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What about lexical semantics if syntax is the only generative component of the grammar?

A case study on word meaning in German

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Abstract

This paper explores the semantic consequences of the principle of containment embodied by the popular assumption that word formation is entirely syntactic and that there is no generative lexicon. According to the principle of containment, the analysis and structure of a given form must also be contained within the analysis of any structure derived from that form. The implications of the containment principle for the analysis of word meaning are elucidated with a detailed case study of ambiguous German nominalizations. The resulting analysis of ambiguous German nominalizations is employed as a probe into the structure and analysis of contained constructions to derive novel insights about the syntax and semantics of adjectival participles in German.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted that because the syntactic analysis of a seemingly idiomatic meaning does not differ from the syntactic analysis of a compositional meaning, the containment principle obtains regardless of whether or not the meaning of a structure is idiomatic.

  2. Like Harley, Alexiadou (2009), gives up on the embedded vP hypothesis: “the difference between AS [Argument Structure] and non-AS nominals does not depend on the presence of verbalizing morphology” (Alexiadou 2009:256). Borer (2003) keeps the embedded vP hypothesis but gives up on containment: the result reading is not derived in the syntax but roots like √exam “may be associated, in the L-D [lexical phrasal domain], with an inserted nominal (and verbalizing) affix” (Borer 2003:52).

  3. For a similarly critical inspection of Grimshaw’s claims with respect to English nominalizations see e.g. Newmeyer (2009), Grimm and McNally (2013).

  4. I use the following glossing conventions for German examples: NMLZ = Nominalization, PRFX = Prefix, PRTC = Particle, PTCTP = Participle, GEN = genitive. I indicate the selection restrictions of a predicate with a superscript: E (event), S (state), O (object). When there is no suitable translation of a German be-prefixed construction into English, I indicate the be-prefix also in the translation.

  5. As a reviewer notes, an anaphoric description of a state as in (25) appears to be compatible with the selection restrictions of renovieren if the second sentence starts with a temporal sequence connective like danach (‘after that’). But in contrast to (26), the temporal connective in (25) enforces an interpretation of the anaphoric construction according to which the state to which the anaphoric construction refers back is not the state in which the wall painting was before the renovation but rather is the result state entailed by the verb to renovate that the wall is in after and because of the renovation. Thus, the acceptability of (25) is due to the temporal connective picking up the change of state entailment of renovieren and as such is independent of the selection restrictions of renovieren.

    1. (25)
      figure i

  6. “The exact (semantic) categories for roots that predicts their varying behavior in nominal and verbal environments is not important here (although identifying these categories is of course essential to syntactic theory). The important point is that there are such categories” (Marantz 1997:216).

  7. The spell-out rules in (46) simply circumvents the problem of the distribution of the -t morpheme in verbal conjugation by assuming that the spell-out of the [+part] feature is empty in contexts other than +a and +Pred. A reviewer suggested that a more thorough investigation may be able to come up with a systematic explanation of the distribution of the -t morpheme (which is not realized in the 1.SG/1.PL/3.PL present tense conjugation) in analogy to the systematic explanation of the seemingly idiosyncratic t-stem in Latin argued for in Steriade (2016), where—quite similar to my case—“some verbal derivatives have a stem that is identical to that of the perfect-passive participle” (Steriade 2016:114).

  8. The proposed analysis of adjectival participles relates to Maienborn (2005) and subsequent work in a straightforward way. Maienborn argues that states denoted by copula constructions (like adjectival participles) are ‘Kimian States,’ states that are ontologically poorer than ‘Neo-Davidsonian’ states. Kimian states are not defined relative to a (Neo-)Davidsonian event but “are to be understood as reifications for the exemplification of a property Q at a holder x and a time t.” (Maienborn 2009:41), which is nothing other than the state derived with PredP.

  9. 2016, Inverted Classroom and Beyond: Lehren und Lernen im 21. Jahrhundert, eds. Großkurth, Handke. Marburg: tectum Verlag.

  10. I should add here that event-related modifiers (McIntyre 2015:941) “are unacceptable in adjectival participles unless they contribute to the description of the state expressed by the participle or of the theme during the interval during which this state holds.” Low participles denote states and thus are compatible with approaches to event-related modifiers in the literature like the incorporation approach of Gehrke (2015) and the Kimian state analysis of Maienborn (2009); see also fn. 11.

  11. Such a revision of the licensing condition for ung-nominalizations would also account for the last construction type of verbs in German I didn’t address at all, namely particle verbs. Following Roßdeutscher (2016), German particles like ab (‘off’) have a scalar semantics similar to that of scalar adjectives. And interestingly, mono-eventive verbs like arbeiten have an ung-nominalization (and thus are bi-eventive) in the presence of such a scalar particle as in (79b).

    1. (79)
      figure an

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the handling editor Gillian Ramchand and three anonymous reviewers for having carefully read earlier versions of the paper. The paper profited very much from their instructive and detailed comments. I am also indebted to the reviewers and participants of the 3rd Workshop on Aspect and Argument Structure of Adjectives and Participles (WASAAP 3), the 6th Workshop on Nominalizations (JeNom 6) as well as the participants of the syntax/semantics research group at the University of Texas at Austin for helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper. I would particularly like to thank Antje Roßdeutscher and Hans Kamp for reading and commenting on numerous earlier versions of the paper. All remaining errors are my own. The research reported in this paper was supported by a grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) to the project B4 “Lexikalische Information und ihre Entfaltung im Kontext von Wortbildung, Satz und Diskurs,” as part of the Collaborative Research Center SFB 732 “Incremental Specification in Context.”

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    Tillmann Pross

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Pross, T. What about lexical semantics if syntax is the only generative component of the grammar?. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 37, 215–261 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-018-9410-7

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