Meaning Meeting - Mal Shah / Locality domains for semantics
Meaning Meeting - Mal Shah / Locality domains for semantics
October 26 in the Meaning Meeting, Mal works through recent thoughts on the domain to which specific rules of semantic interpretation can apply. An abstract follows.
Locality domains for semantics
Syntax pairs linguistic signals with combinatorially-determined interpretations. Research on the syntax-semantics interface tends to focus on clause-level properties like scope and binding (Lechner 2015). This discussion explores the issue of how ‘roots’, a special sort of morpheme, devoid of syntactic properties, interact with interpretation. Theories of ‘contextual allosemy’ suggest roots shift their meaning in different contexts, much like the English plural morpheme is pronounced differently in different phonological contexts (Marantz, 1997; Arad, 2003).
I argue instead that the assignment of a concept to a root-containing structure is possible only at fixed points in a syntactic derivation. Following Borer (2013), I argue that every merge is a possible point of concept assignment. For semanticists, this gives us a syntactic principle that underwrites some non-compositional cases, telling us more about how the mapping from syntax to compositional semantics works. Contra Pietroski (2018), though in the spirit of his project, I suggest that functional structure initiates concept-retrieval instructions, not roots alone. This helps with some cases of non-compositionality we should capture. I end with some speculative remarks on whether polysemy should be attributed to concepts or lexical items, suggesting that it may be the former which are polysemous.