THE COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR OF INTENSIONAL TRANSITIVE VERBS.

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Richard K. Larson will conduct three years of research on the behavior and interpretation of so-called "intensional transitive verbs" (ITVs), a construction type that addresses the relation between syntax and semantics. Certain semantic phenomena (e.g., intensionality) are known to correlate in English and related languages with certain syntactic structures (e.g., clausal complements). ITVs challenge this correlation. This research concerns the hypothesis that the correlation does in fact hold and that ITVs represent (in effect) a disguised variant of the expected grammatical pattern. The "disguising effect" is conjectured to arise from two processes found in natural languages: phonetically null elements and clause reduction. If this conjecture is correct, careful comparison of languages in which the principles governing null elements and restructuring are known to vary should reveal the disguise of ITVs, or else provide evidence that the basic hypothesis is incorrect. Data on ITVs will be collected from a wide range of languages, including Chinese, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Slovenian, Russian, and a number of native languages of North America. The PI will work with native-speaker graduate students, who directly control the target languages, and/or with professional linguists who have studied them. The results of this research will bear not only on linguistic theory, but also on broader issues in the relation between language and thought. A basic question is how far languages may vary in the ways that they express the same thoughts or concepts. Are the same ideas necessarily encoded in the same forms (once disguising effects are stripped away)? Or can there be true variation? This study will investigate the question of what variation is possible in the expression of intensional concepts, and so contribute to this wider set of questions.