Workshops

Lectures on non-representational grammar with Andrés Saab (University of Buenos Aires)

In these lectures, Andrés Saab focusses on the grammar of expressivity in Spanish, with particular emphasis in my own variety, Rioplatense Spanish. Essentially, he contends that expressivity in natural language is an epiphenomenon and, consequently, he makes a first attempt to decompose the different factors that serve to the expressive function of language, i.e., generally speaking, the way in which different bits of grammar give us a flavor of the speaker and her relation to context.

Lecture #1: One of such factors reduces to mere lexical competence. In effect, by virtue of a principle of paradigmatic competition in the lexical space (in de Saussure’s terms), the addresses are capable of situating the speaker and her context in a strictly conventional manner. As Andrés will try to show, this requires full mastering of the phonetic form of words and some general principles of pragmatic inference (probably related to the Manner Maxim). In a model in which phonetic forms are not part of the vocabulary of abstract syntax, but of PF, this amounts to the thesis that some expressive meanings don’t reach LF, but only PF. He argues that many hybrid terms forming pairs with neutral counterparts (e.g., formality pairs: trabajo/laburo ‘work’/’work_informal’ or slurs: sudamericano/sudaca ‘South-American’/ ‘South-American_pejorative’) are amenable to this type of analysis. Evidence coming from ellipsis gives particular support to it. The conclusion is that at least for this empirical realm, the metalogical operators  (Potts 2005) or  (McCready 2010) are deduced from architectural considerations.