Configurational Properties of Point of View Roles

By Peggy Speas. 2011

430 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The pragmatic force of a sentence and the pragmatic roles of discourse participants have traditionally been considered to be peripheral to the syntactic component of Grammar. Recently, there have been a variety of proposals for syntactic projections that encode information relevant to the interface between syntax and pragmatics. among others). At the same time, linguists have been exploring the various notions of pragmatic prominence or point of view that are relevant to that interface. Studies of this sort naturally raise questions about the extent to which pragmatic information is syntactically represented. After all, the idea that syntax encodes extensive pragmatic information was rejected as being too unconstrained in the 1970s. On a separate track, linguists have observed that sentience (also variously described as animacy, subjectivity or experiencer-hood) plays an interesting role in the grammar. However, these phenomena have been treated as involving pragmatics or Discourse Representation; syntactic representation of sentience has been largely limited to treatments such as associating lexical features for animacy or logphoricity with individual lexical items. Our proposal will unify both tracks: representation of sentience and representation of pragmatic properties, under one syntactic approach. We will argue that basic syntactic principles constrain projections of pragmatic force as well as the inventory of grammatically relevant pragmatic roles. We take our inspiration from the among others, who have explored constraints on the mapping from Lexical Conceptual Structure (LCS) to syntactic structure. Although there are interesting differences among the proposals made by these authors, they seem to be converging on two points: syntactic principles impose constraints on possible lexical items and their projections, and semantic roles are not primitive, but are determined within these basic asymmetric projections. We will argue that the same basic structural principles that constrain lexical primitives and the lexicon-syntax interface also operate on primitives of a Sentience Domain, and restrict the pragmatics-syntax interface. The above authors have offered theories of what can count as a " grammatically relevant " thematic property. Our goal is to use their insights to restrict what will count as a "grammatically-relevant" pragmatic property. We will not be proposing a new theory of the specific structural restrictions on the lexicon-syntax interface, and we don't offer much insight into how one might choose among the existing theories. What we will do is use Hale and Keyser's theory as a point of departure, and show how the constraints they propose mediate the interaction between …

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Communications, Development

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/851bec1434e9895dc05a3ca9dfcac2dcfe4ee51b

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