Direct Compositionality

Chris Barker is Associate Professor of Linguistics at New York University. He has held positions at a number of universities, including 10 years at UCSD. His 1991 UCSC PhD thesis, Possessive Descriptions, was published in 1995 by CSLI, Stanford. He is the co-founder of semanticsarchive.net, and is co-editor of Oxford Surveys in Semantics and Pragmatics.Pauline Jacobson is Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University. She has also held visiting appointments at Ohio State University and Harvard University. Her books include The Nature of Syntactic Representation, co-edited with G. K. Pullum (Reidel,1982) and The Syntax of Crossing Conference Sentences (Garland, 1980); the latter is the publicaton of her 1977 Ph.D. dissertation (UC Berkeley). She is editor in chief of the journal Linguistics and Philosophy.

• 1. Introduction: Direct Compositionality ; PART I SOME PROGRAMMATIC ISSUES ; 2. Compositionality as an Empirical Problem ; 3. Direct Compositionality on Demand ; 4. Linguistic Side Effects ; 5. Type Shifting with Semantic Features: a Unified Perspective ; PART II CASE STUDIES ; 6. Direct Compositionality and Variable Free Semantics: the Case of "Principle B" Effects ; 7. The Non Concealed Nature of Free Relatives: Implications for Connectivity in Specificational Sentences ; 8. Connectivity in a Unified Analysis of Specificational Subjects and Concealed Questions ; 9. Degree Quantifiers, Position of Merger Effects with their Restrictors, and Conservativity ; 10. Two Reconstruction Puzzles ; PART III NEW HORIZONS ; 11. Online Update: Temporal, Modal, and de sa Anaphora in Polysynthetic Discourse ; 12. The Dimensions of Quotation ; Index

an impressive lineup of papers in formal semantics that are concerned with direct compositionality ... I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the specifics of how, for instance, binding and quantification can be accounted for within syntactically sparse frameworks. Direct Compositionality is rich with innovative, well-argued proposals, and anyone who is concerned with the kinds of constructions that are taken up in this volume will certainly benefit from reading it.