Abstract for Lisa Levinson's talk

On the ontology of category-neutral roots
Lisa Levinson (NYU)
September 19, 2006 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - ; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

In this talk I will present novel empirical evidence for the presence of category-neutral lexical roots in the syntax, along the lines of proposals within the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM) (e.g. Marantz 1997, Arad 2003, 2005) and provide a semantically explicit account for the composition of such derivations. Evidence is presented for modification of roots in the syntax by 'pseudo-resultative' predicates, such as 'tight' in 'She braided her hair tight'. The proposal for the compositional semantics of pseudo-resultative root modification is one piece of a larger theory of the ontology of category-neutral roots. While Dowty (1979) argues that all roots of verbs are states, I propose a richer ontology for roots such that they introduce predicates of entities, states, or events (see also Harley 2005). I further argue, in support of Arad's proposals for Hebrew, that one root can be associated with multiple denotations, and show that this makes desirable predictions regarding contrasts in telicity and argument structure when what is traditionally thought of as 'one verb' occurs in multiple syntactic 'frames'.