Papers by Laura A Michaelis
Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Oct 17, 2006
Linguistics and Philosophy, Oct 1, 1996
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Unlike other reports of ongoing actions, English explicit performatives do not normally take prog... more Unlike other reports of ongoing actions, English explicit performatives do not normally take progressive form. This suggests that "there is something over and above a mere concurrent report" in utterances like I bet you I'll win the race that is absent in utterances like I'm betting you I'll win the race (Levinson 1983: 259). For Krifka (2014), an explicit performative describes not the utterance act being produced, but the adoption of a new commitment, which has already happened at encoding time. If this is so, however, we might expect to find preteritor present-perfect-form performative clauses and it appears that we do not. Using crosslinguistic data from genetically and geographically unrelated languages, we establish a strong typological tendency: explicit performative utterances use the same verbal construction that is used for reporting states holding at coding time. We attribute this tendency to an epistemic commonality between explicit performatives and state reports. In addition, we offer an explanation for exceptional uses of progressive aspect in apparently performative expressions, noted by, e.g., Searle (1989). Building on Dahl (1985), we have developed a questionnaire that allows us to identify the aspectual distinctions made in individual languages and which of these categories are employed in the various performative contexts (as classified by Searle 1976). Imperfective aspect is used to encode performatives and present-time states in, e.g., Arabic, Turkish and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. In Bantu languages like Lingala and Kirundi, performative predications receive perfective encoding, and this same form is used to report states holding at present. Japanese and the Austronesian language Kilivila feature unmarked verb forms in both present state reports and performative expressions. Progressive aspect is systematically excluded in the languages of our sample. Thus, in light of these typological observations, the use of the English simple present in performative contexts is not unexpected. The fact that present-time states and performative events receive the same aspectual construal across languages suggests a semantic commonality that cannot be conceived in terms of boundedness, one of the major parameters used to describe aspectual distinctions. We argue instead that aspectual categories encode epistemic distinctions, and that states and performative events are similar at this epistemic level: the situation type expressed by a performative or state predication is verifiable at the time of speaking. States have the subinterval property, according to which every segment of a state counts as an instance of that state, including that segment that overlaps the speech event. In the case of performatives, the reporting event and the performed event (promising, etc.) are one and the same; therefore, performative events are verifiable as such at speech time. The few scholars who touch on performativity and aspect in English appear to assume that in the rare attestations of progressive perfomatives, the predication does not perform a speech act (like promising) but rather reports on one's own performance, as in I'm not just saying, I'm promising (Langacker 1987; Verschueren 1995; Krifka 2014). However, this characterization is not evidently applicable to examples like I'm warning you, Mrs. Hinkle: one more obscenity and I'll charge you with contempt, which does count as a warning. Analysis of COCA data reveals that one type of performative clause, the exercitive type (Austin 1962), involving verbs such as warn and order, accounts for the majority of progressive performative tokens. Following McGowan (2004), we assume that exercitive acts change the boundaries of permissible or appropriate conduct. We postulate that progressive-form exercitive acts do not change these boundaries but rather describe an effort to do so. More generally, progressive performatives are action glosses like I'm trying to repair this; they explain the purpose of ongoing actions, both linguistic and nonlinguistic. This account naturally extends to nonexercitive progressive performatives like I'm withdrawing as a candidate.
Theoretical Linguistics, Jan 25, 2004
The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach articulated by Uwe Durst is a componential theor... more The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach articulated by Uwe Durst is a componential theory of meaning, and it inherits many of the strengths of such theories. This is especially evident when we compare NSM with componential models that share its view of linguistic cognition as a reflex of the human meaning-making capacity in general. One such strength is the model's ability to account for prototype effects in categorization judgments without assuming scalar category membership or fuzzy category boundaries. Durst argues (section 3.3) that "[s]ince meaning is more than reference, one cannot conclude from referential fuzziness or vagueness that the meanings of words are fuzzy or vague as well". The view is reminiscent of Lakoff's (1987) radial model of category structure, in which prototypicality ratings reflect not category structure but divergence of cognitive submodels that jointly define the best exemplars. Another strength of NSM that can likewise be traced to its decompositional base is its ability to capture cross-linguistic differences in lexical conflation patterns, as exemplified by Durst's comparison of words denoting anger in a variety of languages (section 3.3). Similarities and differences among the cognate words are captured by partial overlaps in their propositional representations, and what emerges is a relatively constrained picture of the range of typological variation. This is a strength that NSM shares with Talmy's (1985) model of motion-verb lexicalization patterns: these models allow otherwise ineffable translation problems to be described in rigorous ways. Just as Talmy's model enables us to talk about rhetorical-style differences among languages (or language families) by reference to fundamental features of event schematization (Slobin 1996), so the NSM approach captures 'connotational' differences among cognate lexical items that have been neglected in denotation-based lexicography.
