piñón: paths and their names

opening

This study addresses the claim that a notion of path plays a significant role in natural language semantics. According to Jackendoff, paths crucially figure in the analysis of (dynamic) PPs in English. Specifically, such PPs are said to refer to paths. In §1, a simple algebraic semantic analysis with paths is given for one type of path expression. In §2, Jackendoff's work serves as the basis for a critical discussion of the full typology of paths. Finally, in §3, the mereological semantic account developed in §1 is used to shed light on the 'parameters of difference' between path types.

note

I originally wrote this paper using MS Word 4 for the Macintosh. The present file is the result of my efforts at converting the old Word 4 file to an OpenOffice.org 2.1 Writer file. Needless to say, converting old Word files isn't rocket science, and there's considerable handwork required to get a pleasing result. In any case, I've learned something about OpenOffice.org Writer in the process …

I've preserved the text of the original, though I've taken the opportunity to correct several typos. The total number of pages of the original remains the same (17). I haven't attempted to preserve the exact formatting of the original (which wouldn't have been feasible anyway), so the line and page breaks are different. Moreover, I've transformed the endnotes into footnotes. The figures are the original ones, and I'm surprised that they survived the conversion process so well. They aren't very pretty, but I've resisted the temptation to redraw them.

I also have another (shorter) paper on paths, "Inside paths", which I wrote half a year later.

For those interested in such things (I imagine that I'm not the only one who has old Word files to convert), I began by opening the old Word 4 file in Word 97 for Windows (this is the latest version that I own) and then saving it as an RTF file. Word 97 did a pretty good job of reading the Word 4 file, but I first had to install the conversion filter for Word 4 (which didn't get installed by default). I then opened the RTF file in OpenOffice.org 2.1 Writer under Linux. The result was much better than I had expected, and even the figures and style sheets were preserved. The main problem was that I had used a certain little known but useful "advanced feature" of Word 4, namely, a facility for writing mathematical formulas using the Symbol font, which was dropped after Word 5.1. (I don't think that Word for Windows ever had it.) Unfortunately, everything formatted with this facility became distorted in the conversion process. Moreover, the character map of the old Macintosh Symbol font doesn't seem to match that of the Windows Symbol font perfectly, which is probably not so surprising. In the end, I deleted all of the old style sheets (I had forgotten what exactly they did anyway), created new ones in OpenOffice.org Writer, and reformatted the document. This involved a bit of work, but at least now I have a OpenOffice.org Writer template file that will facilitate further conversions.

reference

• Piñón, Christopher. Paths and their names. In Katharine Beals, Gina Cooke, David Kathman, Sotaro Kita, Karl-Erik McCullough, and David Testen, editors, Papers from the 29th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Volume 2: Papers from the parasession on the correspondence of conceptual, semantic and grammatical representations, pages 287–303, CLS, 1993. URL: <http://pinon.sdf-eu.org/covers/ptn.html>.

download "Paths and their names"

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http://pinon.sdf-eu.org/covers/ptn.html