PDF #161 – Angelika Kratzer – Semantics in Generative Grammar
Semantics in Generative Grammar – In many languages, verbs are inflected. In all languages, verbs bring along at least some inflectional heads, lexical items bearing inflectional meanings: e.g. agreement, voice, aspect, tense, negation, mood, question markers, and evidential. Whether inflectional heads are literally attached to a verb or not is an issue that is of interest for morphology or phonology, but it is not likely to be relevant at all for syntax or semantics. In semantics, we are interested in the compositional aspects of meaning.
The inflectional items we care about, then, are those that make a compositional meaning contribution. In our introductory book, Irene and I only talk about the meanings of bare verbs. We neglect all contributions of inflectional items. In LING 620, you will look at the semantics of at least tense and mood, and possibly also at the semantics of aspect and questions.
The guiding idea about verb denotations we fleshed out in our book is one that we inherited from logic: the meaning of a (bare, inflectionless) intransitive verb like dance determines who the actual dancers are. The denotation of dance, then, is the set of individuals who dance. Adapting this kind of denotation to the demands of Frege’s Conjecture, we construed the denotation of dance as the characteristic function of the set of individuals who dance. But wait. Who are the individuals who dance? Those who are dancing right now? Those who
have just finished dancing? Those who have danced in the past? Those who dance habitually? The professional dancers? Or those who are able to dance? It’s much easier to swallow that the common noun goat might pick out the set of actual goats, or that the adjective plastic might pick out the set of actual things that are plastic.
After reading “Semantics in Generative Grammar” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.