Adverbial NPs: Bare or Clad in See-Through Garb?

McCawley, James D.

doi:10.2307/414534

Cited by 79 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…(1 NP-like Larson (1985) argues that adverbial NPs are syntactically NPs with the (lexical) property of self-assigning Case, but Emonds (1987) and McCawley (1988) convincingly show that Larson's proposal is empirically and theoretically problematic. Emonds (1976Emonds ( , 1987 and McCawley (1988) argue that adverbial NPs are NPs that can occur in positions to which no Case is assigned and behave like PPs in virtue of a silent preposition that takes the NP as its complement (6).…”

Section: Introduction: Silent Prepositionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Silent prepositions: Evidence from free relatives

Caponigro¹,

Pearl²

2008

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

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Silent prepositions are hypothesized to be prepositions that are phonologically null, but syntactically and semantically contentful. Their existence in the grammar has been argued for on the basis of the behavior of expressions like there, now, and that way, which look like nominals but can (or must) behave as prepositional phrases. We bring further evidence in favor of silent prepositions by studying the syntactic and semantic behavior of free relative clauses introduced by the wh-words where, when, and how. We propose a fully compositional syntactic/semantics analysis for these free relatives that accounts for their puzzling nominal/prepositional distributional and interpretative properties. This analysis is crucially based on silent prepositions. We also briefly discuss how our proposal can be extended to interrogative clauses introduced by the same wh-words, as well as what the licensing conditions and semantic properties of silent prepositions are.* We are very grateful to Grant Goodall, Richard Larson, Howard Lasnik, Carson Schütze, and the participants at the Syntax and Semantics of Spatial P Workshop at the University of Utrecht for their very helpful comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors are, of course, our own.

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Section: Introduction: Silent Prepositionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Silent prepositions: Evidence from free relatives

Caponigro¹,

Pearl²

2008

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

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“…21 This phenomenon is reminiscent of those temporal DPs that are interpreted as PPs even without an overt preposition in English and other languages (e.g. It happened (on) [ DP that day]/[ DP Monday]) (Larson 1985;McCawley 1988;Caponigro and Pearl 2009, a.o.). 22 A detailed analysis of this construction as a pseudo-cleft (as opposed to a cleft) is beyond the scope of this paper.…”

Section: Matrix Constituent Interrogativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…English and other languages have temporal DPs that seem to behave syntactically and semantically as PPs, though there is no overt P. For instance, the DP that day in the sentence It happened that day behaves syntactically and semantically the same as the PP on that day in It happened on that day. It has been argued that a silent preposition occurs with DPs that behave like PPs (McCawley 1988;also Larson 1985) or with headless/free relatives introduced by when, where, and how in English when they behave like PPs (Caponigro and Pearl 2009). A similar approach can easily be developed for the syntax/semantic mapping of adjunct clauses in Adyghe, but it is not directly relevant for our purposes.…”

Section: Adjunct Clausesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relative embeddings: a Circassian puzzle for the syntax/semantics interface

Caponigro

Polinsky

2011

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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This paper documents and analyzes the pattern used in the Northwest Caucasian language Adyghe (Circassian) to express what the following five different constructions convey in other languages: headed and headless relative clauses, embedded declaratives, embedded polar interrogatives, and embedded constituent interrogatives. We argue that Adyghe encodes the meanings of all these embedded structures by means of the same syntactic construction, a relative clause. This pervasive use of relative clauses is possible due to mechanisms that are independently attested not just in Adyghe but also in more familiar languages like English. These mechanisms include concealed questions, polarity operators, and nominals such as fact and question that can connect propositional attitude verbs or interrogative verbs with embedded clauses. We suggest that this extensive use of relative clauses in Adyghe is triggered by the absence of non-relative complementizer. We further show that this use is facilWe are very grateful to our language consultants Raxmet Eshev, Raxmet Gishev, Svetlana Kinokova, and Mira Unarokova for their help with the language data. This paper owes its initial inspiration to the pioneering findings by Yury Lander and Yakov Testelets, who have been very generous in discussing their findings with us. We are particularly indebted to Peter Arkadiev and Brian O'Herin for their very detailed comments on this work. We would also like to thank Ayla Appelbaum, Daniel Büring, Gennaro Chierchia, Marcel den Dikken, Shin Fukuda, Anastasia Giannakidou, Matt Gordon, Daniel B. Kane, Richard Kayne, Ed Keenan, Christopher Kennedy, Min-Joo Kim, Shin-Sook Kim, Alexander Letuchiy, Eric Potsdam, Greg Scontras, Kirill Shklovsky, Donca Steriade, Virginia Yip, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions. Parts of this work were presented at SALT 18, WCCFL 27, GLOW 31, CUNY Graduate Center, Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Berlin, the University of Chicago, and Yale University. We are solely responsible for all the errors in this paper.I. Caponigro ( ) Department of Linguistics, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, 0108, La Jolla, CA 92093-0108, USA e-mail: ivano@ucsd.edu M. Polinsky Department of Linguistics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA e-mail: polinsky@fas.harvard.edu 72 I. Caponigro, M. Polinsky itated by their morphological visibility: a relativizer realized as a prefix on the verb, verbal affixation, a rich system of applicative heads hosting indirect arguments, and the availability of a case marker suffixed to headless relatives. We conclude by discussing the implications of the Adyghe system for the general design of embedding and subordination in natural language.

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“…Other expressions that are DPs without any doubt have independently received an identical analysis. Emonds (1976Emonds ( , 1987 and McCawley (1988) 2 argue that silent prepositions are needed to account for the behavior of adverbial nominals like the other day (temporal), nice places (locative), and that way (manner), as shown in (29)-(31). They argue that such nominals are always generated as complement of a silent P when no overt P occurs as their sister.…”

Section: Silent Prepositionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the semantics of when-clauses

Hall

Caponigro

2015

SALT

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This paper is about non-interrogative temporal embedded clauses introduced by when (temporal when-clauses), their semantic interpretation and their syntax/semantics mapping. Our goal is to provide a fully compositional account of temporal when-clauses that accounts for their formal identity with interrogative clauses and their difference in meaning. The main idea is that temporal when-clauses are syntactically and semantically free relative clauses. Previous syntactic analyses (Grimshaw 1977, Bresnan & Grimshaw 1978 have provided robust support to the syntactic side of this claim. On the other hand, the semantic proposals for temporal when-clauses that we are aware of (Bonomi 1997, Vikner 2004, Moens & Steedman 1988 have ignored these syntactic conclusions and have argued for analyses that are problematic for the syntactic/semantic mapping. These semantic analyses are also not fully adequate in handling the interpretative properties of temporal when-clauses. We provide evidence from the distributional and interpretive properties of when-clauses as well as from the temporal alignment of the matrix clause with the when-clause that supports our analysis.

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Adverbial NPs: Bare or Clad in See-Through Garb?

Cited by 79 publications

References 3 publications

Silent prepositions: Evidence from free relatives

Silent prepositions: Evidence from free relatives

Relative embeddings: a Circassian puzzle for the syntax/semantics interface

On the semantics of when-clauses

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