Enriched meanings and pseudo-incorporated bare singular count nouns - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Enriched meanings and pseudo-incorporated bare singular count nouns in English Curt Anderson SFB 991, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf 23-24 May 2019 Modifjcation of Complex Predicates Workshop Curt Anderson English bare singulars 23-24 May 2019 1 / 39

Introduction b. 23-24 May 2019 English bare singulars Curt Anderson on campus c. at home, at school in prison, in church Bare singular count nouns are generally barred in the verbal internal argument position in a. (2) However, there are some exceptions, such as nouns denoting locations (Stvan, 2009). He reads poetry/poems/*poem. (1) English (compared to bare singular plurals and mass nouns): 2 / 39

Introduction a. 23-24 May 2019 English bare singulars Curt Anderson (Google) in Hollywood does at least once: she waited table . Meanwhile, with her career going nowhere, she did what every hopeful actress c. (Google) Blake worked at the Nuart Theatre and drove truck during potato harvest. b. (Google) He drove bus for 55 years. There was hardly anything about it he didn’t like. (4) This talk: there are cases of bare singular count nouns in the direct object position of a partially dialectal in nature. But, not so diffjcult to fjnd attestations: Largely gone unnoticed and unremarked on (even by Stvan), possibly due to being wait table d. teach school, teach college c. tend bar b. drive bus, drive truck a. (3) verb. Some examples: 3 / 39

Interpretation c. 23-24 May 2019 English bare singulars Curt Anderson b. a. (6) get (Stvan, 2009). He drives truck occasionally. He drove truck for twenty years before retiring. b. He drives truck for a living. a. (5) sentence performs the event as their job or profession, as the examples in (5) suggest. languages (Dayal, 2015; Mithun, 1984). name-worthiness that characterizes the meaning of noun incorporation in other 4 / 39 ▶ Interpretation of these object BSNs + verb is similar to the institutionalization or ▶ In the English cases, these often have the interpretation that the subject of the ( → Occasionally, he earns a wage driving a truck.) ▶ Resembles the “activity implicature” that bare count noun objects of prepositions in church ̸ = in the church at school ̸ = at the school

Goals (Petersen, 2007) ontology developed by Anderson & Löbner (2018) for role-denoting relational adjectives, and cascades as developed by Löbner (2019) the VP (to be discussed more) Curt Anderson English bare singulars 23-24 May 2019 5 / 39 ▶ Argue that these BSNs are an instance of pseudo-incorporation ▶ Give an initial account of their semantic properties using tools from frame semantics ▶ Provide an explanation of the “institutionalization” of the event using the social ▶ My story will also account for a relative lack of modifjcation of both the noun and

Data

Disclaimer: dialect data English and American English as spoken in the US Midwest. family members, friends, and Google. Curt Anderson English bare singulars 23-24 May 2019 7 / 39 ▶ The cases of BNs under discussion here seem to be somewhat dialectal. ▶ Some examples are better than others; not all speakers accept all examples. ▶ Possibly restricted to some varieties of North American English, including Canadian ▶ Attempted to back up my own intuitions regarding the data using the intuitions of ▶ Lots of junk on Google, naturally, but I’ve tried to use mostly books or newspapers.

Data More examples: 23-24 May 2019 English bare singulars Curt Anderson dairy industry in the province. (Google) On his farm, he raises goat for meat and said there is potential for a goat (8) (constructed example) ??He breeds goat for the US Army. (7) and surprising examples can be found. Things to note: 8 / 39 ▶ drive truck ▶ teach school ▶ ride bus ▶ drive bus ▶ teach university ▶ drive tram ▶ teach high school ▶ play violin ▶ drive carriage ▶ keep book ▶ tend bar ▶ wait table ▶ play guitar ▶ Probably not an exhaustive list. ▶ Not clearly a productive pattern, but new coinages are better than expected for me, ▶ Exist on a scale of idiomaticity.

