Monday, June 11, 2007

Trying to piece together an analysis

Do you know how you can see bits of a picture, and then your mind will fill in the empty places, so that you think you're seeing a complete picture? Or you can see the first and last letter of a word, where the middle letters are all mixed up, and your brain will unmix-it-up for you? I've been hoping that my brain would manage to fill-in and unmix-up a half-baked analysis that's been mouldering in my mind for something like 8 months. Unfortunately, my brain hasn't quite managed to do it yet. So I'm asking for help! Or assurance that I'm not crazy.

Now, this research is what I've been focusing on for the past two years, and it's very dear to me, but I've been reluctant to post on this stuff before. This is because the relevant data really belongs to my language consultant, not me, and I don't think it's right to just splash it all over the internet. But I think I've managed to write it in a way that avoids this problem since I don't actually provide any data.

So here is my full-of-holes-and-faulty-logic working analysis:

Assumption 1: In IE languages like English, semantic truth-values are encoded through Tense, or IP, in the clausal (verbal) domain. (Kearns 2000)

Messy Assumption 2: The semantic equivalent of truth-values in the nominal domain is existence, or referentiality. (Because I am, er, semantically-challenged, I'm not sure what the difference between existence and referentiality is. )

Now, here is a hole. Is this assumption justifiable? I figure that nominal elements don't really have truth-values, but something more like an existential, or referential value. Or looking at it the other way, a noun has (or doesn't have) a referential value, and the clausal/verbal is considered 'true' if event being referred to exists, and is 'false' if the event doesn't exist. Does that make sense? Man, I really wish there were more undergraduate classes in semantics. But anyways, assuming that the above, er, assumption [i], is justified, I'll move on with the holey analysis...

Generalization 1: NPIs are known for having existential narrow-scope - they are non-referential (Progovac 1994, Uribe-Etxebarria 1996)

Assumption 3: Blackfoot lacks the syntactic node Tense, utterances instead being anchored deictically via a Participant (as in Speech Act Participant) node (Ritter & Wiltschko 2005).

Now, here's where my (poor excuse of an) analysis get's really vague and holey. I have a load of questions. If Blackfoot doesn't have the syntactic node Tense, how are semantic truth-values encoded? Or are they even encoded? Because there's this idea that several languages do not ASSERT information, but instead PRESENT information (or so I gathered from my LING 447 evidentials seminar...but have yet to find a citable reference) Does the Participant node encode truth-values, or some other semantic, perhaps speech act participant-related, property being encoded?

BUT anyways, if I jump over that giant hole in my analysis, and assume that there is some kind of Participant-related-semantic feature encoded by Participant node in the clausal/verbal domain, the simplest stab at what the nominal equivalent would just be Participant. Right? Because while it doesn't really make sense for nouns to have a +/- truth-value, they can certainly have a +/- SpeechActParticipant value.

Now putting this all together, one might predict that Blackfoot NPIs wouldn't have an existential property within the scope of negation, but instead have a parallel SpeechActParticipant property within the scope of negation. (Which, of course, I already know is the case, and I'm just pretending is a prediction for presentation's sake...)

So, despite the giant holes, does this analysis make sense? Is it interesting? I hope it's interesting...

And a question from this: How might such a semantic 'SpeechActParticipant' property manifest in other parts of the language? What kind of predictions does this analysis make? How cool would it be if this language didn't quantify over worlds, but instead over deictic spheres? Or something like that...
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[i] I know Giannakidou's 1998 notion of semantic (non)veridicality (which is directly related to truth-values) translates (non)veridicality onto the nominal domain (with determiners and quantifiers) in terms of whether the denotation of the NP is nonempty or not...which kind of feels like the same sort of thing I'm trying to say. Except, of course, the semantic terminology is a giant barrier in my understanding. See now, I really could benefit from a 'Semantics Awareness Week'...(Hey, they have those wristbands for just about anything. Why not this?)

4 comments:

Meaghan Fowlie said...

Well, on first reading, I have to say I like it. Sounds interesting and quite possible. Before I go back and think more deeply on it, I'll tell you what I understand about existence and referentiality, though I don't know how they're used in semantics, since that ONLY thing I learned in semantics was aqbout NPIS:

Existence means you're asserting the existence of something (There is a dog over there).

Reference means your refering to the actual sometehing (I like the dog).

Something needn't be assumed to exist to be referenced ("I like dogs that never bark, but I'm not sure there's any such thing"; "Unicorns don't exist")

Anyone know if that's what's meant?

Meaghan Fowlie said...

So maybe languages that merely PRESENT information have referentiality, not existence, as the equivalent of truth value?

Meaghan Fowlie said...

If Blackfoot doesn't have the syntactic node Tense, how are semantic truth-values encoded? Or are they even encoded? Because there's this idea that several languages do not ASSERT information, but instead PRESENT information (or so I gathered from my LING 447 evidentials seminar...but have yet to find a citable reference) Does the Participant node encode truth-values, or some other semantic, perhaps speech act participant-related, property being encoded?

I'm not sure I see why this is a gigantic hole. It seems that you are looking for an equivalent to truth-value in Blackfoot. if Blackfoot isn't asserting anything, and if the Participant node is what encodes "truth values", then isn't it reasonable to assume that it's not TVs you need to be worried about, but rather something more relevent to particiants? In other words, I agree with your analysis. And I totally agree that if this is right, Blackfoot quantifies over the deitic sphere.

meagan louie said...

Maybe it's not so much a gigantic hole, as a blurry piece of the picture. Because while I would love it if Blackfoot didn't encode truth-values, I'm not sure if I have enough evidence to say that it doesn't. The languages we were talking about in the evidentials seminar course, which seemed to present instead of assert propositions, were all languages with (predictably in an evidentials seminar) evidentiality. I know that the vast majority of Algonquian languages have evidentials, but Blackfoot seems to be the odd man out, or if there are evidentials, no one has found them yet. So other than anecdotal things like my LC always saying things like "I'm just describing what I see" (sounds like a presentation, as opposed to an assertion), I don't have much of an empirical basis for saying that BF doesn't encode truth-values. I probably should be looking into modals, or whatever Blackfoot has instead of modals, unfortunately I have no idea what constitutes yet...

And it's really interesting that you mentioned that BF might not encode existence, but referentiality, because so far it doesn't seem like there's the equivalent of a bare existential "a man" in Blackfoot, my LC always wants to say "that specific man" instead...so now how would referentiality (as nominal) translate onto the clausal/verbal domain? If the verby-things (I suppose I should call them events, or propositions) have to be referential, instead of just existential, this might be related to the'realis/irrealis' distinction you seem to see in these types of languages as well...(at least Algonquian has this, I should look at whether other evidential-heavy languages have this distinction as well)