crest

Syntax Project Group

at

University of Toronto

Summer 2005

Place:
RL 6071

Time:
Thursday, 1-3 pm

NEW!

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Schedule

June | July | August

June 23

Monica Irimia
Unifying Secondary Predicates

June 30

Clitics and Agreement Day

by
Javier Bucio
Mike Barrie
Diane Massam

July 7

Forum Presentations

by

Katarina Koncar
Title: TBA

Vanessa Shokeir
Serbo-Croatian clitics:
How prosody determines word order

July 14

Marina Sherkina-Lieber
Title: TBA

July 21

Diane Massam
Issues in Niean NI

Eugenia Suh
The Structure of Nominal Phrases in Korean

Jee-Youn Shin
Wh-constructions in Korean:
A Lexical Account

July 28

Reading:
Fox and Pesetsky - Cyclic Linealization

August 4

David Oshima
(Stanford University)
Perspectives in Reported Discourse

Tanya Slavin
Title: TBA (Forum Presentation)

August 11

David Newton
Title: TBA (Forum Presentation)

Sarah Clarke
Title: TBA (Forum Presentation)

August 18

Reading: McCloskey (????)

August 25

Reading: McCloskey (????)

Directors: Elizabeth Cowper, Alana Johns, Diane Massam

Schedule & Announcements: Mike Barrie

Department of Linguistics at University of Toronto

Last Update: June. 27, 2005 by Kenji Oda

Logs:

David Oshima's abstract:

The notion of perspective plays an important role in many aspects of natural language interpretation, such as constructional alternations, anaphora, deixis and indexicality, functional sentence perspective, narrative styles and rhetorical structures. Reported discourse is an especially important domain in this light. When an agent reports another agent's utterance (or belief, etc.), he or she can choose from, or otherwise mix, two standpoints from which the utterance is represented: that of the reporter-agent and that of the reported-agent. Interactions, fusion, and clash of the two perspectives within reported discourse provide us with important clues as to the nature of many perspectival features.

The main goal of this thesis is to develop semantic analyses of attitude reports that capture various effects of perspective-taking. First, I establish the distinction between the direct and indirect modes of reported discourse: a report in the direct mode describes a relation between an individual and a linguistic object (linguistic representation), while a report in the indirect mode describes a relation between an individual and a semantic object (proposition, etc.) (Partee 1973).

Then, I demonstrate that the indirect mode of attitude reports can be divided into subtypes, depending on the extent to which it maintains the "original" perspective. That is, certain indirect attitude reports are more "direct speech-like" than others. In this talk I take up four types of "perspective shift" phenomena: (i) the de re/de dicto opposition (the analytic perspective shift), (ii) the de se/non-de se opposition (the logophoric perspective shift), (iii) deictic perspective shift (e.g., go vs. come), and (iv) empathic perspective shift, and discuss formal semantic analyses of them. Finally, I examine factors that affect or condition the speaker's choice of perspective in discourse reporting, which include (i) vividness of a report (Tannen 1985), (ii) the hierarchy of attitude predicates (SAY > BELIEVE > KNOW > SEE; Culy 1994), and (iii) implicational relations between the subtypes of perspectives.

References:
Culy, Christopher. 1994. Aspects of logophoric marking. Linguistics 32.
Partee, Barbara. 1973. The syntax and semantics of quotation. In: Anderson, S. and Kiparsky, P. (eds.) A Festschrift for Morris Halle. Holt, Reinhart and Winston.
Tannen, Deborah. 1985. Introducing constructed dialogue in Greek and American conversational and Literary Narrative. In: Coulmans, F. (ed.) Direct and Indirect Speech. Mouton de Gruyter.