Language Module

Yesterday’s reading for Syntax Reading Group was Asya Pereltsvaig’s Negative Polarity Items in Russian and the ‘Bagel Problem’, and it was interesting for a lot of the same reason’s that I enjoyed last week’s paper.

Basically, the so-called ‘bagel problem’ is this. There are two (types of) negative polarity items in Russian that are in complementary distribution - the “ni“-items and the “libo“-items. Of course, being in complementary distribution means that they can’t appear in the same environment, but looking for the environment that conditions the choice turns out to be unexpectedly problematice. On first glance, the generalization seems to be semantic - to wit, that ni-items are “stronger” than libo-items. The disinction being made here betwen “weak” and “strong” basically comes down to how far one is allowed to take the semantic entailments associated with each item, and the difference between “weak” and “strong” items on these grounds is well-established cross-linguistically. “Strong” here means “antimorphic,” something of a complicated term to explain, but here goes.

Something is antimorphic when it meets all of the following conditions:

1. f(X or Y) implies f(X) and f(Y)
2. f(X) and f(Y) implies f(X or Y)
3. f(X and Y) implies f(X) or f(Y)
4. f(X) or f(Y) implies f(X and Y)

So, for example, never in English sets up an antimorphic context. Each first sentence in each of the pairs below entails the second.

1. I never sing or dance IMPLIES I never sing and I never dance
2. I never sing and I never dance IMPLIES I never sing or dance
3. I never sing and dance IMPLIES I never sing or I never dance
4. I never sing or I never dance IMPLIES I never sing and dance

Antimorphic, ladies and gentlemen!

Ok, well, a superficial look at Russian leads one to the conclusion that ni-items show up in antimorphic contexts and libo items show up elsewhere (itallicized because syntacticians like to call such things “elsewhere conditions” - that is, “if a certain conditon doesn’t obtain, use me….” kind of thing).

There’s just one problem. It turns out there is one clearly anti-morphic context where you use libo-items instead, contrary to prediction. This is the context defined by the preposition bez (’without’). It’s easy to see that ‘without’ is antimorphic in English:

1. He showed up without paper or pencil -> He showed up without paper and without pencil
2. He showed up without paper and pencil -> He showed up without paper or without pencil
3. He showed up without paper or without pencil -> He showed up without paper and pencil
4. He showed up without paper and without pencil -> He showed up without paper or pencil

And so it is in Russian too. All these implicatures hold. Unfortunately for the theory, bez can’t be used with ni-items.

Pereltsvaig’s solution is to notice that the only difference she can see between bez and all the other antimorphic contexts where ni-items appear is that bez is clearly never a complementizer at any level of the derivation. It’s clearly not a lexical complementizer, and neither is there any reason to suspect that it ever plays a semantic role as a complementizer (in Minimalist/GB-speak - sometimes called ‘GiBberish’ - of course you would say ‘it doesn’t raise to C at LF’). So once again - as with last week - you seem to have gotten your syntax in my semantics. The distinction between ni- and -libo is semantic, bucept when ni- fails to be a complementizer, in which case you ignore the otherwise-convincing semantic distinction and use libo instead.

Sounds like a job for HPSG!

Of course, Pereltsvaig’s analysis is all about raising things at LF where we can’t see them, i.e. about as far from HPSG as it’s possible to be. But it’s an interesting question all the same. How would an HPSG account handle this?

My first instinct is to say that HPSG can’t handle it, that this is an example of where Minimalism/GB is superior, and that’s because the distinction is positional. But of course, as soon as that hits the screen I realize that it’s only because I’m training in GB that I think of “what’s a complementizer?” as confounded with “where does it show up?” The idea that “complementizer” has a special position all its own is a GB prejudice. In HPSG, where sentence position isn’t explicitly encoded into the theory (rather, it “falls out” from the inventory of features - certain combinations turn out to be illicit), “complementizer” would just be a feature (erm, set of features) like everything else, and there wouldn’t be any talk of where it shows up (and certainly no talk of where it raises to!) at all.

So actually, HPSG could handle this just fine. And in fact, HPSG handles it a little better, because you don’t get into all the complicated (and probably unfounded) speculation about when words are “inserted” into the derivation. Perelstvaig’s solution leverages Distributed Morphology - a theory that includes so-called “late insertion,” whereby lexical items aren’t actually inserted for pronounciation until the deriation is complete. (So ni- and -libo items, on the extreme version of this, might just be different pronounciations of the same item - though most distributed morphology people would say they are different items, and that you insert the more completely specified item - ni, since it’s “pickier” about where it goes - if you can, the other one - libo in this case - if you can’t.) In HPSG such an issue doesn’t even arise since all items carry with them their complete feature set, and there’s no derivation to speak of. There is no debate about when items get “inserted” as they were always just there, and the theory merely tells you whether they can appear in this order or not.

One of the orignal selling points of HPSG was that it bundled syntax with semantics (calling the items over which it operates ’signs,’ the main grammatical feature of which is called ’synsem,” a combination of ’syntax’ and ’semantics’) - a move that seems sensible given that syntactic order is sensitive to and clearly affects semantic interpretation. So this would seem to be yet another plus in the HPSG column. But interestingly, reading this paper gave me some appreciation for LF, and why we might want such a thing.

Basically, that’s because semantics is positional in some sense too. Or, at least it’s convenient to think of it that way when we’re being lazy. I guess “positional” is maybe the wrong word - but we humans are in the habit of marking scope from outside to in when we draw up semantic formulae, and I suppose it therefore seems to us that there’s something positional involved. The rub came with some sentences in the footnotes where libo items appeared in what looked like ni context. Pereltsvaig explained them away by noting that the items in question were D-linked (they have a discourse-level rather than a purely sentential interpretation) and thus in some semantic sense outside the scope of negation. And in that sense - that is, to the extent that we like to think of something as being “outside” or “inside” a scope - LF is actually kind of nice, because it represents the semantics of the sentence in the way we’re used to thinking about it. Things that “scope over” others “raise” above them in the covert movement phase of the derivation. So first you do your syntactic movement - that is, get the items arranged in a proper syntactic heirarchy. Then you linearize (erm…sequentialize - flatten the tree) this to pronounce it, and also read the semantics off it by allowing more determined movements of distinguished items out of the syntactic arrangement. This has the advantage of making a fairly clear prediction: the semantics/syntax interference only really runs in one direction. Synatx can get in the way of the success of semantics, but not the other way around. Syntax is “primary,” and you only worry about whether the interpretation makes sense once the syntax has been satisfied.

In HPSG, all this happens at the same time. And unfortunately I know hardly anything at all about how semantics works in HPSG, so I can’t really speak to any effect where syntax might block semantics or vice versa, or which direction (if any) the influence tends to run. But I did want to note that this is another area where the theories are not “mere notational equivalents,” as some have accused Chomsky of once having called them. How the syntax-semantics interface is handled in each theory is clearly different. In the so-called “Standard Theory,” there literally is an interface, such that the semantic component of the grammar takes a syntactic structure and operates on it. In HPSG, there is no such interface. Syntax and Semantics run in parallel, and failure of either to resolve at any time tenders ungrammaticality.