, we can find the second scenario, where two or more negative elements can co-occur in the same sentence without applying the 'negation cancellation' rule. The most common example of the Negative Concord phenomenon consists of a sentential negation (NEG) co-occurring with a negative word. This is shown in Spanish examples such as "Juan no llamó a nadie" (literally: 'Juan didn't call nobody') meaning 'John didn't call anybody'. Another less common type of exception occurs when two sentential negations (NEG+NEG) are phonologically realized in the same sentence. This phenomenon is traditionally known as Discontinuous Negation. The following example is from Bukusu (Bell, 2004): Peter SEalaba akula sitabu TA 'Peter will NOT be buying a book (NOT)'. The language I examined in this dissertation, Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, can combine both types of Negative Concord cases in the same sentence, as we see in the example "Não ligou ninguém não (literally: 'Nobody didn't call not') meaning 'Nobody called'". Another unique characteristic of this variety that distinguishes it from the rest of the Romance languages is the optional deletion of the preverbal NEG. Though the post- verbal negative words require a preverbal negation, working as their licensor, the use of the post-sentential NEG makes the example "Ligou ningum não 'Nobody called'" grammatically correct. The main purpose of my dissertation is to present a different approach to what has been traditionally seen as the Negative Concord and Discontinuous Negation. These two complex negation phenomena stem from the same syntactic source, as they are two versions of the same syntactic derivation. Based on data from Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, I demonstrate that there is no "concord" or "discontinuity" relationship between the negative elements in "Não ligou ninguém não", since there is only one negative item in the sentence: the pre-verbal NEG não.Item Negative concord in Levantine Arabic(2010-08) Hoyt, Frederick MacNeill; Baldridge, Jason; Beaver, David I.; Beavers, John; Abboud, Peter F.; Benmamoun, Abbas; Steedman, Mark J.This dissertation is a study of negative concord in Levantine Arabic (Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria), where negative concord is the failure of an n-word to express negative meaning distinctly when in syntagm with another negative expression . A set of n-words is identified, including the never-words <ʔɛbadan> and "never, not once, not at all," the negative minimizers and "nothing," and the negative scalar focus particle "not (even) (one), not a (single)." Each can be used to express negation in sentence fragments and other constructions with elliptical interpretations, such as gapping and coordination. Beyond that, the three categories differ syntactically and semantically. I present analyses of these expressions that treat them as having different morphological and semantic properties. The data support an ambiguity analysis for wala-phrases, and a syntactic analysis of it with never-words, indicating that a single, uniform theory of negative concord should be rejected for Levantine Arabic. The dissertation is the first such work to explicitly identify negative concord in Levantine Arabic, and to provide a detailed survey and analysis of it. The description includes subtle points of variation between regional varieties of Levantine, as well as in depth analysis of the usage of n-words. It also adds a large new data set to the body of data that has been reported on negative concord, and have several implications for theories on the subject. The dissertation also makes a contribution to computational linguistics as applied to Arabic, because the analyses are couched in Combinatory Categorial Grammar, a formalism that is used both for linguisic theorizing as well as for a variety of practical applications, including text parsing and text generaration. The semantic generalizations reported here are also important for practical computational tasks, because they provide a way to correctly calculate the negative or positive polarity of utterances in a negative concord language, which is essential for computational tasks such as machine translation or sentiment analysis.Item Phonological and semantic list learning with individuals with TBI(2011-05) Lindsey, Andre Michele; Harris, Joyce L.; Marquardt, ThomasThe purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which learning and recall are facilitated by semantic and phonological targets. A list-learning paradigm was administered to 10 individuals with a history of traumatic brain injury. Participants were asked to recall and identify words that were present on the list. The lists consisted of semantically related associate words and phonologically related associate words. Participants recalled significantly more semantically related associates than phonological associates. Demographic factors such as age, time-post injury, and educational attainment did not have a significant effect on the recall ability for either word target type. Word recognition ability also was not influenced by target type. The results of this study found adults with TBI use a semantic network following brain injury and that semantic targets are more beneficial for recall than phonological targets.Item Preposition typology with manner of motion verbs in Spanish(2013-12) Bassa Vanrell, Maria del Mar; Beavers, John T.Spanish, as a V(erb)-framed language (Talmy 1985), is expected to lexicalize the path of motion in the verb and manner in some satellite when it comes to the description of motion events. Nonetheless, it shows mixed properties (e.g. Aske 1989, Berman & Slobin 1994). All manner of motion verbs can take a path satellite introduced by the prepositions "hacia" and "hasta", and yet only some can take a path satellite introduced by the preposition "a." I claim that goal XPs introduced by "hasta" and "hacia" are adjuncts, whereas "a" is an argument marker. In order to capture the intermediacy of a verb’s ability to take a goal XP, I classify manner of motion verbs according to a three-way distinction that takes into account whether they encode path categorically, overwhelmingly, or only sometimes, and