Journal of Semantics, 1993
Abstract This study represents an elaboration and revision of König's (1977) account of the ... more Abstract This study represents an elaboration and revision of König's (1977) account of the synchronic interrelations among three senses of the English adverbial still. These senses at issue are those in which still serves as a marker of a state's continuation to a temporal ...
Colorado research in linguistics, 2005
Based on the results of a sorting task involving verbs and grammatical patterns, Bencini & Goldbe... more Based on the results of a sorting task involving verbs and grammatical patterns, Bencini & Goldberg (2000) argue that "argument structure constructions are directly associated with sentence meaning." We explore this hypothesis by attempting to replicate their results using a nonhuman categorizer: a cognitive model based on ACT-R (Anderson & Lebiere 1998). The model replicated the sentence-sorting behaviors of Bencini & Goldberg's subjects, but did so using formal cues alone. This outcome suggests that the subjects in the Bencini & Goldberg study were not necessarily attending to constructional meaning, and lends support to Bock's (1986) conclusions regarding syntactic priming: subjects' similarity judgments are as likely to be based on syntactic form alone as they are to involve syntax-semantic mapping. * Ms. Fowles-Winkler would like to thank Brad Best of Micro Analysis and Design for discussing ACT-R modeling and Dr. Adele Goldberg for kindly mailing a hardcopy of her paper "Relationships between Verbs and Constructions."
Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Aug 25, 1999
Theoretical Linguistics, 2006
De Gruyter eBooks, Dec 31, 2021
De Gruyter eBooks, Dec 16, 2019
Boulder understand construction as construct when interpreting the dictum "A word is a constructi... more Boulder understand construction as construct when interpreting the dictum "A word is a construction", the equivalence would not be valid: a construct is a phrase, a combination of words. 3 There is a reason, however, that Construction Grammar proponents have tended to see words and phrasal patterns as the same thing: both words and phrases are signs, and as such have specifications for phonological structure, morphological form, syntactic category, semantics and use conditions. 4 The phrasal patterns range from those that are very constrained (partially lexically filled patterns of the 'snow clone' variety, e.g., I x therefore I am) to those that are very open (like the construction that pairs a lexical head with its complements). What this means is that while the term construction has typically been used to refer to patterns with restrictive conditions both on form and use, canonical phrasestructure rules are constructions too: The [Construction Grammar] approach supposes a grammar to consist of a repertory of conventional associations of lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic information called constructions. Familiar grammar rules are simply constructions that are deficient in not containing any lexical information except for specification of rather gross syntactic categories-and, in some cases, lacking any pragmatic values as well. Every such conventional association that must be learned or recognized separately by the speaker of a language is a construction. This includes all idioms and partially productive lexico-grammatical patterns (Kay 1992: 310) accurately, as capturing what is common to a range of words based on that lexeme. 3 In assuming this definition of construct, I depart from the practice of Traugott (this volume), who describes her use of the term as follows (p.c.): Construct is an attested token (spoken or written), not necessarily licensed by a [construction], since in some cases historically there was no [construction] to license it. Replicated use of constructs in some cases enables the rise of a particular [micro-construction] such as all but X. 4 Peter Petré (p.c.) interprets the claim that words are signs to entail that words are not classes of language objects, and that they lack "open slots": He says: "While I agree that there have to be units in language without open slots (the atomic elements of grammar, one might say), I'm not convinced 'word' is actually such an atomic unit. In the intuitive interpretation of what a word is, a word is a paradigmatic class of objects, including a singular and a plural form". I offer two responses here. First, the question of whether an expression has "open slots" is a distinct question from whether or not it represents a paradigmatic class of objects. A main point of this chapter is that words, like lexemes, most certainly can have open slots, represented by their VALENCE and ARG-ST sets. In fact, we distinguish lexical classes according to their combinatoric properties, and these combinatoric properties are inherited by words. For example, while the proper-noun word Kim has no valence, the transitive-verb word eat has two valence elements. Second, SBCG recognizes a word-lexeme distinction, as discussed in footnote 2. This means that while a word is not a "paradigmatic class of objects" a lexeme is. Words in SBCG are members of such paradigmatic classes rather than representing classes themselves.
