International Journal of American Linguistics 53:194–231 (April 1987) ON THE SEMANTICS OF THE GREENLANDIC ANTIPASSIVE AND RELATED CONSTRUCTIONS
This study describes a new field method, suited for investigating scope relations — and other aspects of truth conditional meaning — with native speaker consultants who may speak no other language and have no background in linguistics or logic. This method revealed a surprising scope contrast betwee...
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| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.405.3467 http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~mbittner/bittner_87_ijal.pdf |
| Summary: | This study describes a new field method, suited for investigating scope relations — and other aspects of truth conditional meaning — with native speaker consultants who may speak no other language and have no background in linguistics or logic. This method revealed a surprising scope contrast between the antipassive and the ergative construction in Greenlandic Eskimo. The results of this field work are described in detail and a crosslinguistic scope generalization is proposed based on Greenlandic Eskimo, Basque, Polish, Russian, Finnish and English. [In subsequent work the method described here was refined to avoid interference between minimally contrasting sentences. They should be presented separately, not together. For instance, suppose that (1) and (2) form a minimal pair, where (1) is ambiguous between readings A and B, and (2) can only mean B. That is, if (1) and (2) are presented separately (with unrelated questions in between), the pattern of judgements is (1) = A, B and (2) = *A, B. But if they are presented together, most consultants focus on the contrast — i.e., the pattern of judgments is (1) = A, *B and (2) = *A, B. Fortunately for this particular study, this potential source of error turned out to be harmless. Using the refined method, I still got the same results.] 2 Table of contents: 1. |
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