Freitag, 13.30 Uhr
My paper focuses on sentences containing stage and individual level predicates (Carlson 1977), examining changes in interpretation when they are combined with certain types of adverbials. Based on data from Finnish, I put forward the idea that stage level readings differ structurally from individual level readings. The stage/individual level interpretation can also contain elements other than just the predicate. Consider:
(1)
Sirkku laulaa.
'Sirkku sings'(2)
Sirkku laulaa kauniisti.
'Sirkku sings beautifully'(3)
Sirkku laulaa kauniisti suihkussa.
'Sirkku sings beautifully in the shower'
The stage level readings of (1) and (2) refer to some temporary moment in time. The individual level readings of (1) and (2) refer to some permanent property that Sirkku has, and in (1) we are talking about a different property than in (2). In the stage level reading of (2), an adverbial of manner such as KAUNIISTI 'beautifully' functions as ordinary adverbial modifier, a sister to some nonminimal head perhaps. In the individual level reading of (2), because KAUNIISTI 'beautifully' seems to form an unseparable combination with the (verbal) predicate, I shall analyse it as what might be called a secondary head. The idea of secondary heads that I experiment with is from Cann (1996), who argues that certain (Spec + Head) combinations can be doubly headed, so that the label of the phrase marker is the union of the labels of two constituents, the two co-heads of the phrase. Cann also argues that phrases containing a Specifier differ distributionally from their Specifierless counterparts. Examples such as (3) from Finnish would seem to suggest that only Specifierless phrases (ie the stage level readings) can combine with additional adverbials. The fact that the interpretation of LAULAA KAUNIISTI 'sing beautifully' is restricted to a stage-level reading in (3) is used as evidence that different adverbial constructions have different structural properties.
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