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Part of
A0 – The Lexical Status of Adjectives
Edited by Phoevos Panagiotidis and Moreno Mitrović
[Language Faculty and Beyond 17] 2022
► pp. 257–292

First-phase semantics

| Leibniz Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) | Bled Institute

Everything else being equal, the procedural principles of interpretational composition should abide by the morphosyntactic structure that is provided to the conceptual intentional interface, in its totality and without stipulative exception. To equip the theory of mapping and interpretation with stipulations that would ‘skip’ or ignore nodes would mean ridding that theory of the principle-based power of explanation it is presumably designed to provide. It seems an undesirable consequence to me to end up with a model in which most morphemes are void of meaning or some kind of contribution to meaning. A foundational lexical structure, qua First Phase, containing an acategorial root and a categorising head, has not received a principled analysis which would not pull cheap tricks and attempt to assign denotation, or at least non-void denotational properties, to the categorial (n, v) formatives and the acategorial loci of lexical meaning (roots). This paper sketches a programme for doing exactly that: semantics at Phase One of the morphosyntactic derivation.

Keywords: first-phase, derivation by phase, semantic compositionality, type theory, multi-sorted, adjectives, adjectival meaning, nouns, nominal meaning, verbs, verbal meaning, lexical categories, meaning, interpretation, interpretation theory, totality, partiality, sort theory, property, predicates, set, English, Slovenian, adverb, phi-features, defectivity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Property Theory
    • 1.2Microsemantics
      • 1.2.1On the partiality/totality of structure reading
  • 2.Thesis
  • 3.Implementation: Roots as properties, categories as kinds
  • 4.A biversal sort-theoretic property theory for root categorisation
    • 4.1BPT1.0
    • 4.2BPT2.0
  • 5.Deriving nouns and verbs
    • 5.1Nouns
    • 5.2Verbs
  • 6.Deriving adjectives
    • Modulating degrees and deriving gradability.
    • Laxing the filtering effects.
  • 7.Discussion
    • Conclusions.
    • Problems and outlook.
    • Beyond first-phase: a sort-theoretic aetiology of alternatives.
  • Notes
  • References
  • Acknowledgements
Published online: 24 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.17.08mit
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