Workshop in Semantics and Philosophy of Language

The workshop will have its last meeting of the year this
Friday (June 13) from 11:00am-1:00pm in the Landahl Center.
Ivano Caponigro (UCSD) will be presenting some of his recent
work (actually joint work with Maria Polinsky from Harvard).
The abstract is below.

Most languages (including English) distinguish between
relative clauses, embedded declarative clauses, and embedded
interrogative clauses in various syntactic ways (e.g.
complementizers, gaps, wh-words, extraction). The syntactic
behavior matches the semantic one, since all these embedded
clauses differ in their meaning as well. In this talk, we
present a language that exhibits a very different pattern.
In Adyghe, a North-West Caucasian language spoken in
southern Russia and some parts of Turkey, the very
same “mystery clause” is used to convey the various meanings
that relative clauses, embedded declaratives, and embedded
interrogatives convey in other languages. We show that (i)
Adyghe’s “mystery clause” is a headless relative clause, and
that (ii) the syntax-semantics mapping in Adyghe can be
accounted for by means of tools that have already been
independently argued for in the grammar (set formation,
concealed questions, polarity operators, etc.). More
generally, Adyghe and its extensive use relative clauses to
convey various meanings show that the syntax-semantics
interface across languages is more varied that it is usually
assumed, but it can still be handled without enriching the
conceptual apparatus of the grammar.