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Ray Jackendoff Seth Merrin Professor of Philosophy Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies Tufts University November 16, 2007 Thursday, 3:30pm-5:00pm Gambrell 151 Thousands of conventionalized noun-noun compounds in English must be learned and stored in a speaker's lexicon. At the same time, new compounds can be coined freely and understood. The meaning of a compound, stored or novel, is normally built from the meanings of its nouns. However, aside from the fact that the second noun is normally the semantic head of the compound (a dog house is a kind of house), the relation of the two nouns varies wildly from one example to the next. Many analysts have despaired at there being a systematic account of compounds. Yet speakers understand compounds and learn them, so something systematic must be going on. I will propose an account adopting features of Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon theory, formalized in terms of my Conceptual Semantics. Some components of the account are independently necessary for the semantics of nouns, and some are particular to compounds. The consequence of this account is an extremely broad range of possible ways to create compound meanings, sensitive to the semantic affordances of the constituent nouns. I will conclude that compounding arises in a layer of language more primitive than full modern grammar — so-called "protolanguage" in the sense of Bickerton — in which meaning is composed on the basis of linear order plus a lot of pragmatics. This talk is co-sponsored by the Linguistics Program, the Department of English, the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, and the College of Arts and Sciences.  |
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Last updated 4/8/08 10:33 PM
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