LISSIM 6

June 1-15, 2012@ Kangra

Selected Essays

Syed Saurov
University of Southern California
 

How would LISSIM6 help me sharpen my research goals?

I have two ongoing research projects right now- one syntactic, and one semantic. I shall take you through each of them in a brief manner.

The syntax project:

Possessors in Bangla.

Currently I am working on possessor-constructions in Bangla, and exploring different syntactic possibilities. I show that Bangla has (at least) two different types of possessors, the Individual genitives (like John’s car in English) and Modificational genitives (like men’s shoes in English), and am working on the positions of these two different genitives (I-gen and M-gen from now on). So far, I show that the I-gen occur above the NumP in Bangla, and the M-gen below the NumP. I also show that these two different genitives behave differently in terms of pronominal reference. I claim that I-gen has more structure within them, and currently pursuing a compounding analysis for the M-gen. I also consider multiple gen phrases, that is, more than one I-gen or/and M-gen, and all the possible orders that this type of combination will yield; and show what I think the syntax for all these constructions look like, and how these fall out from the analysis that I sketch before. This project shows the need for having different syntax for I-gen and M-gen, and in a way sides up with Munn’s (to appear) argument that despite the fact that in English, there is no morphological difference between these two types of genitives (a man’s shoe can mean both an individual man’s shoe, or men’s shoes), there needs to be different syntactic encoding for them.
The project is work in progress, and there are lots of things to be still figured out, including the nature of the –r that is a common part in all types of genitive constructions (e.g Ruma-r shoe). I am entertaining different types of possibilities to explain the behaviour and distribution of the –r. Having it as a head of some functional projection seems like the most plausible explanation to me (so far), as this –r can have a varied distribution, where it can go with the agent, the theme, part-whole relation, possession, etc. In a way, it seems to me that the linker idea of Den Dikken (2004) can be one of the possibilities, but my research hasn’t reached a stage yet where I can comment on or commit to that possibility.
Besides showing what I have found in my research so far, I am trying to find answers to a lot of relevant questions. I list a few of them below:
• What is the nature of –r? Is it a head? A linker? Or something else?
• What do the multiple genitive constructions tell us about the entire DP structure of Bangla?
• How can NP-ellipsis data help us knowing more about the possessors, as well as the DP?


The semantics project:

Bare nouns in object position in Bangla.

In my semantics project, I am looking at bare nouns occurring in the object position in Bangla. It seems that when an inanimate noun like book occurs bare in the object position (gloss: ‘Ruma book read’), there can be three meanings:
• Ruma read a book
• Ruma read more than one book
• In addition to this, a bare noun in the object position can have a generic interpretation as well.
I am exploring a simple ‘indefinite’-analysis of the nominal to explain the meanings possible, and it seems to capture the behaviour of the nominal. A little more precisely, analyzing the noun as an open variable, which can get existential closure at the VP-level, or a generic closure at a higher level seem to work here.
Contrasting this with an animate noun boy (put footnote: not representative of all animate nouns) in a construction like Ruma boy saw, which is truth conditionally similar to the book case, it is expected that the indefinite analysis should be able to explain this one as well. And it does. However, there seems to be an interesting difference between the two nominals, in terms of pronominal reference. In one case (book), pronominal reference is allowed, while in the other case, it’s not. What is the reason for this difference is the question I am asking at this point, and exploring all sorts of possible answers.
I note that the bare nouns in both the cases have only a narrow scope, and because semantically narrow scope indefinites do not differ from incorporated nominals (Van Geenhoven), it’s an alternative possibility to analyze the nominals here as incorporated, and see if that works for both.

Summarizing my research questions for the semantics project:

• If the indefinite analysis of the bare nominal is on the right track, how does it explain the difference between the two nominals in terms of pronominal reference?
• Will an ‘incorporation’-analysis be able to explain the behaviour of both the nominals, and account for their difference?
• Or is it the case that only one of the nominals is incorporated, and the other one is a case of indefinite? If so, how to find out?

I am looking for answers to all these questions, and to be able to ask the right questions in order to get these answers. and LISSIM 6 will give me a chance to stay focused during the summer months, and meet all the great experts of the field to talk about my projects, and get guidance on what directions to go, and how to ask the right questions. While I am very keen on meeting all the faculty as I am sure it will shape my thoughts and benefit me immensely on an academic level, I am in particular looking forward to work with Tanmoy Bhattacharya and Utpal Lahiri. Both of them apart from being great linguists, also share the same language which I am working on; and thus a chance to share their thoughts on the language can only help me sharpen my ideas, both towards my syntax research, and the semantics one.


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