John Benjamins Publishing Company eBooks, 1992
... I am grateful to Ekkehard König for the inspiration which he has provided me through his work... more ... I am grateful to Ekkehard König for the inspiration which he has provided me through his work, and for his personal support. ... The presence of multiple meanings attached to a given syntacticstructure where the distinct readings cannot be represented via distinct tree-structures. ...
Journal of Linguistics, Mar 1, 1994
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
Lingua, Aug 1, 1992
... (Letter to the editor of Fresh Magazine 9 22 90) (l 0b) The US Navy has dispatched the aircra... more ... (Letter to the editor of Fresh Magazine 9 22 90) (l 0b) The US Navy has dispatched the aircraft carrier Independence to the Gulf to back up ships already there. ... When you sit down, there's already a plate in front of you. But they take that plate away as soon as you sit down. ...
Oxford University Press eBooks, Mar 7, 2024
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Papers by Laura A Michaelis
1. The Eagle has landed. (Entailed resultant state: Eagle is in contact with lunar surface)
2. Dear Feel Like a Fool: Brother, I have walked in your shoes. (Inferred resultant state: speaker understands addressee’s experience)
A seemingly paradoxical behavior of the PrP in its resultative function (RPrP), is that while the causal event is unique, its time cannot be specified adverbially, at least in most PDE dialects: *I have seen it yesterday, *We have moved here in 2012 (cf. Engel & Ritz 2000 on Australian English). Klein’s (1992) influential pragmatic explanation (the constraint arises from the quantity-based injunction against simultaneously fixing the times of both E and R) is hard to reconcile with some of the facts: (a) the constraint is not defeasible and (b) it does not apparently apply to discourses involving the past perfect, e.g., She came to work at noon yesterday. She had woken up at 10 (Kiparsky 2002). Michaelis (1994, 1998), inspired by Dinsmore (1981), proposes that the time-specification constraint is in fact an aspect of a broader constraint, attached exclusively to the RPrP, that prevents its use to specify the circumstances of E when E’s occurrence is mutually presupposed or must be taken for granted. The examples in (3-6) illustrate the operation of this constraint in various presuppositional contexts (the # indicates that many such sentences are redeemable on an existential PrP reading):
3. WH-interrogative: #How have you fixed it? (cf. How did you fix it?)
4. Manner modification: She has fixed it (#skillfully). (cf. She fixed it skillfully.)
5. Cleft: #It’s LAWYERS that #have gotten seat belts in cars. (cf. …that got seatbelts in cars)
The purpose of this paper is to extend the event-elaboration constraint to a series of contexts, only vaguely described in my prior work, in which verb class, and in particular the directionality of the denoted event, plays a role in the felicity of RPrP. This account draws on Mittwoch’s (2008) concept of target state. Relevant contrasts are given in (6-8):
6. Bi-directional transfer predication
a. Someone has borrowed my Latin dictionary.
b. [You can borrow this Latin dictionary, but be careful with it.] #It has been borrowed.
7. Creation predication
a. My daughter has painted a landscape.
b. [A: What a lovely landscape!] #B: My daughter has painted it.
8. Object-disposition predication
a. Where have you hidden my glasses?
b. #Where have you found my glasses?
I propose to refine the event-elaboration constraint by addressing exceptions concerning the target state, and the interpretive factors that define the target state. The primary interpretive factor, a metaphorical one, is presence at the speaker’s deictic center. If a theme entity is understood as mutually accessible to speaker and hearer, any predication in which that theme plays an argument role will be construed as specifying circumstances of the causal event E (of transfer, creation, disposal) rather than to S, the target state. I will discuss paraphrase diagnostics that we can use to determine the target state for each such predication.
References
De Swart, Henriëtte. 1998. Aspect shift and coercion. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 16: 347-385.
Dinsmore John. 1981. Tense choice and time specification in English. Linguistics 19: 475-494.
Engel, Dulcie M. and Ritz, Marie-Eve A. 2000. The use of the present perfect in Australian English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 20: 119-140.
Kiparsky, Paul. 2002a. Event structure and the perfect. In Beaver, David et al., (eds.), The Construction of Meaning. CSLI Publications.
Klein, Wolfgang. 1992. The present perfect puzzle. Language 68: 525-552.
Michaelis, Laura A. 1994. The Ambiguity of the English Present Perfect. Journal of Linguistics 30: 111-157.
Michaelis, Laura A. 1998. Aspectual Grammar and Past-Time Reference. London: Routledge.
Michaelis, Laura A. 2011. Stative by Construction. Linguistics 49: 1359-1400.
Mittwoch, Anita. 2008. The English Resultative Perfect and its Relationship to the Experiential Perfect and the Simple Past Tense. Linguistics and Philosophy 31: 323-351.