{"id":5166,"date":"2013-05-06T05:02:48","date_gmt":"2013-05-06T09:02:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=5166"},"modified":"2013-05-06T02:08:04","modified_gmt":"2013-05-06T06:08:04","slug":"ling-lunch-59-neil-myler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2013\/05\/06\/ling-lunch-59-neil-myler\/","title":{"rendered":"Ling-Lunch 5\/9 - Neil Myler"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaker: Neil Myler (NYU)
\nTitle: Building and interpreting HAVE sentences in (mostly) English
\nDate\/Time: Thursday, May 9, 12:30-1:45p
\nLocation: 32-D461<\/p>\n

\n

The full abstract is available here<\/a> (pdf).<\/p>\n

The literature on the syntax and semantics of possession sentences is vast. However, much of it can be seen as trying to deal with two major puzzles: what we might call the too many meanings puzzle (why do possession constructions across languages have the ability to convey a myriad of seemingly unrelated meanings, like kinship, body parts, permanent ownership, abstract attributes, etc.?), and the too many (surface) structures puzzle (why do possession constructions vary so much in their surface syntax across languages, from transitive HAVE constructions, to existential BE constructions containing an oblique possessor, to copular BE constructions containing a PP possessee?; Why is the transitive HAVE pattern relatively rare?). <\/p>\n

I suggest that a solution to both of these puzzles is forthcoming if we take thematic roles out of the syntax, and instead have them be read off from the output of syntax in the semantic component (a conclusion argued for already on different grounds by Sch\u00e4fer 2008; Wood 2012; Bruening 2013; Marantz 2009, 2013). The post-syntactic conception of thematic roles has an important consequence: whether a given argument-introducing head takes a complement or specifier is determined in the syntax, but whether it assigns a thematic role or not is determined in the semantics. This means that the notion of \u0093syntactic argument of head X\u0094 is potentially independent of the notion of \u0093semantic argument of head X\u0094. I argue that this independence is key to understanding the syntactic structures of possession sentences and how they give rise to the gamut of apparently unrelated \u0093possessive\u0094 interpretations. In particular, I argue for the following hypotheses, which rely on this conception:<\/p>\n