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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod

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Query Details


Query Subject:   Languages with Obligatory Auxiliary Verbs
Author:   William Sakas
Submitter Email:  click here to access email

Linguistic LingField(s):  Computational Linguistics
Syntax
Language Acquisition

Query:   Are there any natural languages whose (declarative) sentences
obligatorily contain an auxiliary verb? I.e., there are no sentences
with finite main verbs.

We are building a large domain of parameterized languages for
computational study of language acquisition. We need to know whether
it is plausible to permit the combination of no V-to-I movement with
obligatory I-to-C movement, which would entail that every sentence
must contain an auxiliary that raises from I to C.

If you know of any such languages, could you supply a couple of
examples?

Thanks!
William Sakas
LL Issue: 22.2360
Date posted: 04-Jun-2011



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