The division of labor between semantic and pragmatic contributions of almost and other proximatives has long been controversial. A watershed in this dispute is Sadock’s (1981) proposal that I almost won only conversationally implicates, rather than entailing, I didn’t win. Neither this “radical pragmatic” line nor a pure entailment account covers the full range of data, including the non-cancelability of the polar component and the distribution of polarity items. This gap prompts the construct of assertoric inertia (Horn 2002a), exploiting the distinction between what is entailed and what is asserted. I buttress that approach here with additional arguments, address the role of other semantic and pragmatic factors, and revisit the viability of assertoric inertia in the light of other recent work.
In 1985 Jerry Sadock offered a solution to the Performadox, a puzzle about performative sentences propounded in 1980 by Boër and Lycan. The present paper defends Sadock’s approach, particularly against a number of objections previously made by Lycan.
This essay reconceptualizes the relationship of mental-act, mental-state, and speech-act verbs. It shows that ‘believe’ can be used as a mental-activity, quasi-performative verb and not just a mental-state verb, illustrates the explanatory value of distinguishing performative from quasi-performative verbs, and draws the implications of the new taxonomy of verbs for Moore’s Paradox. Quasi-performative, mental activity verbs can express (manifest) or create mental-states just as performative speech-act forms like ‘I promise’ can create obligations. The arguments employ methods first used by Jerrold Sadock (1974) in his classic work Toward a Linguistic Theory of Speech Acts. I adapt his syntactical arguments that appeal to the properties of expositive adverbials in sentences with verbs of communication to the case, which Sadock did not discuss, of the mental-state verb ‘believe’ and show that ‘believe’ has more than mental-state uses; it is also a mental-activity verb that has properties that, following Hunter (1990), I call ‘quasi-performative’. I also use the adverbial for the last time to distinguish ‘believe’ from a performative verb. Likewise I extend Sadock’s arguments for the case of performative communication verbs embedded in factive sentences, e.g. in ‘regret’ sentences, to show that ‘believe’ has performative-like uses. I also employ Sadock’s observations on the relation between stative-verb sentences and related pseudo-cleft sentences to show that ‘believe’ and ‘regret’ have non-stative uses. I discuss the views of Donald Davidson and Zeno Vendler on the difference between mental state-verbs and mental event-verbs. And I conclude with the implications of this new characterization of ‘believe’ for the classic problem of Moore’s Paradox.
In this paper Rogers examines two proposed accounts of pragmatic presupposition, offered by Stalnaker and Sadock at the 1973 Texas Conference, in light of what we now call presupposition accommodation. Rogers argues that the general process of utterance incrementation, pointed out by Stalnaker (1978), and developed in Rogers’s paper, reveals that the process of accommodation is more complex than envisioned in Stalnaker’s work, that Stalnaker’s account and Sadock’s apply at different points in the accommodation process, and that given a version of Stalnaker’s evolving account, extended in light of utterance incrementation, Sadock’s proposal appears to follow as a condition on utterance per se.
This chapter examines what the pragmatic skills of autistic individuals suggest about the claim by Sadock (1970, 1972) and others that questions like “Can you pass the salt” are conventionalized for use as indirect requests. A review of the autism literature indicates that the primary pragmatic deficit in autism is in reading speakers’ minds. Autistic individuals should thus only fail at inferences involving speakers’ beliefs and intents, for example conversational implicatures. Anecdotal and empirical evidence bears this out. Autistic individuals correctly interpret non-literal uses of language so long as such uses are conventionalized, and so long as the conventions in question have entered their lexicons. In particular, they readily process “Can you” utterances as indirect requests, confirming Sadock’s thesis.
This paper examines two pseudo-apologies in the news. Apologies have been defined as involving acceptance of responsibility for an offense and an acknowledgment of its wrongfulness. In contrast, pseudo-apologies index a stance lacking in remorse. This examination of a deviant type of apology reveals some of the limits that mediation imposes on more prototypical apologies: the more a speaker is viewed as attending to the interests of parties other than the offended party/ies, the greater the detriment to the apology. We propose that the polysemy of I’m sorry (and, via association, I apologize), which can serve as both apology and expression of sympathy, provides the functional structure for the pseudo-apologies examined here.
