🚀 go-pugleaf

                         UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO
                      STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

                       DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS
                  GRADUATE GROUP IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
                                  and
   GRADUATE RESEARCH INITIATIVE IN COGNITIVE AND LINGUISTIC SCIENCES

                                PRESENT

                             ARNOLD ZWICKY

            Department of Linguistics, Ohio State University
             Department of Linguistics, Stanford University

            1.  TOWARDS A THEORY OF SYNTACTIC CONSTRUCTIONS

The past decade has seen the vigorous development of frameworks for syn-
tactic  description  that  not  only are fully explicit (to the point of
being easily modeled in computer programs) but also are integrated  with
an  equally explicit framework for semantic description (and, sometimes,
with equally explicit  frameworks  for  morphological  and  phonological
description).   This  has  made it possible to reconsider the _construc-
tion_ as a central concept in syntax.

Constructions are, like words, Saussurean signs--linkages of  linguistic
form  with  meanings  and pragmatic values.  The technical problem is to
develop the appropriate logics for the  interactions  between  construc-
tions,  both  with  respect  to  their  form  and  with respect to their
interpretation.  I am concerned here primarily with the formal  side  of
the  matter,  which turns out to be rather more intricate than one might
have  expected.   Constructions  are  complexes  of   categories,   sub-
categories, grammatical relations, conditions on governed features, con-
ditions on agreeing features, conditions on phonological  shape,  condi-
tions  on branching, conditions on ordering, _and_ specific contributory
constructions (so that, for example, the subject-auxiliary  construction
in  English  contributes  to  several  others, including the information
question construction, as in `What might you have seen?').  The  schemes
of  formal  interaction  I  will  illustrate  are overlapping, or mutual
applicability; superimposition, or invocation; and preclusion, or  over-
riding of defaults.

                       Thursday, November 3, 1988
                               5:00 P.M.
                       Baldy 684, Amherst Campus

       There will be an evening discussion on Nov. 3, 8:00 P.M.,
         at the home of Joan Bybee, 38 Endicott, Eggertsville.

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     2.  INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY AS A (SUB)COMPONENT OF GRAMMAR

                        Friday, November 4, 1988
                               3:00 P.M.
                       Baldy 684, Amherst Campus

                       Wine and cheese to follow.

Call Donna Gerdts (Dept. of Linguistics, 636-2177) for further information.