Restrictive apposition: An indeterminate category<sup>1</sup>

Meyer, Charles F.

doi:10.1080/00138388908598623

Cited by 12 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…I do not believe this to be the case. What I have called 'identifying descriptions' have also been termed 'pseudo' appositives (Lasersohn, 1986), 'close' or 'restrictive' appositives (Meyer, 1989), or 'integrated' appositives (Payne and Huddleston, 2002), to distinguish them from 'true' or 'non-restrictive' appositives like 'the city, Oakland'. As Jackendoff (1984) points out, one way to see that close appositives are not true or non-restrictive appositives is that the latter can involve an indefinite article ('a city, Oakland' or 'Oakland, a city') but the former cannot ('a city of Oakland' sounds bad).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Being Something: Properties and Predicative Quantification

Rieppel¹

2016

Mind

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If I say that Alice is everything Oscar hopes to be (healthy, wealthy, wise etc.), I seem to be quantifying over properties. That suggestion faces an immediate difficulty, however: though Alice may be wise, she surely is not the property of being wise. This problem can be framed in terms of a substitution failure: if a predicate like 'happy' denoted a property, we would expect pairs like 'Oscar is happy' and 'Oscar is the property of being happy' to be equivalent, which they clearly are not. I argue that a Fregean response that draws a distinction between objects and concepts faces serious difficulties, and that a syntactic solution to the substitution problem likewise fails. I propose to account for the substitution failure by instead distinguishing different ways that expressions can stand for properties: whereas the 'the property of being happy' refers to a property, 'happy' expresses or ascribes that property. I go on to compare this view to proposals made by Wright (1998) andLiebesman (2014), and end by drawing out a consequence my proposal has for a debate about the ontological commitments of predicatively quantified sentences.One reaction to this problem would be to jump ship to the nominalist camp. Predicates, one might insist, let us describe things as being this way or that, but not by way of denoting properties, or anything else for that matter. An immediate hurdle confronting this view is that it threatens to rob us of the resources needed to make sense of the possibility of quantifying into predicate position. For if predicates do not denote anything, there looks to be nothing for predicative quantifiers to quantify over, and so no obvious way to understand the semantics of such quantifiers. 2 Moving forward, I will set the nominalist view aside. The question I want to consider is how to deal with substitution failures like the above while holding on to the idea that there are things that predicates denote, and that predicative quantifiers can accordingly be construed as quantifying over. I will consider three competing answers to that question, and argue that we should opt for the third.The first option is to adopt a Fregean approach, and to hold that the postcopular expressions in (1a) and (1b) must denote different things. Properties, the Fregean will say, are objects of a certain sort, in the sense that they are denoted by certain nominal expressions and quantified over in certain nominally quantified sentences. Predicates like 'happy', he will insist, denote things of a fundamentally different kind -what Frege termed concepts. The Fregean would thus have us abandon the property-based view: the things denoted by predicates and quantified over by predicative quantifiers are not properties, but things of this fundamentally different kind.A second option is to look for a syntactic solution. Truth conditions, we should remind ourselves, are determined by both syntax and semantics. We might therefore seek a syntactic explanation of the change in truth conditions that we observe in our substitution p...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Being Something: Properties and Predicative Quantification

Rieppel¹

2016

Mind

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“…There are numerous accounts of the discourse functions of close appositions (Quirk et al 1985;Meyer 1989Meyer , 1991Meyer , 1992Keizer 2007b) and they are all compatible with this view. There are numerous accounts of the discourse functions of close appositions (Quirk et al 1985;Meyer 1989Meyer , 1991Meyer , 1992Keizer 2007b) and they are all compatible with this view.…”

Section: Agreement: Consistent With the Pluralization Facts If A Phrmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…2 If we compare (1)-(4), all from Curme (1947), a traditional grammar, with (5)-(10) on the other, from Meyer (1989Meyer ( , 1991Meyer ( , 1992, it is easy to see that the half a century of greatest progress in the history of linguistics has not affected 1 This research was funded by the Fund for Scientific Research of the Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant number PGIDT01PXI20401PR) and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (grants SEJ2005-08911/PSIC and, partially, SEJ2006-09238/PSIC). 2 If we compare (1)-(4), all from Curme (1947), a traditional grammar, with (5)-(10) on the other, from Meyer (1989Meyer ( , 1991Meyer ( , 1992, it is easy to see that the half a century of greatest progress in the history of linguistics has not affected 1 This research was funded by the Fund for Scientific Research of the Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant number PGIDT01PXI20401PR) and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (grants SEJ2005-08911/PSIC and, partially, SEJ2006-09238/PSIC).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aspects of the grammar of close apposition and the structure of the noun phrase