Sentence – or rather, utterance – intonation poses an interesting conceptual challenge for any linguistic theory that assumes a rigid separation of phonological and pragmatic representations (as assumed in current Minimalist theory), as does the interaction of structure with speech act (examined in detail by Sadock 1974). This paper seeks to demonstrate that intonation and illocutionary force all too often correlate with one another, with or without the mediation of syntactic form, and argues that this correlation warrants the hypothesis of an interface between intonation and illocutionary force, with both matches and mismatches, in continuation of the automodular view of language advocated by Sadock (1991 et seq.). Citing evidence from child language, dialectal variation, and autism research in Bangla and Hindi, besides research on Norwegian intonation and pragmatic particles (Fretheim 1993), the paper claims that an account in terms of a direct intonational-illocutionary interface proves to have the advantage of economy.
Atkan Aleut has non-subject pronominals that are attracted to a position just before the verb but do not fuse with it. This clitic like behavior, termed unclitic, is modeled using a version of the automodular or autolexical analysis proposed by Sadock (1991). The unclitic pattern is proposed as the explanation for a set of apparent counterexamples in the puzzling word-order-and-‘definiteness’ paradigms first presented by Bergsland & Dirks (1981: 31–33) and commented on by Fortescue (1987), Leer (1988), and Sadock (2009)
This paper discusses the nature of restrictions imposed by derivational affixes on the bases in word formation. While some derivational affixes select the base of a particular syntactic category, there are affixes whose restrictions on the base are semantic in nature. Two sets of nominalization affixes in Japanese (-sa and -mi; -kata and -buri) display different and disjoint semantic and syntactic selectional properties, which operate independently from each other, as well as interact to block certain derived nominal forms. The way different types of base selection by these affixes work and interact with each other is best accounted for by a modular approach to word formation, as advocated by the Autolexical Syntax model (Sadock 1991).
This paper is an attempt to demonstrate how the morphological phenomena found in West Greenlandic and other polysynthetic languages are best accounted for within a simple, truly word-based theory of morphology, without the use of morphemes, morpho-phonological rules, or anything else that could remotely justify the existence of a morphological level of linguistic representation.
In English both the preposition and complementizer till take on the enclitic form ‘ll, with the main verb wait serving as its host. This chapter offers a multimodular analysis of these enclitics within the Autolexical/Automodular framework of Sadock (1991, 2003). Although they are bound morphemes attaching outside inflection and blocking further morphological operations, they are not prototypical enclitics: they are not productive and act selectively w.r.t. their morphological host. As for the constraints on the Morphology-Syntax interface, enclitic ‘ll morphologically attaches to a verb which does not belong to the constituent it syntactically combines with. Phonologically, it is agglutinative, stressless, and subject to automatic phonological rules. Semantically, it acts as a functor taking a constituent meaning as its argument.
Aleut shows a remarkable alternation in its case and agreement patterns: roughly put, one pattern appears when a non-subject argument is syntactically unexpressed in a predicate, and the other pattern appears otherwise. This paper is devoted to an attempt to provide a coherent analysis for this alternation: the missing argument is analyzed as a pro which must move into a local relation with the highest T; in this position, it triggers additional agreement on the verb, and blocks normal case assignment to the subject (which then gets a different case). This movement is analogous to that of (potentially long) clitic movement, and its effects on the case and agreement patterns is shown to be similar to the wh-agreement pattern in Chamorro.
This paper contrasts the analysis of English derived nominals (i. e., words such as refusal, height, goodness, movement, etc.) in minimalism, automodular grammar, and classical transformational grammar. It argues that minimalism does the poorest job of the three in handling their distinctive properties. Automodular grammar and classical transformational grammar are each partly successful. The paper closes with a discussion of how automodular grammar and classical transformational grammar might each be extended to account for the relevant facts. Essentially, the former could incorporate a notion such as ‘canonical argument structure’, while the latter could borrow from automodular grammar a mechanism for interfacing mismatched surface representations from different grammatical modules.
On the currently dominant view of superficially subjectless infinitival complements they contain a PRO subject (and are thus syntactically sentential), and denote a proposition. Sadock (2008) argues against the PRO analysis, but maintains the propositional view. This paper follows Montague’s (1973) analysis, on which such complements are VPs and denote properties, citing arguments from Chierchia (1984a, b) and Dowty (1985). I give a new argument, based on the necessarily de se interpretation of these complements, and respond to the analysis of Roberts (2009).
This paper is a try at building a bridge between a vexing topic – the architecture of emphatic sentences in English (and by induction, of all languages) – and the automodular theory of our old pal Jerry Sadock, a theory which I understand way too little of. I beg forbearance at the outset for my misunderstandings, and I only hope that the end of the bridge about emphatic sentences will be clearly enough enunciated that people who know more about automodularity will be able to see where I get to in crossing the Great Water between us, so that they, starting with a clear idea of the ins and outs of their machinery and tools, will be able to proceed towards what a dyed-in-the-wool (i.e. a non-recovering) transformationalist like myself finds to be of central importance.
