Vladimir Borschev - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Edited books by Vladimir Borschev
A Festschrift for Barbara Partee edited by her Russian colleagues, students and friends.
Papers by Vladimir Borschev
Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The Stony Brook Meeting, 2007
Similar parallels are found with intensional verbs like ždat''expect, wait for'; c... more Similar parallels are found with intensional verbs like ždat''expect, wait for'; correlations between Genitive of Negation (Gen Neg) and Genitive of Intensionality (Gen Int) were described by Dahl, Neidle (1988), Kagan. The similarity between non-veridicality in the sentential domain and non-specificity in the nominal domain has been explored by Kiparsky and Kiparsky (1970), Dahl, Farkas (1985), and others. We suggest that both Subjunctive and the Russian Gen often signal the absence of a presupposition or entailment: of truth, and ...
Journal of Slavic Linguistics, 2018
and Alexander Wentzell for help gathering and clarifying information and improving translations, ... more and Alexander Wentzell for help gathering and clarifying information and improving translations, and Wayles Browne for invaluable help and advice at all stages. 1 Our transliteration practice: When we know that someone's long-standing personal preference for the transliteration of their name in English-language contexts is different from the JSL standard (e.g. 'Zalizniak', 'Paducheva', 'Sitchinava', 'Tolstaya' rather than 'Zaliznjak', 'Padučeva', 'Sičinava', 'Tolstaja'), we use their preferred transliteration if we are writing about them in our text, including when we are translating from Russian into English something someone else wrote about them. But in the bibliography, when transliterating citations of works in Russian, we use JSL standard in both author names and names occurring within titles of works. Exceptions: we write 'Zalizniak', 'Yanin', 'Testelets' as author names (though not within titles). For émigrés such as Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, we use their American names, even when writing about pre-emigration times.
Semantics and Linguistic Theory, Sep 9, 2004
NDS (a) Otvet iz p olka ne p rise!. Answer-NOM.M.SG from regiment NEG arri ved-M.SG 'The answer f... more NDS (a) Otvet iz p olka ne p rise!. Answer-NOM.M.SG from regiment NEG arri ved-M.SG 'The answer from the regiment h as not arri ved. ' ADS (b) Otvet iz p olka p rise!. Answer-NOM.M.SG from regiment arri ved-M.SG 'The answer from the regiment h as arri ved. ' (4) NES (a) Otveta iz p olka ne p ris!o. Answer-GEN.M.SG from regiment NEG arri ved-N.SG 'There was no answer from the regiment. ' AES (b) Prise! otvet iz p olka. Arri ved-M.SG answer-NOM.M.SG from regiment 'There was an answer from the regiment. '
Modifying Adjuncts, 2003
The argument-modifier distinction is less clear in NPs than in VPs since nouns do not typically t... more The argument-modifier distinction is less clear in NPs than in VPs since nouns do not typically take arguments. The clearest cases of arguments in NPs are found in certain kinds of nominalizations which retain some "verbal" properties (Grimshaw 1990). The status of apparent arguments of non-deverbal relational nouns like sister is more controversial. Genitive constructions like John's teacher, team of John's offer a challenging testing ground for the argument-modifier distinction in NPs, both in English and cross-linguistically. In the analyses of Partee (1983/1997) and Barker (1995), the DP in a genitive phrase (i.e. John in John's) is always an argument of some relation, but the relation does not always come from the head noun. In those split approaches, some genitives are arguments and some are modifiers. By contrast, recent proposals by Jensen and Vikner and by Borschev and Partee analyze all genitives as arguments, a conclusion we no longer support. In this paper, we explore a range of possible approaches: argument-only, modifier-only, and split approaches, and we consider the kinds of semantic evidence that imply that different approaches are correct for different genitive or possessive constructions in different languages. For English, we argue that a split approach is correct and we offer some diagnostics for distinguishing arguments from modifiers. 1. The argument-modifier distinction in NPs The argument-modifier distinction is less clear in NPs than in VPs since nouns do not typically take arguments. The clearest cases of arguments in NPs are found in some nominalizations (Grimshaw 1990). Non-deverbal relational nouns like sister, mayor, enemy, picture, edge, height in some sense also seem to take arguments. C. L. Baker (1978) proposed a test using English one anaphora whereby one substitutes for N-bar, which obligatorily includes all of a noun's arguments. By that test, to Oslo in (1a) is a modifier, while of Boston in (1b) is an argument. But neither this, nor any other known test, has seemed conclusive and the question of whether and in what sense "true nouns" take arguments remains controversial.
