Volume 51, Issue s1000 - Jubilee Issue: 50 Years Folia Linguistica

In view of the apparent successes achieved with Labovian quantitative methods in the analysis of phonological Variation, it is not surprising to find these techniques being extended to include the study of syntax. S ANKOFF (1973), for example, suggests that the extension of probabilistic considerations from phonology to syntax is not a conceptually difficult Jump. In my opinion, however, S ANKOFF 's optimism is premature. An analogous view of syntactic Variation is incoherent; it is a moot point what one means by the notion 'syntactic Variation*. We simply do not have a sociolinguistic (nor a syntactic) theory which is sufficiently well articulated and restricted to deal with the problem of Variation in syntax. Perhaps the most serious issue which the problem of syntactic Variation raises concerns the kind of semantic/pragmatic theory upon which the foundations of an integrative sociolinguistic theory should be based.*

In this paper, I examine the mechanisms responsible for enabling underspecified lexical forms to acquire a determinate and unique Interpretation in the composition of the sentence. In particular, I study the behavior of several classes of lexical items exhibiting degrees of systematic or logical polysemy. These words present an interesting challenge to conventional treatments of polysemy and füll specification in natural language semantics. Extending the analysis of these classes presented in Pustejovsky (1994, 1995), I elaborate the formal mechanisms responsible for capturing the syntactic and semantic behavior of nouns such äs lecture, prize, book, and lunch, and verbs such äs read, rent, and break . I argue that members of these classes must be represented äs complex types, äs they do not allow for simple conjunctive typing; furthermore, these nouns and verbs display a peculiar behavior regarding the quantificational force of the type which is absent from other nominal and verbal classes. I conclude by discussing the consequences of this analysis for a theory of semantic Underspecification.

The general distinction between morphology and syntax is widely taken for granted, but it crucially depends on a cross-linguistically valid concept of ‘(morphosyntactic) word’. I show that there are no good criteria for defining such a concept. I examine ten criteria in some detail (potential pauses, free occurrence, mobility, uninterruptibility, non-selectivity, non-coordinatability, anaphoric islandhood, nonextractability, morphophonological idiosyncrasies, and deviations from bi-uniqueness), and I show that none of them is necessary and sufficient on its own, and no combination of them gives a definition of ‘word’ that accords with linguists’ orthographic practice. ‘Word’ can be defined as a language-specific concept, but this is not relevant to the general question pursued here. ‘Word’ can be defined as a fuzzy concept, but this is theoretically meaningful only if the continuum between affixes and words, or words and phrases, shows some clustering, for which there is no systematic evidence at present. Thus, I conclude that we do not currently have a good basis for dividing the domain of morphosyntax into morphology and syntax, and that linguists should be very careful with general claims that make crucial reference to a cross-linguistic ‘word’ notion.