We identify a gestural marker for negation in a home sign system: a side-to-side headshake. This marker expresses a meaning that corresponds semantically to a function that applies to a sentence (whose semantic value is a proposition) and yields another, more complex sentence. Combining negation with a sentence involves sentential modification; we therefore propose that the side-to-side gesture is a structure building operator. We show that it systematically occupies a position at the left periphery of the string, isomorphic to the logical syntax. If what we see in home sign is language creation (Goldin-Meadow 2003), our analysis implies that home signs have at least the minimal syntax of negation, and therefore contributes to ongoing debates about fundamental properties of language
This chapter presents psycholinguistic evidence for “default correspondences” – canonical mappings between semantic roles and constituent ordering – in the comprehension of two types of noun phrase mismatch: possessive free relatives and quantificational nouns. Experiments showed that possessive free relatives were processed more slowly and comprehended less accurately than normal possessive relatives, whereas quantificational nouns were processed more quickly and understood more accurately than normal binominal noun phrases. Following Townsend & Bever (2001), possessive free relatives cause processing difficulty because the position of the head violates the default, leading to confusion in semantic role assignment. Quantificational nouns do not violate the default in this way. One implication is that default correspondences may help limit mismatch in languages through their role in sentence comprehension.
This paper evaluates the claim that semantic and formal elements of language can be understood as interdependent modules, based on an analysis of essays written for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). Two different writing tasks from the TOEFL test, which place different cognitive constraints on the process of linguistic production, are compared on the basis of automatically-calculated features, and found to elicit responses with systematic linguistic differences. An argument is developed that these empirical findings support the modeling of grammar as a multi-modular system, in which constraints placed on one linguistic module can determine how fully constraints on other modules can be satisfied.
Autolexical Grammar (AG) explains both the coherent systematicity and the pervasive idiosyncrasies present in natural language through a unified, multimodular approach moderated by lexical constraints. This chapter presents recent research in cognitive neuroscience that bears on the representational strengths of AG. While AG does not strive to be a psycholinguistic model of cognitive processing in real time, the ability of AG to represent mismatch and resolution as formal constraints, and the emphasis that AG places on the lexicon as the moderating factor in constraint satisfaction, provides descriptive mechanisms that can further illuminate cognitive approaches to language processing.
The division of labor between semantic and pragmatic contributions of almost and other proximatives has long been controversial. A watershed in this dispute is Sadock’s (1981) proposal that I almost won only conversationally implicates, rather than entailing, I didn’t win. Neither this “radical pragmatic” line nor a pure entailment account covers the full range of data, including the non-cancelability of the polar component and the distribution of polarity items. This gap prompts the construct of assertoric inertia (Horn 2002a), exploiting the distinction between what is entailed and what is asserted. I buttress that approach here with additional arguments, address the role of other semantic and pragmatic factors, and revisit the viability of assertoric inertia in the light of other recent work.
In 1985 Jerry Sadock offered a solution to the Performadox, a puzzle about performative sentences propounded in 1980 by Boër and Lycan. The present paper defends Sadock’s approach, particularly against a number of objections previously made by Lycan.
This essay reconceptualizes the relationship of mental-act, mental-state, and speech-act verbs. It shows that ‘believe’ can be used as a mental-activity, quasi-performative verb and not just a mental-state verb, illustrates the explanatory value of distinguishing performative from quasi-performative verbs, and draws the implications of the new taxonomy of verbs for Moore’s Paradox. Quasi-performative, mental activity verbs can express (manifest) or create mental-states just as performative speech-act forms like ‘I promise’ can create obligations. The arguments employ methods first used by Jerrold Sadock (1974) in his classic work Toward a Linguistic Theory of Speech Acts. I adapt his syntactical arguments that appeal to the properties of expositive adverbials in sentences with verbs of communication to the case, which Sadock did not discuss, of the mental-state verb ‘believe’ and show that ‘believe’ has more than mental-state uses; it is also a mental-activity verb that has properties that, following Hunter (1990), I call ‘quasi-performative’. I also use the adverbial for the last time to distinguish ‘believe’ from a performative verb. Likewise I extend Sadock’s arguments for the case of performative communication verbs embedded in factive sentences, e.g. in ‘regret’ sentences, to show that ‘believe’ has performative-like uses. I also employ Sadock’s observations on the relation between stative-verb sentences and related pseudo-cleft sentences to show that ‘believe’ and ‘regret’ have non-stative uses. I discuss the views of Donald Davidson and Zeno Vendler on the difference between mental state-verbs and mental event-verbs. And I conclude with the implications of this new characterization of ‘believe’ for the classic problem of Moore’s Paradox.