1. Babby on “Declarative ” and “Existential ” sentences............................................. more 1. Babby on “Declarative ” and “Existential ” sentences...................................................................................... 6 1.1. The scope of negation. Theme and Rheme. Problems................................................................................ 6 1.2. Sentences with the verb byt ’ ‘be ’ and referential subject............................................................................ 10
Part of the Linguistics Commons This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Li... more Part of the Linguistics Commons This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Linguistics at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please
Formal and lexical semantics can be integrated if they speak the same language. We claim that a s... more Formal and lexical semantics can be integrated if they speak the same language. We claim that a substantial part of lexical semantics can be incorporated into formal semantics without adding to the latter any new mechanisms. This talk continues the authors’ work on the ontology and the semantics of measure constructions in Russian. The work concerns expressions like dva stakana moloka, polkorziny gribov, tri meshka muki (two glasses of milk, half a basket of mushrooms, three bags of flour), etc., describing various kinds of containers, or corresponding measures based on them, and their contents—portions of substances. In our previous works, describing ontological information, including sorts of things and the words and expressions that designate sorts, we did not include those sorts in our formal semantic analyses. We do that in the present work, declaring sorts as types and thereby significantly expanding Montague’s system of types. On the one hand this gives us the means for speci...
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007
Compositionality in Formal Semantics
Background: Possessives and the argument-modifier distinction in NPs. Possessive constructions li... more Background: Possessives and the argument-modifier distinction in NPs. Possessive constructions like John's teacher, John's team, John's cat, friend of John's offer an interesting test-bed for the argument-modifier distinction in NPs, both in English and cross-linguistically. Many, perhaps all, possessives seem to have some properties of arguments and some of modifiers, but some seem more argument-like and some more modifier-like. Recent proposals by Jensen and Vikner (1994), Vikner and Jensen (ms.1999), Partee and Borschev (1998), Borschev and Partee (1999a,b) analyze all possessives as argument-like, a conclusion we are no longer sure of. It is not easy to settle the question of whether there is a substantive difference between these two "roles" of possessives, and it may well be the case that all or many possessives play both roles at once. One central question about possessive constructions, then, is the following: Are all, some, or no possessives arguments of nouns, and if so, which ones (and how can we tell?), and of what kind, and at what 'level' of analysis? Within this larger question, we discuss here a relevant narrower question: Do predicate possessives provide strong evidence against a unified treatment of all possessives as arguments? 1.1. Possessives/genitives and related constructions. The terminology surrounding "possessives" and "genitives" is confusing, since the correspondences among morphological forms, syntactic positions, grammatical relations, and semantic interpretations are complex and debated, and vary considerably across languages. For clarification, let us distinguish at least the following: 2 a. Possessive pronouns: E. my, his; R. moj 'my', ego 'his'; E. predicative forms mine, his and postnominal forms of mine, of his.
Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 2001
Our long-term goal is to contribute to the integration of formal and lexical semantics. Our more ... more Our long-term goal is to contribute to the integration of formal and lexical semantics. Our more immediate theoretical starting point is the idea of “text as theory”, within a model-theoretic semantic framework. We describe a set of empirical problems in the domain of genitive modifiers that offers a challenge to theories of the integration of lexical, compositional, and contextual information. After sketching a solution, we raise the issue of metonymy in the interpretation of genitives, and examine the role of sortal information in the specification of underspecified meanings and in processes of type-shifting and sort-shifting, including metonymy.
Linguistic Typology, 2013
Abstract
Tipologija i teorija jazyka: Ot opisanija k ob" jasneniju. …, 1999
University of Massachusetts occasional papers, 2004
What's the reason? Our thesis can be stated in a fuzzy form as follows: Many, although not a... more What's the reason? Our thesis can be stated in a fuzzy form as follows: Many, although not all, restrictions on felicitous and infelicitous uses of genitive constructions, and on the possible interpretations of felicitous uses, can be characterized in terms of sortal distinctions within the domain of entities, and corresponding sortal properties of both the head noun and the genitive NP. We are building on related work (Pustejovsky 1993, Jensen and Vikner 1994, Dölling 1992a, b, 1997, Knorina 1979, 1985, 1988, Borschev and Knorina 1990, ...
