FFF CONFERENCE CTF07

Barbara Partee & Vladimir Borschev - Sortal and Relational Interpretations of Nouns and the Russian Genitive of Measure

One pervasive fact about the distinction between sortal and relational nouns in many languages is the permeability of the boundary between them. The distinction is real: certain constructions clearly distinguish them. But nouns can often be coerced to cross the border, and some nouns like teacher have robust meanings both as sortal and as relational nouns. The line between relational and functional nouns is even less sharp than that between sortal and relational nouns, and we have less evidence of the robustness of the category of functional nouns as distinct from the broader category of relational nouns.
There are indeed some “minor” constructions specific to functional nouns. Before turning to our main topic, the Russian “genitive of measure” construction, we will briefly discuss two of them: (i) parameter-headed bare NPs as modifiers in English, as in a dress that length, socks that color; that house has been every color (Partee 1986) (ii) a construction in Russian known as “genitive with obligatory third term” (Borschev and Knorina 1990) or “genitive of quality” (Zolotova 2001), illustrated in (1).


(1)    celovek  srednego        rosta           
        person   medium-GEN    height-GEN    
        ‘person of medium height’  

     
The main topic of the talk will be the use of “container-nouns” in Russian “genitive of measure” constructions, illustrated by stakan moloka ‘glass of milk’, with head nouns including mešok ‘sack’, korzina‘basket’, etc. The basic meanings involve a quantity of substance contained in a container, where stakan moloka may refer to the quantity of milk or to both the milk and the glass (Pustejovky’s “dotted type”).A pure measure reading, where stakan constitutes a standard unit of measure  like litr ‘liter’, is a historically later development. In all readings of these constructions, stakan is a functional noun selecting an argument NP that can denote a substance (or a substance-like plurality). We show how the semantics of these constructions and neighboring ones (kuca peska ‘pile of sand’, motok provoloki ‘roll of wire’, with vague boundaries separating them) is closely tied up with lexical specifications (and possible lexical shifts) of the ontological sort of the head noun. The genitive complement must be of a suitable ontological sort, but as illustrated in (2-3), that need not be lexically determined; it’s the referent of the complement phrase, and not its meaning, that must meet there-quirements imposed by the head. This is in fundamental contrast with the genitive construction in (1), where lexical properties of the head of the genitive NP are crucial, and the genitive phrase is a modifier rather than an argument.


(2)    ložka     kakogo-to            lekarstva
        spoon    some.kind.of-GEN    medicine.GEN
        ‘spoon of some kind of medicine’
(3)    stakan     kakoj-to             gadosti
         glass     some.kind.of-GEN    filth-GEN
         ‘glass of some sort of nasty stuff’

Issues to be discussed include the ontological distinctions among the different readings of these ‘container-genitive’ constructions, the semantics of the “dotted type” examples, the relation between linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of the “natural language metaphysics of containers”, including the relation between the semantics of the genitive of measure construction and the semantics of related function nouns like ‘volume’, verbal expressions like ‘fill (halfway)’, adjectives like ‘(half-)full’.