{"title":"Compositional trace conversion","authors":"R. Pasternak","doi":"10.3765/sp.13.14","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"In order to eliminate traces as stipulated grammatical objects, syntactic movement has been reformulated in terms of multiple-merge : it is the result of the same constituent being merged into the structure multiple times, using either copies or multidominance structures . In spite of their empirical and conceptual advantages, multiple-merge theories pose known challenges for the semantic interpretation of movement, as there are no variable-denoting traces in lower positions. The most common means of resolving this conundrum is trace conversion (Fox 2002, 2003), in which either a syntactic operation makes alterations at lower merge sites in order to generate trace-like interpretations, or the semantics behaves as if such a syntactic operation had occurred. In this paper I discuss problems faced by presently formulated versions of trace conversion and propose an alternative, compositional trace conversion , in which multiple-merge structures can be directly interpreted in a straightforwardly compositional manner. This approach is shown to generalize well, extending to modals and degree phrases as well as DPs. \n \nEARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1000,"publicationDate":"2020-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"4","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Semantics & Pragmatics","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.13.14","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 4
Abstract
In order to eliminate traces as stipulated grammatical objects, syntactic movement has been reformulated in terms of multiple-merge : it is the result of the same constituent being merged into the structure multiple times, using either copies or multidominance structures . In spite of their empirical and conceptual advantages, multiple-merge theories pose known challenges for the semantic interpretation of movement, as there are no variable-denoting traces in lower positions. The most common means of resolving this conundrum is trace conversion (Fox 2002, 2003), in which either a syntactic operation makes alterations at lower merge sites in order to generate trace-like interpretations, or the semantics behaves as if such a syntactic operation had occurred. In this paper I discuss problems faced by presently formulated versions of trace conversion and propose an alternative, compositional trace conversion , in which multiple-merge structures can be directly interpreted in a straightforwardly compositional manner. This approach is shown to generalize well, extending to modals and degree phrases as well as DPs.
EARLY ACCESS