Papers by Paolo Acquaviva
The work of James McCloskey has been an inspiration for many people, and I am one of them. I woul... more The work of James McCloskey has been an inspiration for many people, and I am one of them. I would like to express my thanks to him for all he has done and for what he has meant for so many. Cailín is grammatically regularly masculine, despite its meaning, because it is formed with-ín, which is here a noun-forming sux and not a noun-modifying diminutive one; see. below). I use the following abbreviations: = copula, = feminine, = genitive, M = masculine, = possessive, = particle, = Past.
Number in the World's Languages
A morphological analysis shows that the inflection of Irish prepositions involves more than the a... more A morphological analysis shows that the inflection of Irish prepositions involves more than the attachment of pronominal endings to a stem. Some paradigmatic regularities suggest that inflecting prepositions have an abstract morphological agreement marker, absent in the syntax; pronominal endings are just one way of realizing it. Apart form the immediate empirical results, a morphological approach to prepositional conjugation can provide new insights into the syntactic questions posed by Irish inflection. Introduction In all dialects of Irish, and indeed of Goidelic and Celtic, prepositions have both a base form and a set of inflected forms. The paradigms in (2) and (3), respectively from the Connacht and Munster areas (from De Bhaldraithe 1997:141, 143 and Ó Sé 2000:198, 204), illustrate two realizations of the orthographic standard set in (1): (1) le "with" ag "at" 1sg liom agam 2sg leat agat 3sg masc. leis aige 3sg fem. léi aici 1pl linn againn 2pl libh agaibh...
This chapter examines the relation between the structure of words as linguistic objects and their... more This chapter examines the relation between the structure of words as linguistic objects and their conceptual content. It addresses two questions: what are the primitives of lexical semantic interpretation, and how they are expressed in the grammatical and morphological representation of a lexical item. The answer involves a characterization of roots as theoretical objects, followed by an argument to the effect that it is not roots, but larger structures of variable size which relate to lexical concepts. An in-depth discussion of nouns leads to the claim that the conceptual content of a lexical item does not reflect its grammatical structure, because a concept is not the meaning of a linguistically defined unit, but a language-external cognitive content, globally associated with the lexical word as a whole.
Beaucoup de noms pluriels sont syntaxiquement caracterises comme massifs et ne referent pas a des... more Beaucoup de noms pluriels sont syntaxiquement caracterises comme massifs et ne referent pas a des ensembles d'elements bien definis: par exemple, dans l'une de ses lectures, angl. resources refere generiquement a tout element ayant une fonction de ressource, et non a un ensemble d'elements dont chacun est une ressource. Dans ce nom la pluralite a cependant un role semantique, puisque resources et resource n'ont pas le meme sens ; mais son interpretation n'est pas compositionnelle. Apres avoir montre que de telles donnees ne peuvent pas etre ecartees sous pretexte d'exception, l'article propose que le pluriel represente ici une epellation flexionnelle qui encode le fait que le lexeme denote une realite consistant en parties distinctes: angl. books signifie [PL (BOOK)], mais le sens effectif de resources est (RESOURCE & PL].
UCD Foundation for Italian Studie
Title On the exponence of gender in the Irish DP Authors(s) Acquaviva, Paolo Publication date 201... more Title On the exponence of gender in the Irish DP Authors(s) Acquaviva, Paolo Publication date 2018-03 Publication information Merchant J., Mikkelsen L., Rudin D., Sasaki K. (eds.). A reasonable way to proceed: Essays in honor of Jim McCloskey Publisher Linguistics Research Center, University of California Santa Cruz Link to online version https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7z29n70x Item record/more information http://hdl.handle.net/10197/10320
Word Knowledge and Word Usage, 2020
Lexical semantics is concerned with modeling the meaning of lexical items. Its leading questions ... more Lexical semantics is concerned with modeling the meaning of lexical items. Its leading questions are how forms and meanings combine, what they mean, how they are used, and of course also how they change. The answers to these five questions make up the fundamental theoretical assumptions and commitments which underlie different theories of lexical semantics, and they form the basis for their various methodological choices. In this chapter, we discuss four main models of lexical meaning: relational, symbolic, conceptual and distributional. The aim is to investigate their historical background, their specific differences, the methodological and theoretical assumptions that lie behind those differences, the main strengths and the main challenges of each perspective.
Lingue e linguaggio, Jul 1, 2012
* We wish to thank the audience and organizers of the first NetWordS workshop. P. Acquaviva's res... more * We wish to thank the audience and organizers of the first NetWordS workshop. P. Acquaviva's research was supported by an Alexander von Humboldt fellowhip, which is gratefully acknowledged. Faults and omissions are the authors' responsibility.
Studia Linguistica, 1994
Despite the desirability of an analysis of sentential negation based on the Negative Criterion an... more Despite the desirability of an analysis of sentential negation based on the Negative Criterion and the NegP hypothesis, current approaches are unsatisfactory both on the theoretical and on the empirical level. I argue that the ultimate source of such inadequacies is the idea that negative expressions are quantifiers and must accordingly reach a scope position. The alternative view that negatives are negated indefinites affords a general analysis of sentential negation as unselective binding of the event variable and possibly of variables associated with indefinites, including negative indefinites. This approach solves the noted problems without rejecting the starting assumptions, and provides a unified syntactic analysis for negative sentences grounded on their semantics. * I should like to express my gratitude to the audience of the XVI GLOW Conference and to an anonymous reviewer, whose comments on an earlier draft have suggested a number of improvements. Any shortcomings are my own responsibility.
Linguistics, 2002
Polarity items must, by definition, lie inside the scope of their licenser; items like any N, in ... more Polarity items must, by definition, lie inside the scope of their licenser; items like any N, in addition, appear to require a c-commanding and overt licenser. It is argued that the relevant restriction refers to precedence, not c-command, and that it is morphological, not syntactic. This implies a morphological dimension of dependence, in addition to the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic ones. The analysis relies on the separation between syntax and a post-syntactic morphological component: the exponents of the relevant polarity items require an [operator] feature which never appears in the corresponding feature bundle at the output of syntax. This mismatch is resolved by copying the feature from the licensing operator, provided it is present at morphological structure (overt) and linearly preceding.
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Papers by Paolo Acquaviva