In this paper Rogers examines two proposed accounts of pragmatic presupposition, offered by Stalnaker and Sadock at the 1973 Texas Conference, in light of what we now call presupposition accommodation. Rogers argues that the general process of utterance incrementation, pointed out by Stalnaker (1978), and developed in Rogers’s paper, reveals that the process of accommodation is more complex than envisioned in Stalnaker’s work, that Stalnaker’s account and Sadock’s apply at different points in the accommodation process, and that given a version of Stalnaker’s evolving account, extended in light of utterance incrementation, Sadock’s proposal appears to follow as a condition on utterance per se.
This chapter examines what the pragmatic skills of autistic individuals suggest about the claim by Sadock (1970, 1972) and others that questions like “Can you pass the salt” are conventionalized for use as indirect requests. A review of the autism literature indicates that the primary pragmatic deficit in autism is in reading speakers’ minds. Autistic individuals should thus only fail at inferences involving speakers’ beliefs and intents, for example conversational implicatures. Anecdotal and empirical evidence bears this out. Autistic individuals correctly interpret non-literal uses of language so long as such uses are conventionalized, and so long as the conventions in question have entered their lexicons. In particular, they readily process “Can you” utterances as indirect requests, confirming Sadock’s thesis.
This paper examines two pseudo-apologies in the news. Apologies have been defined as involving acceptance of responsibility for an offense and an acknowledgment of its wrongfulness. In contrast, pseudo-apologies index a stance lacking in remorse. This examination of a deviant type of apology reveals some of the limits that mediation imposes on more prototypical apologies: the more a speaker is viewed as attending to the interests of parties other than the offended party/ies, the greater the detriment to the apology. We propose that the polysemy of I’m sorry (and, via association, I apologize), which can serve as both apology and expression of sympathy, provides the functional structure for the pseudo-apologies examined here.
Sentence – or rather, utterance – intonation poses an interesting conceptual challenge for any linguistic theory that assumes a rigid separation of phonological and pragmatic representations (as assumed in current Minimalist theory), as does the interaction of structure with speech act (examined in detail by Sadock 1974). This paper seeks to demonstrate that intonation and illocutionary force all too often correlate with one another, with or without the mediation of syntactic form, and argues that this correlation warrants the hypothesis of an interface between intonation and illocutionary force, with both matches and mismatches, in continuation of the automodular view of language advocated by Sadock (1991 et seq.). Citing evidence from child language, dialectal variation, and autism research in Bangla and Hindi, besides research on Norwegian intonation and pragmatic particles (Fretheim 1993), the paper claims that an account in terms of a direct intonational-illocutionary interface proves to have the advantage of economy.
Atkan Aleut has non-subject pronominals that are attracted to a position just before the verb but do not fuse with it. This clitic like behavior, termed unclitic, is modeled using a version of the automodular or autolexical analysis proposed by Sadock (1991). The unclitic pattern is proposed as the explanation for a set of apparent counterexamples in the puzzling word-order-and-‘definiteness’ paradigms first presented by Bergsland & Dirks (1981: 31–33) and commented on by Fortescue (1987), Leer (1988), and Sadock (2009)
This paper discusses the nature of restrictions imposed by derivational affixes on the bases in word formation. While some derivational affixes select the base of a particular syntactic category, there are affixes whose restrictions on the base are semantic in nature. Two sets of nominalization affixes in Japanese (-sa and -mi; -kata and -buri) display different and disjoint semantic and syntactic selectional properties, which operate independently from each other, as well as interact to block certain derived nominal forms. The way different types of base selection by these affixes work and interact with each other is best accounted for by a modular approach to word formation, as advocated by the Autolexical Syntax model (Sadock 1991).
This paper is an attempt to demonstrate how the morphological phenomena found in West Greenlandic and other polysynthetic languages are best accounted for within a simple, truly word-based theory of morphology, without the use of morphemes, morpho-phonological rules, or anything else that could remotely justify the existence of a morphological level of linguistic representation.
In English both the preposition and complementizer till take on the enclitic form ‘ll, with the main verb wait serving as its host. This chapter offers a multimodular analysis of these enclitics within the Autolexical/Automodular framework of Sadock (1991, 2003). Although they are bound morphemes attaching outside inflection and blocking further morphological operations, they are not prototypical enclitics: they are not productive and act selectively w.r.t. their morphological host. As for the constraints on the Morphology-Syntax interface, enclitic ‘ll morphologically attaches to a verb which does not belong to the constituent it syntactically combines with. Phonologically, it is agglutinative, stressless, and subject to automatic phonological rules. Semantically, it acts as a functor taking a constituent meaning as its argument.