Proceedings of Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics, 2010
... This talk is related to our ongoing joint work, with valuable suggestions from more people th... more ... This talk is related to our ongoing joint work, with valuable suggestions from more people than we can list here see acknowledgments in our papers -- but especially Olga Kagan for ongoing discussion, Alexander Letuchij for corpus help, and Ekaterina Rakhilina for both. ...
∎ This talk represents work joint with Vladimir Borschev, as well as work joint with Vladimir Bor... more ∎ This talk represents work joint with Vladimir Borschev, as well as work joint with Vladimir Borschev, Elena Paducheva, Yakov Testelets, and Igor Yanovich, with valuable suggestions from and discussion with more people than I can list here–see acknowledgments in our papers--but especially Olga Kagan for ongoing discussion, Alexander Letuchij for valuable corpus help, and Ekaterina Rakhilina for both. This work was supported in part by by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-9905748 to Partee and Borschev.
Lecture notes, Universidade da Coruna, 2005
Possessive constructions also offer an interesting test-bed for the argument-modifier distinction... more Possessive constructions also offer an interesting test-bed for the argument-modifier distinction in NPs, both in English and cross-linguistically. Many, perhaps all, possessors seem to have some properties of arguments and some of modifiers, but some seem more argumentlike and some more modifier-like. Recent proposals by Jensen and Vikner (1994), Vikner and Jensen (2002) and Partee and Borschev (1998) analyze all possessors as argument-like. Partee and Borschev (2001, 2003) argue that the uniform analysis may be ...
Jensen, PA and P. Skadhauge (Eds.), 2001
this paper overlap with parts of Borschev and Partee (1999b) and Partee and Borschev (2000). This... more this paper overlap with parts of Borschev and Partee (1999b) and Partee and Borschev (2000). This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under GrantNo. BCS-9905748. D: My DocumentsGENITIVESDenmark00OntoQue.... doc 2metaphysics with investigations into naivnaja kartina mira. Our focus in this paper is therole of sortal information in the specification of underspecified meanings and inprocesses of type-shifting and sort-shifting, including metonymy
Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The Stony Brook Meeting, 2007
Similar parallels are found with intensional verbs like ždat''expect, wait for'; c... more Similar parallels are found with intensional verbs like ždat''expect, wait for'; correlations between Genitive of Negation (Gen Neg) and Genitive of Intensionality (Gen Int) were described by Dahl, Neidle (1988), Kagan. The similarity between non-veridicality in the sentential domain and non-specificity in the nominal domain has been explored by Kiparsky and Kiparsky (1970), Dahl, Farkas (1985), and others. We suggest that both Subjunctive and the Russian Gen often signal the absence of a presupposition or entailment: of truth, and ...
Journal of Slavic Linguistics, 2018
and Alexander Wentzell for help gathering and clarifying information and improving translations, ... more and Alexander Wentzell for help gathering and clarifying information and improving translations, and Wayles Browne for invaluable help and advice at all stages. 1 Our transliteration practice: When we know that someone's long-standing personal preference for the transliteration of their name in English-language contexts is different from the JSL standard (e.g. 'Zalizniak', 'Paducheva', 'Sitchinava', 'Tolstaya' rather than 'Zaliznjak', 'Padučeva', 'Sičinava', 'Tolstaja'), we use their preferred transliteration if we are writing about them in our text, including when we are translating from Russian into English something someone else wrote about them. But in the bibliography, when transliterating citations of works in Russian, we use JSL standard in both author names and names occurring within titles of works. Exceptions: we write 'Zalizniak', 'Yanin', 'Testelets' as author names (though not within titles). For émigrés such as Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, we use their American names, even when writing about pre-emigration times.