Acuña-Fariña¹

2009

English Language and Linguistics

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The range of structures commonly classed as close appositives forms a rich ecological niche where each construction relates to the other constructions forming a dense network of taxonomic and inheritance ties (Goldberg 1995). As a first approximation to the concept of close apposition, however, the structure of that network falls outside the scope of this article, where I focus on the theoretical notion of close apposition itself, on how it deviates from that of loose apposition (Acuña-Fariña 2006), and on an analysis of a quintessentially close appositive construction, thethe poet Burnstype in the literature (Curme 1947; Lee 1952; Fries 1952; Haugen 1953; Hockett 1955, 1958). The thesis that these strings are formed by a doubly endocentric structure where the putative first segment (the poet) is a grounded nominal (i.e. an active referent; e.g. Langacker 1991; Taylor 2002) is rejected. Instead, it is argued that these highly conventionalized close appositions are instances of ‘inchoate’ noun phrase structure, and that the internal constituency of such strings is not fully elaborated due to a lack of strong functional pressure. Three reasons are put forward in order to defend such a view: 1. the construction has as its job the activation of a social referent, and in the social world that we inhabit this is usually done either by name or profession, with no logical incompatibility between the two; 2. the construction is a hybrid of distinct and more productive (and fully elaborated) templates, which act asattractor polesand pull constituency in opposite directions; and 3. the construction is easily identifiable as such ‘from the top’. This makes it unnecessary to have to spend valuable cognitive resources (like creating, storing and deploying inaudible, abstract, constituent structure) when, somewhat metaphorically, one can reach the final destination of that journey (the last stop being meaning) directly, as it were, with no changing of trains (Haiman 1994; Boyland 1996; Hay 2001). The present analysis is framed along lines compatible with various forms of Construction Grammar.

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“…Não são poucas as controvérsias em torno da definição e identificação de construções apositivas, destacando-se, no tratamento dessas construções, duas perspectivas: a de categorização discreta, que enquadra a aposição em um dos tipos de processo de construção pela adoção de critérios semânticos e sintáticos objetivos, e a consequente redução do conjunto de construções que podem ser analisadas como apositivas (TABOADA, 1978;LAGO, 1991;MARTINEZ, 1985;RODRIGUEZ, 1989;BURTON-ROBERTS, 1987); e a de categorização não discreta, que assume e investiga a fluidez categorial existente na aposição, propõe um conjunto de traços para identificação de uma representação prototípica dessa construção, mas identifica construções apositivas que se situam na fronteira com outras construções gramaticais da língua (MATTHEWS, 1981;MEYER, 1989MEYER, , 1992QUIRK et al, 1985;NOGUEIRA, 1999NOGUEIRA, , 2012. Uma das características mais associadas às construções apositivas é a sua natureza nominal, embora gramáticos e linguistas reconheçam a existência de aposições não nominais que se encontram na fronteira com os processos sintáticos de coordenação e subordinação.…”

Section: Introductionunclassified

“…(3) She rejected their excuses, even this last one, that investigations had taken several weeks (QUIRK et al, 1985(QUIRK et al, , 1305 A construção que temos em (2) assemelha-se à do exemplo anterior, pois também ilustra o que Matthews (1981) e Meyer (1989) consideram como uma fronteira entre aposição e complementação. Ilustra, ainda, o que Quirk et al (1985) analisam como um caso de aposição parcial e fraca entre um sintagma nominal e uma oração.…”

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Aposições oracionais em uso: rediscutindo fronteiras categoriais

Nogueira

2017

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Uma das propriedades mais associadas às construções apositivas é a sua natureza nominal, embora gramáticos e linguistas identifiquem aposições não nominais na fronteira com a coordenação e a subordinação. Com base teórica na Gramática Discursivo-Funcional (HENGEVELD; MACKENZIE, 2008; KEIZER, 2007), eu analiso a fronteira entre aposição e complementação em construções nas quais uma oração se encontra ligada aos substantivos fato, tese e desculpa por meio da preposição de.

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Restrictive apposition: An indeterminate category¹

Cited by 12 publications

References 8 publications

Being Something: Properties and Predicative Quantification

Being Something: Properties and Predicative Quantification

Aspects of the grammar of close apposition and the structure of the noun phrase

Aposições oracionais em uso: rediscutindo fronteiras categoriais

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Restrictive apposition: An indeterminate category1

Cited by 12 publications

References 8 publications

Being Something: Properties and Predicative Quantification

Being Something: Properties and Predicative Quantification

Aspects of the grammar of close apposition and the structure of the noun phrase

Aposições oracionais em uso: rediscutindo fronteiras categoriais

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Restrictive apposition: An indeterminate category¹