whether they lexically reject the notion of a goal. Finally, I posit verb coercion—under certain semantic and pragmatic conditions—of manner of motion verbs that strongly or categorically favor displacement in order to express a goal. These semantic/pragmatic influential factors are reduced to (i) degree of manner and (ii) degree of goal-orientedness.Item Presuppositional indexicals(2010-12) Hunter, Julie Joanna; Sainsbury, R. M. (Richard Mark); Beaver, David I., 1966-; Buchanan, Lawrence Ray; Dever, Josh; Bonevac, Daniel; Kamp, Hans; Recanati, FrancoisI present and defend an account of indexicals that treats indexicals as presuppositional expressions. I argue that the distinction between presupposed and asserted content can replace the more restrictive distinction between character and content that is characteristic of Kaplanian, two-dimensional views. My account, "Presuppositional Indexicals" (PI), is simpler than a two-dimensional account because it does not posit a special layer of meaning for indexicals that cannot interact with truth-conditional content. PI also has broader scope than two-dimensional theories. It opens the door to a general theory of definite noun phrases according to which all definites have two components to their meaning: an asserted component, which contributes new information to a discourse, and a presuppositional component, which determines where asserted information will be attached in a discourse. PI does not stipulate rigidity or referentiality for indexicals as many other theories do. Indexicals do receive a special semantic treatment in PI, but their special semantics are captured entirely in terms of a strategy that indexicals exhibit for the resolution of their presuppositions.Item The "resolution" of verb meaning in context(2013-05) Gaylord, Nicholas L.; Erk, Katrin; Bannard, ColinIt is well-known that the meaning of a word often changes depending on the context in which the word is used. Determining the appropriate interpretation for a word occurrence requires a knowledge of the range of possible meanings for that word, and consideration of those possibilities given available contextual evidence. However, there is still much to be learned about the nature of our lexical knowledge, as well as how we make use of that knowledge in the course of language comprehension. I report on a series of three experiments that explore these issues. I begin with the question of how precise our perceptions of word meaning in context really are. In Experiment 1, I present a Magnitude Estimation study in which I obtain judgments of meaning-in-context similarity over pairs of intransitive verb occur- rences, such as The kid runs / The cat runs, or The cat runs / The lane runs. I find that participants supply a large range of very specific similarity judgments, that judgments are quite consistent across participants, and that these judgments can be at least partially predicted even by simple measures of contextual properties, such as subject noun animacy and human similarity ratings over pairs of subject nouns. However, I also find that while some participants supply a great variety of ratings, many participants supply only a few unique values during the task. This suggests that some individuals are making more fine-grained judgments than others. These differences in response granularity could stem from a variety of sources. However, the offline nature of Experiment 1 does not enable direct examination of the comprehension process, but rather focuses on its end result. In Experiment 2, I present a Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff study that explores the earliest stages of meaning-in-context resolution to better understand the dynamics of the comprehension process itself. In particular, I focus on the timecourse of meaning resolution and the question of whether verbs carry context-independent default interpretations that are activated prior to semantic integration. I find, consistent with what has previously been shown for nouns, that verbs do in fact carry such a default meaning, as can be seen in early false alarms to stimuli such as The dawn broke -- Something shattered. These default meanings appear to reflect the most frequent interpretation of the verb. While these default meanings are likely an emergent effect of repeated exposure to frequent interpretations of a verb, I hypothesize that they additionally support a shallow semantic processing strategy. Recently, a growing body of work has begun to demonstrate that our language comprehension is often less than exhaustive and less than maximally accurate -- people often vary the depth of their processing. In Experiment 3, I explore changes in depth of semantic processing by making an explicit connection to research on human decision making, particularly as regards questions of strategy selection and effort- accuracy tradeoffs. I present a semantic judgment task similar to that used in Experiment 2, but incorporating design principles common in studies on decision making, such as response-contingent financial payoffs and trial-by-trial feedback on response accuracy. I show that participants' preferences for deep and shallow semantic processing strategies are predictably influenced by factors known to affect decision making in other non-linguistic domains. In lower-risk situations, participants are more likely to accept default meanings even when they are not contextually supported, such as responding "True" to stimuli such as The dawn broke -- Something shattered, even without the presence of time pressure. In Experiment 3, I additionally show that participants can adjust not only their processing strategies but also their stimulus acceptance thresholds. Stimuli were normed for truthfulness, i.e. how strongly implied (or entailed) a probe sentence was given its context sentence. Some stimuli in the task posessed an intermediate degree of truthfulness, akin to implicature, as in The log burned -- Something was dangerous (truthfulness 4.55/7). Across 3 conditions, the threshold separating "true" from "false" stimuli was moved such that stimuli such as the example just given would be evaluated differently in different conditions. Participants rapidly learned these threshold