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Title:
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English Goal Infinitives
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Author:
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David Baxter
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Email:
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
, Department of Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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In Progress
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Syntax
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Subject Language(s):
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English
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Director(s):
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Georgia Green
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Abstract:
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This dissertation will address the question 'What do English speakers know that allows them to use goal infinitives?' It is anticipated that the answer to this question will include a combination of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information. The syntactic and semantic information will be formalized within the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), with revisions to the formalism suggested where they seem necessary. Pragmatic information will be described as precisely as possible, but will not be formalized into HPSG terminology, as HPSG does not have an adequate representation of pragmatics, and it is not the purpose of this dissertation to develop one. Goal infinitives, such as the bracketed phrases in (1), are essentially infinitive phrases adjoined to N-bars or VPs, modifying their semantics by describing the goal of a
situation typically the situation described by the N-bar or VP to which the goal infinitive is adjoined. One of the goals of this dissertation is to explicitly describe the goal relation and to determine the extent to which this concept is specific to language, rather than a part of human beings general cognitive system.
(1) a. Jack went to the market [to sell the cow].
b. Jacks trip to the market [to sell the cow] went awry.
Goal infinitives are of interest partly because they seem to convey so much information that is not traceable to an overt lexical item. There is no one word in a goal infinitive that seems to have a definite meaning of 'goal', and yet in certain contexts the idea that one situation is a goal of another is clearly understood. In addition, one or more of the semantic arguments in the goal situation are typically unexpressed lexically, yet a person hearing a sentence containing a goal infinitive can generally figure out who or what participates in what roles in the situation. Thus part of the mystery of goal infinitives lies in how the interpreter gleams all this information from a lexically impoverished construction.
From preliminary research, it appears that this dissertation will have significant implications for several areas of HPSG and linguistics in general. The question of whether goal infinitives are adjuncts or complements will need to be addressed, and this will entail a discussion of how to tell the difference. The possibility will be explored that goal infinitives fall into a class of semantically transparent operators, which will be analyzed as contributing a logical clause conjoined to the one they modify. The advantages of representing event-denoting nominals as having the same sort of semantics as verbals will be assessed, and the extent to which identification of the referents of unexpressed semantic arguments is underdetermined by syntax and semantics will also be discussed.
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Page Updated: 29-Nov-2009
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