linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingu ...

, the syntax–semantics interface is the interaction between syntax and

semantics Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and compu ...

. Its study encompasses phenomena that pertain to both syntax and semantics, with the goal of explaining correlations between form and meaning.Chierchia (1999) Specific topics include

scope Scope or scopes may refer to: People with the surname * Jamie Scope (born 1986), English footballer * John T. Scopes (1900–1970), central figure in the Scopes Trial regarding the teaching of evolution Arts, media, and entertainment * CinemaS ...

,Partee (2014) binding, and

lexical semantic Lexical may refer to: Linguistics * Lexical corpus or lexis, a complete set of all words in a language * Lexical item, a basic unit of lexicographical classification * Lexicon, the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge * Lexical ...

properties such as

verbal aspect In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, as denoted by a verb, extends over time. Perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to ...

and nominal individuation,Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995)Van Valin & LaPolla (1997)Van Valin (2005) p.67 semantic macroroles,Van Valin (2005) p.67 and

unaccusativity In linguistics, an unaccusative verb is an intransitive verb whose grammatical subject is not a semantic agent. In other words, the subject does not actively initiate, or is not actively responsible for, the action expressed by the verb. An unaccus ...

.Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995) The interface is conceived of very differently in formalist and functionalist approaches. While functionalists tend to look into semantics and pragmatics for explanations of syntactic phenomena, formalists try to limit such explanations within syntax itself. It is sometimes referred to as the ''morphosyntax–semantics interface'' or the ''syntax-lexical semantics interface''.Hackl (2013)

Functionalist approaches

Within functionalist approaches, research on the syntax–semantics interface has been aimed at disproving the formalist argument of the autonomy of syntax, by finding instances of semantically determined syntactic structures. Levin and Rappaport Hovav, in their 1995 monograph, reiterated that there are some aspects of verb meaning that are relevant to syntax, and others that are not, as previously noted by

Steven Pinker Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. P ...

.Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995) ch.1 p. 9 Levin and Rappaport Hovav isolated such aspects focusing on the phenomenon of

that is "semantically determined and syntactivally encoded".Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995) ch.5 p.179, Afterword p.279 Van Valin and LaPolla, in their 1997 monographic study, found that the more semantically motivated or driven a syntactic phenomena is, the more it tends to be typologically universal, that is, to show less cross-linguistic variation.

Formal approaches

In formal semantics, semantic interpretation is viewed as a mapping from syntactic structures to

denotation In linguistics and philosophy, the denotation of an expression is its literal meaning. For instance, the English word "warm" denotes the property of being warm. Denotation is contrasted with other aspects of meaning including connotation. For ins ...

s. There are several formal views of the syntax-semantics interface which differ in what they take to be the inputs and outputs of this mapping. In the ''Heim and Kratzer'' model commonly adopted within

generative linguistics Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistics ...

, the input is taken to be a special level of syntactic representation called

logical form In logic, logical form of a statement is a precisely-specified semantic version of that statement in a formal system. Informally, the logical form attempts to formalize a possibly ambiguous statement into a statement with a precise, unambig ...

. At logical form, semantic relationships such as

and binding are represented unambiguously, having been determined by syntactic operations such as

quantifier raising In generative grammar, the technical term operator denotes a type of expression that enters into an a-bar movement dependency.Chomsky, Noam. (1981) Lectures on Government and Binding, Foris, Dordrecht.Haegeman, Liliane (1994) Introduction to Gover ...

. Other formal frameworks take the opposite approach, assuming that such relationships are established by the rules of semantic interpretation themselves. In such systems, the rules include mechanisms such as type shifting and dynamic binding.Heim & Kratzer (1998)Baker (2015)

History

Before the 1950s, there was no discussion of a syntax–semantics interface in American linguistics, since neither syntax nor semantics was an active area of research. This neglect was due in part to the influence of

logical positivism Logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, and both of which together are also known as neopositivism, is a movement in Western philosophy whose central thesis was the verification principle (also known as the verifiability criterion of ...

and behaviorism in psychology, that viewed hypotheses about linguistic meaning as untestable.Partee (2014).pp.2, 6Taylor (2017) By the 1960s, syntax had become a major area of study, and some researchers began examining semantics as well. In this period, the most prominent view of the interface was the ''

Katz Katz or KATZ may refer to: Fiction * Katz Kobayashi, a character in Japanese anime * "Katz", a 1947 Nelson Algren story in ''The Neon Wilderness'' * Katz, a character in ''Courage the Cowardly Dog'' Other uses *Katz (surname) *Katz, British Colum ...

- Postal Hypothesis'' according to which

deep structure Deep structure and surface structure (also D-structure and S-structure although those abbreviated forms are sometimes used with distinct meanings) are concepts used in linguistics, specifically in the study of syntax in the Chomskyan tradition of ...

was the level of syntactic representation which underwent semantic interpretation. This assumption was upended by data involving quantifiers, which showed that syntactic transformations can affect meaning. During the

linguistics wars The linguistics wars were a protracted academic dispute inside American theoretical linguistics which took place mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, stemming from an intellectual falling-out between Noam Chomsky and some of his early colleagues and doct ...

, a variety of competing notions of the interface were developed, many of which live on in present day work.

Notes

References

* * Chierchia, G. (1999)
Syntax-semantics interface
', pp. 824-826, in:
The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences
', Edited by Keil & Wilson (1999) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. * Hackl, M. (2013)
The syntax–semantics interface
'. Lingua, 130, 66-87. * * Levin, B., & Pinker, S. (1992) Introduction in Beth Levin & Steven Pinker (1992, Eds) Lexical & conceptual semantics. (A Cognition Special Issue) Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Pp. 244. * Levin, B., & Rappaport Hovav, M. (1995).
Unaccusativity: At the syntax–lexical semantics interface
'. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press *

* Pinker, S. (1989) ''Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure''. New editoin in 2013: ''Learnability and Cognition, new edition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure''. MIT press. * Taylor, J. (2017)
Lexical Semantics
'. In B. Dancygier (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics, pp. 246-261). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * Tenny, C. (1994). Aspectual roles and the syntax-semantics interface (Vol. 52). Dordrecht: Kluwer. * Robert Van Valin Jr., Van Valin, R. D. Jr. & LaPolla, R. J. (1997) ''Syntax: Structure, meaning, and function''. Cambridge University Press. * Van Valin Jr, R. D. (2003) ''Functional linguistics'', ch. 13 in
The handbook of linguistics
', pp. 319-336. * Robert Van Valin Jr., Van Valin, R. D. Jr. (2005).
Exploring the syntax-semantics interface
', Cambridge University Press. * Vendler, Z. (1957) ''Verbs and times'' in ''The Philosophical Review'' 66(2): 143–160. Reprinted as ch. 4 of ''Linguistics and Philosophy'', Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1967, pp.97-121.

Functionalist approaches

Formal approaches

History

See also

Notes

References

Further reading