PhD Defense - Janek Guerrini "Conceptual representations in grammar : complex meanings, simple composition”

Date - Thursday, September 12 at 1pm

Location - Salle Froidevaux, 24 Rue Lhomond, 75005 Paris and online (contact guerrinijanek@gmail.com for a Zoom link)

Committee :

• Isabelle Charnavel (rapportrice, Université de Genève)
•  Gennaro Chierchia (rapporteur, Harvard University)
• Paul Egré (examinateur, Institut Jean Nicod, ENS-PSL/CNRS/EHESS)
• Orin Percus (examinateur, Nantes Université)
• Viola Schmitt (examinatrice, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Benjamin Spector (directeur de thèse, Institut Jean Nicod, ENS-PSL/EHESS/CNRS)

Summary

The overarching theme of this thesis is the interface between conceptual representations and linguistic structures.

Part I is a study of the distribution of kind-denoting plurals like the English ‘bears’ in sentences such as ‘bears are brown’, ‘bears are extinct’, ‘bears are destroying my garden’. Chapter 1 discusses the fact that these expressions share some but not all of their distributional pattern with singular indefinites like ‘a bear’. I show that by extending to kind-denoting plurals the insights developed in semantics for referential plurals (‘the bears’), we can fully predict their distribution across Germanic and Romance languages. This leads to a significant simplification of the semantic treatment of generic quantification as a whole. Relatedly, in Chapter 2, a new generalization is uncovered, holding across Romance and Germanic languages, and relating the possibility for an expression to denote a kind and for it to be employed with a maximal domain restriction.

Part II, Chapter 3 is a study of the meaning of the expression of similarity in natural language — e.g. ‘John is like a lawyer’ — as relating to generic quantification. It discusses the surprising fact that indefinites in these constructions seem to be interpreted generically : ‘John is like a lawyer’ is equivalent to ‘John is like a typical lawyer’. I present a series of empirical arguments that genericity is not brought about by a silent quantificational adverb in such constructions, but is instead lexically inherent to them. This contradicts the received wisdom that generic quantification necessarily occurs along the verbal spine. I discuss the implications of this finding for compositional theories of genericity.

Part III discusses aspects of adjectival modification. Chapter 4 discusses privative adjectives, and shows that contrary to what has been often claimed in the literature, they do not present a challenge to traditional notions of compositionality. Chapter 5 discusses color adjectives, showing that grammar is sensitive to certain aspects of our non-linguistic concepts of color, and integrating this finding with the homogenous behaviour of these expressions. A common thread of Part III is the examination of the behaviour of different adjectives in pre-nominal position in Italian, which prompts a novel classification of adjectives, in terms of mode of composition rather than of entailment pattern as has been standardly proposed. This is discussed in Chapter 6, which sketches a way forward to explain the proposed classification, and concludes the dissertation.