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Newsletter August 29, No. 43



                      C S L I   N E W S L E T T E R
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August 29, 1985                 Stanford                       Vol. 2, No. 43
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     A weekly publication of The Center for the Study of Language and
     Information, Ventura Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
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           CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *THIS* THURSDAY, August 29, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``A Unified Indexical Analysis of ``same'' and
     Conference Room    ``different'': A Response to Stump and Carlson''
			by David Dowty
			Discussion led by Mats Rooth
		
   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Talk
     Ventura Hall	No talk this week
     Conference Room	
			
   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		
                              ____________

         CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, September 5, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``Predication, Logical Syntax, and the Type-free 
     Conference Room    Conception of Properties, Relations, and Propositions''
			Discussion led by Chris Menzel
			(Abstract on page 2)

   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Talk
     Ventura Hall	No talk this week
     Conference Room	
			
   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		


Page 2                     CSLI Newsletter                    August 29, 1985
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                    ABSTRACT FOR NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
       ``Predication, Logical Syntax, and the Type-free Conception
              of Properties, Relations, and Propositions''

      Since Frege, the (arguably) dominant conception of properties,
   relations, and propositions (PRPs) has been typed.  The first rigorous
   formal development of this view by Russell was motivated largely by
   his discovery of the justly famous paradox that bears his name, and
   was for many years considered the definitive solution to the problem.
   More recently, the view (albeit in extensionalist garb) has enjoyed a
   renewed respectability, and a renewed applicability, in linguistics
   and the philosophy of language prompted by Montague's assiduous
   investigations into the semantics of natural language.
      Recent years, however, have seen a growing dissatisfaction with the
   typed conception of PRPs.  I will begin this week's discussion by
   pointing out some of the problems lurking behind this dissatisfaction,
   and will then present the basics of a type-free alternative.  Despite
   the fact that Frege himself had a typed conception of PRPs, the
   type-free view I will present is largely Fregean in spirit: I will
   argue in particular that properties and relations are in some sense
   ``unsaturated.''  This insight, however, doesn't require typing, as
   Frege seemed to think, and I will show where, in my view, he went
   wrong.  I will then argue that the standard function/argument notation
   of first- and higher-order logic ought, as Frege intended, to be
   thought of as representing the ``completion'' of an unsaturated
   property or relation, and not, contra Bealer, the standing of two or
   more objects in a further relation of predication.  This suggests a
   number of important questions about the nature of logic that will be
   raised for discussion.				--Chris Menzel
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            INTERACTIONS OF MORPHOLOGY, SYNTAX, AND DISCOURSE
                        ``Swedish Ditransitives''
              Summary of the meeting on Thursday, August 22

      In most Swedish ditransitive sentences, either object may
   passivize.  This talk addressed the question of what special property
   of Swedish permits the second object to advance to subjecthood in the
   passive.  It was argued that the property in question is a disjunction
   between two syntactic functions, SUBJECT and TOPIC, on the
   sentence-initial position (the verb-second constraint).  Subjects can
   be distinguished from topics through various syntactic tests (e.g.,
   embedding under raising verbs), but this distinction is often opaque
   in simple clauses.  It was argued that this conflation of two
   alternative functions on a single constituent structure node has
   caused the topic to be reanalyzed as a subject.  Since topicalization
   does not alter grammatical relations, it applies freely to second
   objects in Swedish and English.  But only in Swedish can this
   topicalized second object be reanalyzed as a subject.  When the source
   (before topicalization) is an impersonal passive construction, the
   result is a passivized second object.
      Finally, a ``movement'' analysis, in which topicalization and
   passivization are two instances of a single process defined on
   c-structure (such as ``move alpha''), was rejected.  With verbs
   subcategorized for both a direct object and an oblique function, the
   prepositional object topicalizes but does not passivize, even in
   identical c-structures.  This suggests that the two processes belong
   to different sub-components of the syntax.		--Steve Wechsler

Page 3                     CSLI Newsletter                     August 29, 1985
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                            NEW CSLI REPORTS

     Report No. CSLI-85-29, ``Equations, Schemata and Situations: A
   framework for linguistic semantics'' by Jens Erik Fenstad,
   Per-Kristian Halvorsen, Tore Langholm, and Johan van Benthem, and
   Report No. CSLI-85-30, ``Institutions: Abstract Model Theory for
   Computer Science'' by J. A. Goguen and R. M. Burstall, have just been
   published.  These reports may be obtained by writing to David Brown,
   CSLI, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305 or Brown@SU-CSLI.
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