🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi all,

Our first candidate for the syntax position is:  Laura Michaelis.
Laura will be giving a talk Friday, Feb 27, at 3:30 pm (I hope
in Woodbury 106).  Refreshments will be provided!

The title of the talk and an abstract of the talk follow.


Title. The Pragmatics of Syntax: Nominal Extraposition and the Exclamative
Sentence Type

Abstract. 

Through a detailed examination of a particular sentence pattern, I will
outline a formal model of syntax in which grammatical and syntactic
representations refer to pragmatic conditions. This is a model which I am
developing in collaboration with Knud Lambrecht (Michaelis and Lambrecht
1996). In this model, sentence types--pairings of form, meaning, and
discourse function--are the building blocks of a grammatical system, as
per Construction Grammar (Fillmore, Kay and O'Connor 1988, Goldberg 1995,
Zwicky 1994, Jackendoff 1997). The sentence pattern in question, which I
will refer to as Nominal Extraposition (NE), is exemplified by the
advertising slogan (ital) It's amazing the difference(ital). NE bears a
superficial resemblance to Right Dislocation (RD). However, I will argue
that NE must be distinguished from RD on syntactic, semantic, and
discourse-pragmatic grounds. The postpredicate NP is a TOPIC in the case
of RD and a FOCUS in the case of NE. This NP receives a metonymic scalar
interpretation in the case of NE but not in RD.

In order to capture the properties of NE we have to pull together two
functional frameworks where constructions play a crucial role: INFORMATION
STRUCTURE and SPEECH ACT THEORY. NE is a sentence-focus (or thetic) 
construction (Kuroda 1972, Lambrecht 1994) and it functions as an
exclamation. I will show that basic formal, semantic and
discourse-pragmatic properties of NE follow from this dual categorization.
I will do this by relating properties of NE to universal tendencies in the
coding of sentence-focus utterances (Sasse 1987, Lambrecht 1995) and in
the grammaticalization of exclamative meaning (Sadock and Zwicky 1985,
Grimshaw 1979, Michaelis forthcoming).

I will describe a formal implementation of these observations based on the
idea that grammatical constructions are organized in taxonomic hierarchies
(Pinker 1989, Fillmore and Kay 1994, Michaelis 1994, Goldberg 1995,
Jackendoff 1997). In these hierarchies, more detailed constructions can
inherit formal, semantic and pragmatic specifications from more general
constructions. A construction is motivated to the extent that it shares
structure with other constructions (Goldberg 1995). 

The broad conclusions of this talk are three. First, grammatical
description requires reference to categories of functional analysis.
Second, idiosyncratic properties of constructions may be MOTIVATED
properties (Nunberg, Sag and Wasow 1994, Pinker and Prince 1991). And
finally, there is no incompatibility between formal methodology and
functional theory, since pragmatic categories are also categories of
grammar and syntax.