{"id":14346,"date":"2021-10-18T05:00:22","date_gmt":"2021-10-18T09:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=14346"},"modified":"2021-10-18T09:43:18","modified_gmt":"2021-10-18T13:43:18","slug":"colloquium-10-22-omer-preminger-umd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2021\/10\/18\/colloquium-10-22-omer-preminger-umd\/","title":{"rendered":"Colloquium 10\/22 - Omer Preminger (UMD)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaker: <\/strong>Omer Preminger (UMD)

\nTitle: <\/strong>Natural language without semiosis

\nTime: <\/strong>Friday, October 22th, 3:30pm - 5pm
\nLocation:<\/strong> Zoom (but those on campus can gather in 32-155 to attend the talk together)<\/p>\n

Abstract: <\/strong>A traditional view holds that natural language is fundamentally <\/span>semiotic<\/span><\/i>, in that individual syntactic\u00a0 terminals are Saussurean \u0093signs\u0094 (Saussure 1916; Hjelmslev 1943): they are the locus where individual\u00a0 units of form are paired with individual units of meaning.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It has always been clear, however, that more needs to be said to make such a view work. For one thing,\u00a0 it is likely that no two performances of the \u0093same form\u0094 are literally identical. But even if we were to\u00a0 artificially abstract away from phonetic detail, there would still remain the issue of allomorphy, and,\u00a0 perhaps most pressingly, of alternations in which the resulting forms are not phonotactically predictable\u00a0 (e.g. the alternation of the Korean nominative marker between <\/span>?i <\/span><\/i>and <\/span>?ka<\/span><\/i>). On the meaning side, we must\u00a0 contend with things like systematic polysemy (cf. the artifactual and abstract senses of <\/span>book <\/span><\/i>in a sentence\u00a0 like <\/span>This book is old and crumbling but will affect your life like no other<\/span><\/i>). But it is quite widely assumed,\u00a0 in practice if not in theory, that given the right models of allomorphy and polysemy, a semiotic view of\u00a0 natural language can be salvaged. One can see this de facto assumption at work every time anyone asks, \u0093What does the word (or morpheme) <\/span>w <\/span><\/i>in this language mean?\u0094 or \u0093How do you say meaning <\/span>m <\/span><\/i>in this\u00a0 language?\u0094 These are questions that only make sense within a fundamentally semiotic framework. In other\u00a0 words, a common working assumption (if not a theoretical one) is that natural language is composed of\u00a0 signs after all, it\u0092s just that the \u0093forms\u0094 and \u0093meanings\u0094 that are paired by these signs are more abstract\u00a0 than one might have initially thought\u0097in a way that provides the necessary leeway to capture phenomena\u00a0 like allomorphy (up to and including suppletion) as well as polysemy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In this talk, I present arguments that even this weaker semiotic characterization is incorrect. I argue\u00a0 that, with the possible exception of single-morpheme utterances (e.g. <\/span>Ugh!<\/span><\/i>), a proper model of the\u00a0 competence of a native speaker contains no pairings of form and meaning whatsoever. Instead, speaker\u00a0 competence involves: <\/span>(i) an inventory of syntactic atoms, which are fully abstract (associated with neither\u00a0 form nor meaning); <\/span>(ii) a list of mapping rules from <\/span>sets <\/span><\/i>of atoms to forms (\u0093exponents\u0094); <\/span>(iii) a list of\u00a0 mapping rules from <\/span>sets <\/span><\/i>of atoms to meanings (\u0093lexical meanings\u0094). Importantly, lists (ii) and (iii) are\u00a0 disjoint objects; they have nothing to do with one another, except in the sense that the competence system\u00a0 associates derived structures (consisting of items from list (i)) with items from list (ii) as well as with items\u00a0 from list (iii). But the relation is necessarily indirect and mediated in this fashion.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It is worth noting that lists (ii) and (iii), in this proposed model, bear some resemblance to the\u00a0 \u0093Vocabulary\u0094 and the \u0093Encyclopedia\u0094 in Distributed Morphology (DM; see, e.g., Marantz 1997, and\u00a0 references therein). But DM is still a fundamentally semiotic theory: the unit associated with form, albeit in\u00a0 a context-sensitive way, is still the individual syntactic terminal; and the unit associated with meaning is\u00a0 again the individual syntactic terminal (again, with potential allowances for context-sensitivity, in\u00a0 particular when it comes to idiomaticity; see Harley 2014a,b). I present a collection of linguistic properties\u00a0 (some language-specific, and some quite general) that only make sense in light of a more radically non semiotic model, one in which the relevant mappings are mappings from <\/span>sets <\/span><\/i>of syntactic terminals to units\u00a0 of form (\u0093exponents\u0094), and from <\/span>sets <\/span><\/i>of syntactic terminals to listed meanings (\u0093lexical meanings\u0094). I also\u00a0 show why a framework like Nanosyntax (Starke 2009, Caha 2019), which also maps sets of terminals to\u00a0 forms and meanings, falls short of these explanatory goals, due to its failure to properly dissociate syntax form mappings from syntax-meaning mappings (cf. lists (ii) and (iii), above).<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speaker: Omer Preminger (UMD) Title: Natural language without semiosis Time: Friday, October 22th, 3:30pm - 5pm Location: Zoom (but those on campus can gather in 32-155 to attend the talk together) Abstract: A traditional view holds that natural language is fundamentally semiotic, in that individual syntactic\u00a0 terminals are Saussurean \u0093signs\u0094 (Saussure 1916; Hjelmslev 1943): they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14346"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14347,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14346\/revisions\/14347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}