LINGUIST List 7.372

Sat Mar 9 1996

Qs: Modality, Chinese Texts, Phonological Theory

Editor for this issue: Ljuba Veselinova <lveselinemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. Ken Hughes, Modality, intentionality, and infinitival TO
2. Paul Woods, Segmentation of Chinese texts by computer
3. John Goldsmith, gldsmthu.washington.edu

I'm finishing up a thesis that examines a phenomenology of verbal
inflection and modality. I'm looking at a narrow interpretation of
'syntactic intentionality' that I think is evident in infinitival TO
and zero morphs in English and German modal auxiliaries.

When I say intentionality, I mean intentionality in an old-fashioned
Husserlian sense as intentionality-as-directedness (not
intentionality- as-intensionality) under constrained grammatical views
observed in the patterning of infinitival TO (perhaps especially so
when it is 'semantically empty'), in periphrastic modal forms, and in
related structures such as causatives, verbs of perception, and the
like.

Whatever syntactic category infinitival TO belongs to (be it INFLo,
some other inflectional head, or some unique category of its own) I
want to assert that its referent seems to be what does the heavy
lifting in the generation of sentential modality. This doesn't seem
too odd to assert but one consequence of this is that a modal verb
(excepting OUGHT) ends up looking something like:

 M --> [ TNS V [ INFLo? ]] (with two INFL nodes?).

This is rather ugly, but it seems clear that something special needs
to be said about infinitival TO and modal AUX.

I'm interested in any comments, related mysteries, or refutations.
(Note that this grammar uses only a reduced form of Chomsky 1980.)
I'll summarize these, along with previous data collection, in April.

Thanks for your attentions,

 Ken Hughes hughesunixg.ubc.ca Science Education, UBC

Hello, I am looking at developing efficient, simple, and robust
computer techniques of segmenting Chinese texts for the purposes of
information extraction.If you have any suggestions for papers,
books,or people that I might be able to contact, I'd be very grateful.

Thanks,
Paul Woods.
Uni of Sheffield
UK.

http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~paulw

I am constructing a book of readings in phonological theory in the
generative era, and I'd be grateful for any thoughts or suggestions
along these lines, especially from people who teach phonology and who
have favorite articles (or books) which they especially like for their
students to reach but which are difficult or impossible for the
students to get hold of.

Send your nominations to
John Goldsmith
gldsmthsapir.uchicago.edu

Thanks.