Aleut shows a remarkable alternation in its case and agreement patterns: roughly put, one pattern appears when a non-subject argument is syntactically unexpressed in a predicate, and the other pattern appears otherwise. This paper is devoted to an attempt to provide a coherent analysis for this alternation: the missing argument is analyzed as a pro which must move into a local relation with the highest T; in this position, it triggers additional agreement on the verb, and blocks normal case assignment to the subject (which then gets a different case). This movement is analogous to that of (potentially long) clitic movement, and its effects on the case and agreement patterns is shown to be similar to the wh-agreement pattern in Chamorro.
This paper contrasts the analysis of English derived nominals (i. e., words such as refusal, height, goodness, movement, etc.) in minimalism, automodular grammar, and classical transformational grammar. It argues that minimalism does the poorest job of the three in handling their distinctive properties. Automodular grammar and classical transformational grammar are each partly successful. The paper closes with a discussion of how automodular grammar and classical transformational grammar might each be extended to account for the relevant facts. Essentially, the former could incorporate a notion such as ‘canonical argument structure’, while the latter could borrow from automodular grammar a mechanism for interfacing mismatched surface representations from different grammatical modules.
On the currently dominant view of superficially subjectless infinitival complements they contain a PRO subject (and are thus syntactically sentential), and denote a proposition. Sadock (2008) argues against the PRO analysis, but maintains the propositional view. This paper follows Montague’s (1973) analysis, on which such complements are VPs and denote properties, citing arguments from Chierchia (1984a, b) and Dowty (1985). I give a new argument, based on the necessarily de se interpretation of these complements, and respond to the analysis of Roberts (2009).
This paper is a try at building a bridge between a vexing topic – the architecture of emphatic sentences in English (and by induction, of all languages) – and the automodular theory of our old pal Jerry Sadock, a theory which I understand way too little of. I beg forbearance at the outset for my misunderstandings, and I only hope that the end of the bridge about emphatic sentences will be clearly enough enunciated that people who know more about automodularity will be able to see where I get to in crossing the Great Water between us, so that they, starting with a clear idea of the ins and outs of their machinery and tools, will be able to proceed towards what a dyed-in-the-wool (i.e. a non-recovering) transformationalist like myself finds to be of central importance.
We identify a gestural marker for negation in a home sign system: a side-to-side headshake. This marker expresses a meaning that corresponds semantically to a function that applies to a sentence (whose semantic value is a proposition) and yields another, more complex sentence. Combining negation with a sentence involves sentential modification; we therefore propose that the side-to-side gesture is a structure building operator. We show that it systematically occupies a position at the left periphery of the string, isomorphic to the logical syntax. If what we see in home sign is language creation (Goldin-Meadow 2003), our analysis implies that home signs have at least the minimal syntax of negation, and therefore contributes to ongoing debates about fundamental properties of language
This chapter presents psycholinguistic evidence for “default correspondences” – canonical mappings between semantic roles and constituent ordering – in the comprehension of two types of noun phrase mismatch: possessive free relatives and quantificational nouns. Experiments showed that possessive free relatives were processed more slowly and comprehended less accurately than normal possessive relatives, whereas quantificational nouns were processed more quickly and understood more accurately than normal binominal noun phrases. Following Townsend & Bever (2001), possessive free relatives cause processing difficulty because the position of the head violates the default, leading to confusion in semantic role assignment. Quantificational nouns do not violate the default in this way. One implication is that default correspondences may help limit mismatch in languages through their role in sentence comprehension.
This paper evaluates the claim that semantic and formal elements of language can be understood as interdependent modules, based on an analysis of essays written for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). Two different writing tasks from the TOEFL test, which place different cognitive constraints on the process of linguistic production, are compared on the basis of automatically-calculated features, and found to elicit responses with systematic linguistic differences. An argument is developed that these empirical findings support the modeling of grammar as a multi-modular system, in which constraints placed on one linguistic module can determine how fully constraints on other modules can be satisfied.
Autolexical Grammar (AG) explains both the coherent systematicity and the pervasive idiosyncrasies present in natural language through a unified, multimodular approach moderated by lexical constraints. This chapter presents recent research in cognitive neuroscience that bears on the representational strengths of AG. While AG does not strive to be a psycholinguistic model of cognitive processing in real time, the ability of AG to represent mismatch and resolution as formal constraints, and the emphasis that AG places on the lexicon as the moderating factor in constraint satisfaction, provides descriptive mechanisms that can further illuminate cognitive approaches to language processing.