It is a familiar lesson from physical theory that interactions yield an important probe into structure. In the experiments of Rutherford almost 90 years ago, bits of matter were projected together; the physical properties of their interactions yielded evidence for a nucleus, hidden in the heart of atom. In semantics, the results of Donald Davidson in a famous 1967 paper might be viewed in a similar (although perhaps less dramatic) light. Davidson proposed that when we combine verbs and adverbs together, the logical properties of that interaction yield evidence for a semantic nucleus in the heart of the clause- an event argument. In recent years, the consequences of Davidson’s "discovery " have been elaborated by a number of different researchers across a variety of linguistic domains. In this paper I want to suggest a further area of elaboration. Specifically, I will propose that interactions between nouns and adjectives yield evidence for an event argument inside the nominal as well. Furthermore, this position seems to exist in both of the nominal projections countenanced by current linguistic theory: DP and NP. Postulating this element sheds light, I believe, on some well-known facts of

In this response to Pinker and Jackendoff’s critique, we extend our previous framework for discussion of language evolution, clarifying certain distinctions and elaborating on a number of points. In the first half of the paper, we reiterate that profitable research into the biology and evolution of language requires fractionation of “language ” into component mechanisms and interfaces, a non-trivial endeavor whose results are unlikely to map onto traditional disciplinary boundaries. Our terminological distinction between FLN and FLB is intended to help clarify misunderstandings and aid interdisciplinary rapprochement. By blurring this distinction, Pinker and Jackendoff mischaracterize our hypothesis 3 which concerns only FLN, not “language ” as a whole. Many of their arguments and examples are thus irrelevant to this hypothesis. Their critique of the minimalist program is for the most part equally irrelevant, because very few of the arguments in our original paper were tied to this program; in an online appendix we detail the deep inaccuracies in their characterization of this program. Concerning evolution, we believe that Pinker and Jackendoff’s emphasis on the past adaptive history of the language faculty is misplaced. Such questions are unlikely to be resolved empirically due to a lack of relevant data, and invite speculation rather than research. Preoccupation with the issue has retarded progress in the field by diverting research away from empirical questions, many of which can be addressed with comparative data. Moreover, offering an adaptive hypothesis as an alternative to our hypothesis concerning mechanisms is a logical error, as questions of function are independent of those concerning mechanism. The second half of our paper consists of a detailed response to the specific data discussed by Pinker and Jackendoff. Although many of their examples are irrelevant to our original

. This work belongs to a family of research efforts, called microtheories and aimed at describing the static meaning of all lexical categories in several languages in the framework of the MikroKosmos project on computational semantics. The latter also involves other static microtheories describing world knowledge and syntax-semantics mapping as well as dynamic microtheories connected with the actual process of text analysis. This paper describes our approach to determining and representing adjectival meaning, compares it with the body of knowledge on adjectives in literature and presents a detailed, practically tested methodology and heuristics for the acquisition of lexical entries for adjectives. The work was based on the set of over 6,000 English and about 1,500 Spanish adjectives obtained from task-oriented corpora. Introduction The topic of this paper is the information about adjectival meaning which should be included in a computational lexicon. Thus, we concentrate on...

There are at least four varieties of quotation, including pure, direct, indirect and mixed. A theory of quotation, we argue, should give a unified account of these varieties of quotation. Mixed quotes such as “Alice said that life is ‘difficult to understand’”, in which an utterance is directly and indirectly quoted concurrently, is an often overlooked variety of quotation. We show that the leading theories of pure, direct, and indirect quotation are unable to account for mixed quotation and therefore unable to provide a unified the-ory. In the second half of the paper we develop a unified theory of quotation based on Davidson’s demonstrative theory. “Language is the instrument it is because the same expres-sion, with semantic features (meaning) unchanged, can serve countless purposes. ” (Davidson 1968) Suppose Alice utters (1). She can be properly quoted by any of (2)–(4): (1) Life is difficult to understand. (2) Alice said “Life is difficult to understand”. (3) Alice said that life is difficult to understand. (4) Alice said that life “is difficult to understand”. (2) quotes Alice by mentioning the words she uttered. This is direct quo-tation. (3) quotes her, but could be true even if Alice never uttered any word in (3). This is indirect quotation. (4) quotes Alice by reporting what she said, but attributes to her only an utterance of “is difficult to under-stand”. Call this mixed quotation.