Properties of object BSNs in English Cluster of properties these exhibit: Curt Anderson English bare singulars 23-24 May 2019 9 / 39 ▶ Name well-established or institutional activity ▶ Noun is number neutral ▶ Noun doesn’t introduce a discourse referent ▶ Restricted modifjcation of the noun ▶ Restricted modifjcation of the verb phrase

Well-established or institutional activity c. 23-24 May 2019 English bare singulars Curt Anderson He drives school buses for fun. (10) is not obligatory: Well-establishedness can be a possible meaning with bare plural noun phrases as well, but He teaches college in Rhode Island and at the state prison. problems. (Google) Verb phrases with BSNs in English name an activity that is well-established or She waits table at Tony’s and tries to keep her spirits up despite her b. (Google) He drives school bus for Kenowa Public Schools to earn money for tuition. a. (9) conventionalized way of carrying it out. institutional in some sense, such as a profession or an activity with a regular, 10 / 39

Noun is number neutral a. 23-24 May 2019 English bare singulars Curt Anderson and the restaurant he works at has thirty tables. b. and (, weirdly,) the restaurant he works at only has one table. He waits table to support his acting career... The noun in object BSNs is interpreted as number neutral. (12) and she drives a difgerent bus for every route. b. and she always drives the same bus. a. She drives bus for a living... (11) 11 / 39

Noun doesn’t introduce discourse referent The noun in object BSNs does not introduce a discourse referent. (13) (14) Curt Anderson English bare singulars 23-24 May 2019 12 / 39 John drives truck i for a living. *It i is large/has 18 wheels/is painted red. She teaches school i . *It i has over 300 students. (15) *She waits table i at Tony’s, where they i are large and round.

Modifjcation of the noun Modifjcation of the noun in object BSNs is diffjcult. Diffjcult to fjnd true attributive modifjers (rather than compounds). (16) a. *drive large truck b. *drive slow bus c. *ride crowded bus d. *wait round table Curt Anderson English bare singulars 23-24 May 2019 13 / 39

Modifjcation of the verb phrase As are some spatial modifjers, and manner modifjers in general. 23-24 May 2019 English bare singulars Curt Anderson (20) *He drives truck fast/quickly/slowly/carefully b. ?He teaches school in that building. a. ??She drives truck on I-75. (19) b. ??She waited table for twenty minutes. Some temporal adverbials are possible with VPs with object BSNs. a. ??He drove bus for an hour. (18) However, short periods of time are less acceptable. Ron is driving bus today, but he’ll be available tomorrow for a consultation. b. She waited table for ten years. a. (17) 14 / 39

Summary of properties Cluster of properties these exhibit: Curt Anderson English bare singulars 23-24 May 2019 15 / 39 ▶ Name well-established or institutional activity ▶ Noun is number-neutral ▶ Weak referentiality ▶ Decreased modifjcation of both VP and noun itself.

Background

Frame semantics type of the frame. 23-24 May 2019 English bare singulars Curt Anderson (21) attribute-value matrices. 17 / 39 dog is a subtype of animal ). things) structured meanings (Löbner, 2014, 2017; Petersen, 2007, a.o.). ▶ Adopt a version of Düsseldorf frame semantics, a framework for (among other ▶ A frame is a recursive attribute-value structure. ▶ Values are typed in a type hierarchy, a hierarchical arrangement of types (i.e., the type ▶ Frame attributes are functional. An attribute can have only a single value for any particular holder. (In more traditional semantic terms, attributes are type ⟨ e , e ⟩ .) ▶ One value within a frame is distinguished as the “central node,” which provides the ▶ Frame composition via unifjcation. ▶ Representable using predicate logic, frame diagrams (directed graphs), or ▶ Example:   give ( e ) ∧ agent ( e ) = j ∧     � John gave the red fmower to Mary � = λe goal ( e ) = m ∧     theme ( e ) = f ∧   red ( color ( theme ( e )))

Social ontology facts to brute facts. 23-24 May 2019 English bare singulars Curt Anderson being in a classroom). (e.g., raising one’s hand level generates asking a question in the circumstances of particular social acts (Searle, 1995), a point also raised by Goldman (1970). acting, implementing social roles, and so on. ontology (e.g., “brute facts,” Searle (1995)). teachers, and such). functions, actions by social agents (e.g. voters, politicians, police, parents, spouses, 18 / 39 ▶ A social ontology provides for social entities: persons and institutions, roles, offjces, ▶ Essential are social acts performed by social agents that produce social facts by ▶ Entities in the social ontology are (ultimately) implemented by entities in a physical ▶ Persons are implemented by human animals. ▶ Social acts are implemented by doings that (under appropriate circumstances) count as ▶ The social ontology is grounded by and dependent on the physical ontology. ▶ Searle’s “counts as” relation (“X counts as Y in context C”) relates abstract social ▶ Similarly, Goldman’s notion of “level-generation” relates non-basic acts to basic acts