קולוקוויום מחקרי - החוג לבלשנות

במסגרת הקולוקוויום המחקרי של החוג לבלשנות, שמתקיים מדי יום חמישי, בין השעות 16:15-17:45 בבניין ווב (חדר 103):

הרצאתה של פרופ' מריה פולינסקי מאוניברסיטת מרילנד, שכותרתה:

Making Exceptions: The Syntax of Exceptive Constructions Across Languages 

תקציר:

Natural language allows us to express universal statements (e.g., All dogs bark), and languages also have means of expressing exceptions to such generalizations, via exceptive constructions (e.g., All dogs bark except basenjis). Within the exceptive construction, one recognizes the associate (all dogs) and the exceptive phrase (except basenjis) which in turn consists of the exceptive marker (except in the example above; consider also English but, other than, save, except for) and the exception (basenjis).

Linguistic means of expressing exclusion have received modest attention from philosophers of language and semanticists, whose focus has been primarily on English. Beyond that small body of work, little is known about exceptive constructions across the world’s languages: how they are built, what their distribution is within and across languages, and how they compare to other constructions expressing comparison or contrast. In this talk, I present and analyze the landscape of exceptive constructions in several natural languages focusing on the structural contrast between free/connected exceptives and phrasal/clausal exceptives. I will then link this exploration to more general issues of ellipsis and case-marking in exceptive phrases. In particular, I will consider polarity mismatches present in the exceptive construction. The bottom line is that relating polarity mismatches to syntactic representations results in a series of incorrect predictions; as a result, non-syntactic explanations need to be explored.    

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