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Newsletter May 2, No. 27



                      C S L I   N E W S L E T T E R
_____________________________________________________________________________
May 2, 1985                     Stanford                       Vol. 2, No. 27
_____________________________________________________________________________
                                
     A weekly publication of The Center for the Study of Language and
     Information, Ventura Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
                              ____________

            CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *THIS* THURSDAY, May 2, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``Categorizing the Senses of `Take' ''
     Conference Room    by Peter Norvig
			Discussion led by Douglas Edwards
			
   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Redwood Hall       ``Property Theory and Second-Order Logic''
     Room G-19          Chris Menzel, CSLI
			
   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		

   4:15 p.m.		CSLI Colloquium
     Redwood Hall       ``A Formal Theory of Innate Linguistic Knowledge''
     Room G-19		Janet Fodor, University of Connecticut
			Originally scheduled for April 11
                               ___________

            CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, May 9, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``Scenes and Events''
     Conference Room    by Steven Neale, Dept. of Linguistics, Stanford
			(Abstract on page 2)
			
   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Redwood Hall       ``Approaches to Generalized Quantifiers in 
     Room G-19          Heim/Kamp Semantics''
			Mats Rooth, CSLI
			(Abstract on page 2)

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		

   4:15 p.m.		CSLI Colloquium
     Redwood Hall       ``Reduced Forms of Comparative Clauses''
     Room G-19		James D. McCawley, University of Chicago
			(Abstract on page 3)			
			

Page 2  		     CSLI Newsletter   	                  May 2, 1985
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                    ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
                          ``Scenes and Events''

      In his paper ``The Logic of Perceptual Reports", Jim Higginbotham
   presents an alternative to Situation Semantics' treatment of the
   semantics of naked-infinitive perceptual reports such as ``John saw
   Mary wink''. Drawing on an idea of Davidson's, Higginbotham attempts
   to make explicit the implicit quantification over events in
   NI-perceptual reports by augmenting the valency of certain verbs with
   an extra quantifiable place. In this way, he purports to capture
   Barwise's semantic generalizations purely formally at a level of
   linguistic representation intimately related to LF in
   Government-Binding theory.
      In ``Scenes and Events'' Stephen Neale critically evaluates
   Higginbotham's proposal, concluding that it fails on both semantic and
   syntactic grounds: (i) it neither gives an adequate account of the
   semantic facts it was meant to account for nor meshes with the sorts
   of syntactic considerations which are supposed to motivate it, (ii) it
   fails to confront problems which must be encountered by any purely
   formal account of certain classes of semantic facts, and (iii) it
   admits of no simple incorporation into the GB framework within which
   Higginbotham wishes to embed it.
                              ____________
                     ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR
      ``Approaches to Generalized Quantifiers in Heim/Kamp Semantics''

   The original versions of Heim's file change semantics and Kamp's
   discourse representation theory treated the quantificational
   determiners ``every'' and ``no''.  It has been pointed out that
   extensions to other quantifiers are not immediate.  One problem is
   that the variable corresponding to the head of a quantified NP and the
   variables corresponding to indefinites in the NP are given equal
   status, although ``many a man who owns a donkey beats it'' and ``many
   a donkey which is owned by a man is beaten by him'' appear to have
   different truth conditions.  Recently, generalized quantifier
   treatments for DR theory have been proposed by Klein and others.  I
   will show how Barwise's parameterized set quantifiers can be
   considered a theory of generalized quantifiers for file change
   semantics, and consider extensions to plurals.	--Mats Rooth
			

Page 3                       CSLI Newsletter                      May 2, 1985
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                   ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S COLLOQUIUM
                ``Reduced Forms of Comparative Clauses''

      Russell in 1905 observed that ``than''-clauses within a subordinate
   clause can be ambiguous with regard to scope, e.g., (1) is ambiguous
   with regard to whether the clause introduced by ``than'' is
   semantically part of the complement of ``think.''  However, not all
   reduced forms of ``than''-clauses exhibit this ambiguity; i.e., for
   example, it is absent from the fully reduced ``than''-clause of (2).

     (1) I thought your yacht was longer than it is.
     (2) I thought your yacht was longer than her yacht.

      If the clause introduced by ``than'' or ``as'' is treated as a
   definite description (the x such that your yacht is x much long) and
   underlying structures are assumed in which quantified expressions
   (including definite descriptions) are sisters of the Ss that serve as
   their scopes, the difference in possible interpretations of the
   different reduced ``than''-clauses follows from the typology of
   deletion transformations that distinguishes pronominal deletions,
   which are subject only to the general constraints on where pronouns
   can occur in relation to their antecedents, from REDUCTIONS, which
   delete all but one constituent of an item and are subject to a
   locality condition.
      The resulting analysis of fully reduced ``than''-clauses, as in
   (2), reveals them in fact to be ambiguous, but in a different way from
   (1), and, in conjunction with an analysis in which tenses and
   auxiliary verbs are external to their host Ss in underlying structure,
   accounts for the 3-way ambiguity of (3).

     (3) John has eaten more pizza than Bill.
							--James McCawley
                              ____________
                      ABSTRACT OF AREA NL-1 MEETING
          ``New Aspects of Aspect: A Look at Mandarin Chinese''
                  Carlota S. Smith, University of Texas
          Friday, May 10, 2:30 pm, Ventura Hall Conference Room

      A study of the aspectual system of Mandarin Chinese tests current
   approaches to aspect: the system is considerably more complex than
   that of familiar Indo-European languages, with several perfectives and
   two imperfectives.  Certain features of Chinese are particularly
   interesting.  One perfective involves an interval that spans beyond
   the final endpoint of the situation talked about; it requires a
   viewpoint component of aspect separate from situation type.  Another
   perfective, with reduplication, presents a particular situation type.
   It can be accounted for with an aspect-changing lexical rule and
   suggests the notion of marked, language-specific situation types.  The
   imperfectives differentiate the internal structure of statives and
   non-statives.  Finally, the Aristotelian situation types are realized
   in Chinese within the general pattern of the language.  Some verbs are
   subtly different from their English counterparts, realizing different
   situation types in each language.  Thus, ``die'' is an Accomplishment
   in English and an Achievement in Chinese.  (No interpretation of this
   point is offered.)
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