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3 February 2005, ACLC Seminar, Juan Uriagereka
This talk is devoted to a problem posed by iterative expressions, common in colloquial speech, of the sort in 'I'm very very tired.' In a nutshell, the problem is that expressions of this sort mean very similarly in all languages (typically emphasis, but also a few, arguably related, notions involving extension of some characteristic space); as cognitive grammarians have pointed out, this is an a priori puzzle for any theory that assumes the essential arbitrariness of the syntax/semantics interface. My solution to this puzzle implies treating the relevant expressions in Markovian fashion.
For more information, see http://www.hum.uva.nl/aclc/object.cfm/
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