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I had heard it said that Chomsky’s conception of language is at odds with the truth-conditional program in semantics. Some of my friends said it so often that the point—or at least a point—finally sunk in. 1 My aim in this paper is to describe and motivate what I take to be Chomsky's (2000) conception of semantics, with emphasis on his scepticism about more traditional approaches. But the goal is not exegetical. It is to advance a view, whose attractions are considerable, that often gets ignored. 1. Overview Let me start by simply presenting the main claims. In section two, I go through them again more slowly, with examples and arguments. This will, I hope, compensate for the stark initial statement of some ideas that may initially seem odd. 1.1 We should be sceptical of the idea that a theory of meaning for a natural language will have theorems that specify the truth-conditions of all the declarative sentences of that language. The successes in semantics suggest that the theoretical action lies elsewhere; semantics is concerned with “internalist” features of linguistic expressions, rather than truth per se. The fact that (an utterance of) a sentence has a certain truth-condition is typically an interaction effect whose determinants include (i) intrinsic properties of the sentence that we can isolate and theorize about, and (ii) a host of facts less amenable to

Adjectives and common nouns are currently assigned the same semantic analysis: both categories are said to denote sets of individuals (type <e,t>). We will show that this assumption is empirically inadequate and we will assume instead that adjectives denote properties (viewed as primitive entities, not as sets of individuals) instantiated in individuals, whereas (number marked) common nouns basically denote sets of individuals. Correlated with this distinction, we will propose the existence of two distinct rules of predication: (i) an entity is a member of a set of entities and (ii) a property is localized in an entity. Our analysis is based on the Aristotelian view that has become the basic postulate of property theory (Chierchia 1982,1985, Chierchia and Turner 1988, Fox 2000), namely the existence of two basic types of entities: individuals and properties or, as Chierchia puts it, 'predicable and non predicable individuals'. Our empirical investigation will cover a wide range of phenomena: (i) the different syntactic distribution of adjectives, bare NPs, and Number Phrases (NumPs); (ii) the contrast between ce and il/elle 'he/she ' in French; (iii) the behavior of names of profession in Romance copula sentences, which will be extended to bare NPs of the type fils d’avocat 'son of lawyer ' and ami (avec Pierre) 'friend (with Pierre)'; (iv) the contrast between bare plurals and bare singulars.

What is the significance of combining expressions in a natural human language? A complex expression is not a mere list of words. Combining expressions, as in ‘red ball ’ or ‘ball that Pat kicked yesterday ’ has a semantic effect. But how is the meaning of a phrase related to the meanings of its constituents? And how are the meanings of predicates, simple or complex, related to the meanings of sentences and referential devices? Such questions lie at the heart of attempts to understand the kind(s) of compositionality exhibited in human languages. Elsewhere, I have argued that concatenation signifies conjunction; see Pietroski (2002, 2003, 2005). On this view, phrases like ‘red ball ’ manifest the true character of concatenation: combining ‘red ’ with ‘ball ’ yields a predicate satisfied by things that satisfy ‘red ’ and ‘ball’. But examples like (1) seem not to fit this mold. (1) Pat did not kick every ball yesterday How can all the constituents of (1) be plausibly analyzed in terms of monadic predicates conjoinable with others? And given such examples, why think concatenation signifies a single operation across diverse constructions, much less the operation of predicate-conjunction? My reply, developed in Pietroski (2005) but presented somewhat differently here, involves a

For any sentence of a natural language, we can ask the following questions: what is its meaning; what is its syntactic structure; and how is its meaning related to its syntactic structure? Attending to these questions, as they apply to sentences that provide evidence for Davidsonian event analyses, suggests that we reconsider some traditional views about how the syntax of a natural sentence is related to its meaning. Many theorists have held, at least as an idealization, that every phrase–and in particular, every verb phrase–consists of (i) an expression semantically associated with some function, and (ii) an expression semantically associated with some element in the domain of that function. On this view, which makes it comfortable to speak of both verbs and functions as taking arguments, each phrase is semantically associated with the value of the relevant function given the relevant argument(s); the semantic contribution of natural language syntax is function-application, as in a Fregean Begriffschrift; and the meaning of a sentence is determined by the meanings of ’s constituents, in the way that the sum of two numbers is determined by those numbers and the addition function. I want to urge a different conception of natural language semantics.

This ESSLLI workshop is devoted to connecting the linguistic use of resource logics and categorial grammar to minimalist grammars and related generative grammars. Minimalist grammars are relatively recent, and although they stem from a long tradition of work in transformational grammar, they are largely informal apart from a few research papers. The study of resource logics, on the other hand, is formal and stems naturally from a long logical tradition. So although there appear to be promising connections between these traditions, there is at this point a rather thin intersection between them. The papers in this workshop are consequently rather diverse, some addressing general similarities between the two traditions, and others concentrating on a thorough study of a particular point. Nevertheless they succeed in convincing us of the continuing interest of studying and developing the relationship between the minimalist program and resource logics. This introduction reviews some of the basic issues and prior literature. 1 The interest of a convergence What would be the interest of a convergence between resource logical investigations of