placements via feedback, indicating that their perceptions of meaning-in-context, as expressed via the range of possible conclusions that could be drawn from the verb, could vary dynamically in response to situational constraints. This learning was additionally found to occur both faster and more accurately under increased levels of risk. This thesis makes two primary contributions to the literature. First, I present evidence that our knowledge of verb meanings is at least two-layered -- we have access to a very information-rich base of event knowledge, but we also have a more schematic level of representation that is easier to access. Second, I show that these different sources of information enable different semantic processing strategies, and that moreover the choice between these strategies is dependent upon situational characteristics. I additionally argue for the more general relevance of the decision making literature to the study of language processing, and suggest future applications of this approach for work in experimental semantics and pragmatics.Item Selectional preferences of semantically primitive verbs in English : the periphrastic causatives and verbs of becoming(2013-05) Childers, Zachary Witter; Wechsler, StephenAnalyses of English verb meaning often rely on quasi-aspectual operators embedded in event structures to explain shared properties across classes. These operators scope over temporally basic meaning elements that make up the idiosyncratic semantic core of complex verbs. While the inventory of operators – or semantic primes – differ from proposal to proposal, they are generally presented as a closed class that includes at least CAUSE and BECOME, and their presence and location in event structures account for several alternation and ambiguity phenomena. In this study, I investigate a number verbs whose decompositions would include only operator(s) and event structure frames under most current decompositional lexical theories; in particular, the periphrastic causatives (cause, make, etc) and the verbs of becoming (become, get, etc). I account for differences in the selectional behavior of these verbs by positing incorporated meaning components beyond the purely aspectual or event structural. Based in part on regularities among corpus collocations, I propose additional meaning distinctions among these verbs along the parameters of causal patient complicity, sentiment, and register.Item The semantic import of the French preposition à 'at/to' in verbal argument alternations(2013-05) Mignot, Charles Alexandre; Léger, Catherine; Russi, Cinzia, 1966-This study examines the semantic import of the French preposition à 'at/to' in argument alternations. In French, some verbs can be followed by a direct object or by an indirect object introduced by the preposition à 'at/to' (e.g., parer/parer à 'to ward off/to guard against', satisfaire/satisfaire à 'to satisfy', toucher/toucher à 'to touch', etc.). Although the preposition à 'at/to' has been characterized in the literature as a meaningless grammatical element, and more specifically so in cases of argument alternations, this study shows that à 'at/to' is meaningful and that it contributes to the semantics of the indirect transitive constructions of the verbs under scrutiny. Couched in the Cognitive Grammar theoretical framework (Langacker 1987b, 1991), this study is based on the assumption that grammar is meaningful and that the meaning of grammatical items is more abstract than the meaning of lexical items. Consequently, two abstract meanings characterizing à 'at/to' are proposed to account for the semantic differences between the direct and indirect transitive constructions of the verbs analyzed in this study: the expression of an abstract goal and the expression of an abstract localization. For some verbs, the indirect transitive construction entails a notion of goal that is not expressed in the direct transitive construction. For other verbs, à 'at/to' expresses an abstract relation (i.e., an abstract localization) between the lexical semantics of the verb and the indirect object, which results in meaning differences between the direct and indirect transitive constructions based on the notion of affectedness. Following Langacker (1987a), I view transitivity as a transfer of energy and propose that the various levels of energy involved in an event correlate with the various levels of affectedness of the object. I argue that à 'at/to' signals a disruption of energy leading to a lower affectedness of the indirect object than that of the direct object (see also Beavers 2011). Finally, I show that, for the verb toucher 'to touch', the semantic import of à 'at/to' varies in relation to the various senses of the indirect transitive construction of the verb.Item A semasiological history of High German in(t)-, en(t)- : with a general theory of change of meaning(1935) Gardner, Meredith Knox, 1912-2002; Not availableItem Syntacticism and the semantic turn(2016-05) Anderson, Derek E.; Sarkar, Sahotra; Juhl, Cory F; Kamp, Johan A; Dever, Joshua; Cat, JordiThere are tensions between empiricism and semantics. The logical empiricists Otto Neurath and Rudolph Carnap were committed to rejecting semantics and treating the logic of science and by extension all of philosophical discourse as a matter of syntax alone, until Tarski convinced Carnap to embrace a semantic theory of truth. Once converted to the semantic paradigm, Carnap attempted to give a criterion of significance that would rule out metaphysics as meaningless while preserving scientific discourse as semantically interpreted. Neurath was convinced from the start that the scientific worldview would be corrupted by a semantic theory of truth. In this dissertation I explore the nature and extent of syntacticism, the view of language as syntax without semantics, and its potential to support a thoroughly empiricist approach to the scientific worldview. I argue that Neurath was right to claim that logical empiricism would not survive the semantic turn in philosophy. I also argue that scientific naturalism about semantics entails Carnap’s empiricist criterion of significance; thus, attempts to naturalize semantics are covert extensions of the logical empiricist program.