Symbolic Systems Forum - Joan Bresnan, Linguistics Department

Joan Bresnan, Linguistics Department, "The Dative Alternation and the Meaning of Variation: Is Variation At the Level of Syntax Determined

by Semantic Differences?"

ABSTRACT:

In the linguistics literature it is now almost universally agreed that semantics determines syntactic choices, and in a particularly visible way with the two dative constructions of English. Yet recent corpus work shows that the widely reported evidence for subtle semantic differences in these constructions is flawed. An alternative view is that the choice of constructions is influenced by the need to differentiate the receiver and entity arguments along dimensions such as nominal expression type, animacy, person, definiteness, accessability, and length. These properties are only indirectly influenced by verbal semantics; they primarily reflect actual usage. An informational approach to the dative alternation incorporating this idea can be extended to explain quantitative lexical variation (cf. Gries and Stefanowitsch to appear), as shown by ongoing research with Anna Cueni and Tatiana Nikitina.

Bio:

Professor Bresnan is a Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities and a Professor in Linguistics at Stanford. Her interests include Optimization-based theories of language, theories of typology and universals of grammatical structure.