Measure for Measure

Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 2010

We analyze patterns of variation in degree constructions as ultimately semantically motivated (Beck et al. 2004); more precisely, as rooted at the (structured) level of logical form via a parameter based on binding. The paper pursues two related objectives. First, we complement the sharp distinction between languages like Japanese vs. English with a case of a language that seems to be parametrically intermediate. We suggest that Modern Romanian is sensitive to largely the same configurations which are conspicuous in the Japanese/English split, but that it marks the relevant dependencies overtly. Second, we probe for the grammaticalization process of the pertinent functional items involved in marking degree dependencies by conducting a diachronic pilot study. In this part of the article, we analyze data from (literary) Old Romanian. We investigate the degree constructions at this stage of the language in preliminary fashion and point out that they display a particularly instable situation with regard to the diagnostics of the degree parameter discussed, a factor which may have enhanced the grammaticalization of the particular strategies under discussion and hence co-motivates the apparently idiosyncratic current distribution in the language.

Acta Linguistica Academica, 2021

faculty.biu.ac.il

This paper has two main goals: to argue that crosslinguistically there are two major types of numeral-noun constructions, one in which a projection of the numeral occupies a specifier position and one in which the numeral heads a recursive nominal structure; and to show that the choice between these two structures is partially constrained by the presence of number features and case. It is shown that numerals bearing nominal number morphology display a cluster of properties that often distinguishes them from other numerals in the same language; I claim that presence of morphosyntactic number makes the numeral sufficiently `noun-like' to be subject to general principles of case theory.

Language, 2018

The noun dog disposes of morphological and syntactic means to be counted, such as pluralization, but the noun water doesn't. Average speakers of English are hardly mystified by this contrast-for dog names a type of object in the world which is easily countable, namely discrete entities, while water refers to a (non-discrete) substance. Despite the strong intuition that grammatical form and ontological type are related, this putative relation is the central point of controversy in the count/mass literature. Many researchers have proposed that semantic categorization does not underlie the count/mass distinction. One argument hinges on crosslinguistic incommensurability: If the count/mass distinction reflects the ontological nature of entities in the world, viz. discrete entities vs. substances, it is unexpected that a particular entity would be named by a countable noun in one language but a non-countable noun in another.

Russian Linguistics, 2013

The Russian cardinal numeral construction presents symptomatic variations of behavior with respect to the category of animacy. The present paper addresses these variations using data from the Russian National Corpus and the Internet and in it the following conclusion is drawn: the numeral construction is an important fragment of Russian grammar in which the category of animacy is not completely grammaticalized, which means that it conserves its semantic status. The variations presented by numeral constructions thus allow for the postulating of a centre-periphery organization for the category of animacy in Russian. There are at least three factors that interact with each other when a choice between the inanimate and the animate construction is made: the semantics of the verbs or of the constructions as a whole, the referential status of the quantified noun, and the semantics of the latter. • Oblique construction. Homogeneous pattern (the resulting construction is genitive in (2) and instrumental in (3)): (2) Uėtix gen.pl dvux gen / pjati gen studentov gen.pl [GEN] est' problemy. 'These two / five students have problems.' (3) Sėtimi instr.pl dvumja / pjat'ju instr studentami instr.pl [INSTR] nado razobrat'sja. 'We have to come to terms with these two / five students.' 1 "Konstrukcija Num + S v russkom jazyke-ėto svoeobraznyj utkonos, t.e. lingvističeskoe jajcekladuščee mlekopitajuščee [.. .]." (Mel'čuk 1985, 80). 2 One of the reviewers pointed out to the fact that I claim to use the RNC but only cite few examples in my paper. It is important to underline that the RNC is of limited use for such type of studies as mine, i.e. those that investigate grammatical variation and tendencies and use not only standard, but also substandard material. 3 For a detailed account, see Mel'čuk (1985).

Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. XXXIV, No. 4, 1992

Journal of Language Modelling 1.227-241, 2013

The Smith-Stark hierarchy, a version of the Animacy Hierarchy, offers a typology of the cross-linguistic availability of number. The hierarchy predicts that the availability of number is not arbitrary. For any language, if the expression of plural is available to a noun, it is available to any noun of a semantic category further to the left of the hierarchy. In this article we move one step further by showing that the structure of the hierarchy can be observed in a statistical model of number use in Russian. We also investigate three co-variates: plural preference, pluralia tantum and irregularity effects; these account for an item’s behaviour being different than that solely expected from its animacy position.

One of the goals of a certain brand of philosopher has been to give an account of language and linguistic phenomena by means of showing how sentences are to be translated into a "logically perspicuous notation" (or an "ideal language" -to use pass~ terminology). The usual reason given by such philosophers for this activity is that such a notational system will somehow illustrate the "logical form" of these sentences. There are many candidates for this notational system: (almost)ordinary first-order predicate logic (see Quine [1960]), higher-order predicate logic (see Parsons 1970]), intensional logic (see Montague [1969Montague [ , 1970aMontague [ , 1970bMontague [ , 1971), and transformational grammar (see Harrnan ), to mention some of the more popular ones. I donor propose to discuss the general question of the correctness of this approach to the philosophy of language, nor do 1 wish to adjudicate among the notational systems mentioned here. Rather, I want to focus on one problem which must be faced by all such systems -a problem that must be discussed before one decides upon a notational system and tries to demontrate that it in fact can account for all linguistic phenomena. The general problem is to determine what we shall allow as linguistic data; in this paper I shall restrict my attention to this general problem as it appears when we try to account for certain words with non-singular reference, in particular, the words that are classified by the count/ mass and sortal/non-sortal distinctions.