Genitives, relational nouns, and argument-modifier ambiguity

Abstract

The argument-modifier distinction is less clear i n NPs than in VPs since nouns do not typically take arguments. The clearest cases of arguments in NPs are found in certain kinds of nominalizations which retain some "verbal" properties (Grimshaw 1990). The status of apparent arguments of non-deverbal relational nouns like sister is more controversial.Genitive constructions like John's teacher, team of John's offer a challenging testing ground for the argument-modifier distinction in NPs, both in English and cross-linguistically. In the analyses of Partee (1983Partee ( /1997 and Barker (1995), the DP in a genitive phrase (i.e. John in John's) is always an argument of some relation, but the relation does not always come from the head noun. In those split analyses, some genitives are arguments and some are modifiers. By contrast, recent proposals by Jensen and Vikner and by Borschev and Partee analyze all genitives as arguments, a conclusion we no longer support.In this paper, we explore a range of possible analyses: argument-only, modifier-only, and split analyses, and we consider the kinds of semantic evidence that imply that different analyses are correct for different genitive or possessive constructions in different languages. For English, we argue that a split analysis is correct and we offer some diagnostics for distinguishing arguments from modifiers.

The definite article in Romance expletives and long weak definites

“…As pointed out by Partee (1983/1997), Löbner (1985, Jensen and Vikner (1994), Partee and Borschev (2003), Barker (2011), among others, a small set of nouns, denoting family relations (e.g., brother, cousin) and body parts (e.g., head, leg), are properly (or inherently) relational, which means that they involve a relationship between two participants (i.e., are transitive, as opposed to sortal nouns, which have one participant and are intransitive). 15 We are uncertain at this moment about whether such analysis might be extended to Germanic languages such as English, German and Dutch.…”

Sherlock Holmes Was In No Danger

“…Von Fintel (1998) -borrowing examples from Westerståhl (1984) and Soames (1986) argues that contextual restrictions on sentences containing quantifiers cannot be reduced to global restrictions of the discourse domain. E.g., there is no way of restricting the 5 It is possible that such variety of "understandings" noted above (in 1) may only appear when one has something greater than a one-place predicate, i.e., quite possibly this phenomenon should only appear with relational terms (Barker (1995), Partee and Borschev (2003)), an interesting question but one we do not take up here. Another related topic we also leave aside is the question of whether the implicit argument structure provided in qualia structures (Pustejovsky, 1995;Vikner and Jensen, 2002) provides a fruitful avenue of exploration.…”

Les noms abstraits intensifs et la légitimation de l'article défini

“…Ils se distinguent en cela des autres types de noms (garçon, livre, maison, chien, etc. ), qui, eux, ne nécessitent pas d'argument (Partee, 2000, Heller, 2002, et pour lesquels la construction possessive n'est que facultative. La présence d'un article défini étant une propriété liée à l'emploi de la construction possessive, l'hypothèse proposée permet d'expliquer les particularités distributionnelles de l'article défini avec les noms abstraits intensifs.…”