Semantics and Linguistic Theory, Sep 9, 2004
NDS (a) Otvet iz p olka ne p rise!. Answer-NOM.M.SG from regiment NEG arri ved-M.SG 'The answer f... more NDS (a) Otvet iz p olka ne p rise!. Answer-NOM.M.SG from regiment NEG arri ved-M.SG 'The answer from the regiment h as not arri ved. ' ADS (b) Otvet iz p olka p rise!. Answer-NOM.M.SG from regiment arri ved-M.SG 'The answer from the regiment h as arri ved. ' (4) NES (a) Otveta iz p olka ne p ris!o. Answer-GEN.M.SG from regiment NEG arri ved-N.SG 'There was no answer from the regiment. ' AES (b) Prise! otvet iz p olka. Arri ved-M.SG answer-NOM.M.SG from regiment 'There was an answer from the regiment. '
Modifying Adjuncts, 2003
The argument-modifier distinction is less clear in NPs than in VPs since nouns do not typically t... more The argument-modifier distinction is less clear in NPs than in VPs since nouns do not typically take arguments. The clearest cases of arguments in NPs are found in certain kinds of nominalizations which retain some "verbal" properties (Grimshaw 1990). The status of apparent arguments of non-deverbal relational nouns like sister is more controversial. Genitive constructions like John's teacher, team of John's offer a challenging testing ground for the argument-modifier distinction in NPs, both in English and cross-linguistically. In the analyses of Partee (1983/1997) and Barker (1995), the DP in a genitive phrase (i.e. John in John's) is always an argument of some relation, but the relation does not always come from the head noun. In those split approaches, some genitives are arguments and some are modifiers. By contrast, recent proposals by Jensen and Vikner and by Borschev and Partee analyze all genitives as arguments, a conclusion we no longer support. In this paper, we explore a range of possible approaches: argument-only, modifier-only, and split approaches, and we consider the kinds of semantic evidence that imply that different approaches are correct for different genitive or possessive constructions in different languages. For English, we argue that a split approach is correct and we offer some diagnostics for distinguishing arguments from modifiers. 1. The argument-modifier distinction in NPs The argument-modifier distinction is less clear in NPs than in VPs since nouns do not typically take arguments. The clearest cases of arguments in NPs are found in some nominalizations (Grimshaw 1990). Non-deverbal relational nouns like sister, mayor, enemy, picture, edge, height in some sense also seem to take arguments. C. L. Baker (1978) proposed a test using English one anaphora whereby one substitutes for N-bar, which obligatorily includes all of a noun's arguments. By that test, to Oslo in (1a) is a modifier, while of Boston in (1b) is an argument. But neither this, nor any other known test, has seemed conclusive and the question of whether and in what sense "true nouns" take arguments remains controversial.
1. Babby on “Declarative ” and “Existential ” sentences............................................. more 1. Babby on “Declarative ” and “Existential ” sentences...................................................................................... 6 1.1. The scope of negation. Theme and Rheme. Problems................................................................................ 6 1.2. Sentences with the verb byt ’ ‘be ’ and referential subject............................................................................ 10
Part of the Linguistics Commons This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Li... more Part of the Linguistics Commons This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Linguistics at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please
Formal and lexical semantics can be integrated if they speak the same language. We claim that a s... more Formal and lexical semantics can be integrated if they speak the same language. We claim that a substantial part of lexical semantics can be incorporated into formal semantics without adding to the latter any new mechanisms. This talk continues the authors’ work on the ontology and the semantics of measure constructions in Russian. The work concerns expressions like dva stakana moloka, polkorziny gribov, tri meshka muki (two glasses of milk, half a basket of mushrooms, three bags of flour), etc., describing various kinds of containers, or corresponding measures based on them, and their contents—portions of substances. In our previous works, describing ontological information, including sorts of things and the words and expressions that designate sorts, we did not include those sorts in our formal semantic analyses. We do that in the present work, declaring sorts as types and thereby significantly expanding Montague’s system of types. On the one hand this gives us the means for speci...
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007
Compositionality in Formal Semantics
Background: Possessives and the argument-modifier distinction in NPs. Possessive constructions li... more Background: Possessives and the argument-modifier distinction in NPs. Possessive constructions like John's teacher, John's team, John's cat, friend of John's offer an interesting test-bed for the argument-modifier distinction in NPs, both in English and cross-linguistically. Many, perhaps all, possessives seem to have some properties of arguments and some of modifiers, but some seem more argument-like and some more modifier-like. Recent proposals by Jensen and Vikner (1994), Vikner and Jensen (ms.1999), Partee and Borschev (1998), Borschev and Partee (1999a,b) analyze all possessives as argument-like, a conclusion we are no longer sure of. It is not easy to settle the question of whether there is a substantive difference between these two "roles" of possessives, and it may well be the case that all or many possessives play both roles at once. One central question about possessive constructions, then, is the following: Are all, some, or no possessives arguments of nouns, and if so, which ones (and how can we tell?), and of what kind, and at what 'level' of analysis? Within this larger question, we discuss here a relevant narrower question: Do predicate possessives provide strong evidence against a unified treatment of all possessives as arguments? 1.1. Possessives/genitives and related constructions. The terminology surrounding "possessives" and "genitives" is confusing, since the correspondences among morphological forms, syntactic positions, grammatical relations, and semantic interpretations are complex and debated, and vary considerably across languages. For clarification, let us distinguish at least the following: 2 a. Possessive pronouns: E. my, his; R. moj 'my', ego 'his'; E. predicative forms mine, his and postnominal forms of mine, of his.
Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 2001
Our long-term goal is to contribute to the integration of formal and lexical semantics. Our more ... more Our long-term goal is to contribute to the integration of formal and lexical semantics. Our more immediate theoretical starting point is the idea of “text as theory”, within a model-theoretic semantic framework. We describe a set of empirical problems in the domain of genitive modifiers that offers a challenge to theories of the integration of lexical, compositional, and contextual information. After sketching a solution, we raise the issue of metonymy in the interpretation of genitives, and examine the role of sortal information in the specification of underspecified meanings and in processes of type-shifting and sort-shifting, including metonymy.
Linguistic Typology, 2013
Abstract
Tipologija i teorija jazyka: Ot opisanija k ob" jasneniju. …, 1999
University of Massachusetts occasional papers, 2004
What's the reason? Our thesis can be stated in a fuzzy form as follows: Many, although not a... more What's the reason? Our thesis can be stated in a fuzzy form as follows: Many, although not all, restrictions on felicitous and infelicitous uses of genitive constructions, and on the possible interpretations of felicitous uses, can be characterized in terms of sortal distinctions within the domain of entities, and corresponding sortal properties of both the head noun and the genitive NP. We are building on related work (Pustejovsky 1993, Jensen and Vikner 1994, Dölling 1992a, b, 1997, Knorina 1979, 1985, 1988, Borschev and Knorina 1990, ...
Proceedings of Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics, 2010
... This talk is related to our ongoing joint work, with valuable suggestions from more people th... more ... This talk is related to our ongoing joint work, with valuable suggestions from more people than we can list here see acknowledgments in our papers -- but especially Olga Kagan for ongoing discussion, Alexander Letuchij for corpus help, and Ekaterina Rakhilina for both. ...
∎ This talk represents work joint with Vladimir Borschev, as well as work joint with Vladimir Bor... more ∎ This talk represents work joint with Vladimir Borschev, as well as work joint with Vladimir Borschev, Elena Paducheva, Yakov Testelets, and Igor Yanovich, with valuable suggestions from and discussion with more people than I can list here–see acknowledgments in our papers--but especially Olga Kagan for ongoing discussion, Alexander Letuchij for valuable corpus help, and Ekaterina Rakhilina for both. This work was supported in part by by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-9905748 to Partee and Borschev.
Lecture notes, Universidade da Coruna, 2005
Possessive constructions also offer an interesting test-bed for the argument-modifier distinction... more Possessive constructions also offer an interesting test-bed for the argument-modifier distinction in NPs, both in English and cross-linguistically. Many, perhaps all, possessors seem to have some properties of arguments and some of modifiers, but some seem more argumentlike and some more modifier-like. Recent proposals by Jensen and Vikner (1994), Vikner and Jensen (2002) and Partee and Borschev (1998) analyze all possessors as argument-like. Partee and Borschev (2001, 2003) argue that the uniform analysis may be ...
Jensen, PA and P. Skadhauge (Eds.), 2001
this paper overlap with parts of Borschev and Partee (1999b) and Partee and Borschev (2000). This... more this paper overlap with parts of Borschev and Partee (1999b) and Partee and Borschev (2000). This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under GrantNo. BCS-9905748. D: My DocumentsGENITIVESDenmark00OntoQue.... doc 2metaphysics with investigations into naivnaja kartina mira. Our focus in this paper is therole of sortal information in the specification of underspecified meanings and inprocesses of type-shifting and sort-shifting, including metonymy
Proceedings of ESCOL99, 2000
this paper wefocus on this kind of uniform analysis, and on the coercion principles required tosh... more this paper wefocus on this kind of uniform analysis, and on the coercion principles required toshift the argument structure of lexical items to meet the demands imposed by theconstruction. We first discuss our central question about possessives and then turnto more specific questions about the role of coercion in the possible uniformanalysis of possessives and an analogous possible uniform analysis of favorite. One of our principal conclusions is that our earlier view of coercion withpossessives as principally a triggering ...