http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/7673 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/8158 The semantics of the future Copley, Bridget, Lynn, 1974- Natural languages use a number of different methods to refer to future eventualities: among them are futurates, as in (la), and futures, as in (lb) and (c). (1) a. The Red Sox (are) play(ing) the Yankees tomorrow. b. We'll change your oil in Madera. c. We're going to change your oil in Madera. This dissertation uses evidence primarily from English, with additional data from Turkish and Indonesian, to argue that these methods all involve universal quantification over subsets of metaphysically accessible futures. One factor in determining which worlds a modal quantifies over is the temporal argument of the modal's accessibility relation. It is well-known that a higher tense affects the accessibility relation of modals. What is not well-known is that there are aspectual operators high enough to affect the accessibility relation of modals. New data presented in this dissertation reveal the presence of aspectual operators located between TP and the future modal projection. The effects of these operators on truth and assertability conditions provide substantial information about the correct characterization of future modality, and indeed of modality in general. Furthermore, the very existence of such aspectual operators raises questions about how aspect is represented in the semantics, if (as is generally assumed) aspectual operators take event arguments, which do not occur outside of the verb phrase. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2002. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 142-144). http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/11075 Phonological phrases--their relation to syntax, focus, and prominance Truckenbrodt, Hubert Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1995. Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-259). http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/12499 Minimalism in syntatic derivation Oka, Toshifusa Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1993. Includes bibliographical references (p. 117-120). http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/41704 Contradiction and grammar : the case of weak islands Abrusán, Márta This thesis is about weak islands. Weak islands are contexts that are transparent to some but not all operator-variable dependencies. For this reason, they are also sometimes called selective islands. Some paradigmatic cases of weak island violations include the ungrammatical examples involving manner and degree extraction in (1)a and (2)a, as opposed to the acceptable questions about individuals in (1)b and (2)b: (1) a. *How does John regret that he fixed the car? b.Who does John regret that he invited to the party? (2) a. *How much milk haven't you spilled on your shirt? b.Which girl haven't you introduced to Mary? The main questions that an account of weak islands should address are the following: * What contexts create weak islands and why? + Which expressions are sensitive to weak islands and why? * Why do weak islands sometimes improve? This thesis develops a semantic account for weak islands, whose core idea can be summarized as follows. What sets apart the expressions that are sensitive to weak islands from the ones that are not is that in the case of the former the domain of quantification is such that its elements stand in a particular logical relationship with each other. The island creating contexts are those in which this property of the island-sensitive expressions leads to a problem, namely a contradiction. This contradiction might manifest itself in one of two forms: In some cases, the question will presuppose that that a number of mutually incompatible alternatives is true at the same time, therefore it will necessarily lead to a presupposition failure in any context. (cont.) In other cases, the presupposition that there be a complete answer will not be met in any context, because the domain of question alternatives will always contain at least two alternatives that have to-but cannot-be ruled out at the same time. The present proposal therefore fits in the family of proposals (most importantly Szabolcsi and Zwarts (1993), Honcoop (1998), Rullmann (1995), Fox and Hackl (2005)) which argue that it is independently necessary principles of semantic composition that lead to the oddness of weak islands, rather than abstract syntactic locality constraints. As such, it provides a further piece of evidence against the view which holds that principles governing the well-formedness of sentences necessarily belong to the realm of syntax as we know it. However, when we will examine the nature of the contradiction that arises in the cases of weak island violations, we will observe that it is only a special type of contradiction-identified by Gajewski (2002) as L-analytic-which leads to ungrammaticality: namely one that results from the logical constants of the sentence alone. In this sense the violation that can be observed might be argued to be "syntactic": it can be read from the logical form of the sentences. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 135-138).