But!
While poking around on the web, I came across Kai von Fintel’s seminar notes on exceptives – great stuff! In addition to some more great resources on other work being done on exceptives (especially the Lappin (1996) paper which I was totally unaware of), Kai has a nice proposal at the end of the notes (pp. 5-8) for an NP-level approach to the exceptives. The idea is that the exceptives take the entire NP as its argument, but the NP is not your regular et,t GQ – it’s an et,ett with an extra argument slot in it! Yup! This fits in very nicely, I think, with the NP-S view of things. The pdf here is a short overview of Kai’s proposal, how it fits in with the NP-S analysis, and how to make Kai’s proposal variable-free using the tools given by the NP-S approach :-P
I’ve yet to work out the more complex examples, but I think they will fall out pretty straightforwardly.
emma :: Apr.24.2007 :: misc, semantics, linguistics :: 2 Comments »
I wish I could find Jon Gajewski’s work on exceptives…anyway, Jon Gajewski has done some work on exceptives. I think perhaps his generals paper was about them? Some of it’s to do with negative polarity licensing, but I wonder that there isn’t something in there you’d find worth considering.
Poke around for it, perhaps; if all else fails, you can mail ‘im and ask ‘im. (Tell him I sent you.)
I have his paper from WCCFL 2004 re: exceptives and negpols; it was actually the second paper I ever read about exceptives when I was first introduced to the topic! From what I can tell, the only crucial difference between his approach and Kai’s is that Jon raises the exceptive construction (hence the clever title of his WCCFL paper, “Raising Exceptions”) to account for negpol licensing. The meaning that he adopts for the exceptive construction itself is Kai’s still. But yeah! The raising exceptives/interaction with negative polarity stuff is all very interesting, I think.