Linguistische Berichte Heft 211

I argue that the Inverse Case Filter originally proposed to handle core syntactic properties should be seen as part of the morphological component of grammar and an essential device for regulating morphological case phenomena. The main argument comes from a particular kind of 'morphological visibility' effects that have not received a proper treatment in the previous transformational syntactic literature.

Although the German ethical dative mir is an inflected form of the personal pronoun ich, it has been classified as a modal particle – an analysis which is supported by the syntactic and semantic properties of the ethical dative mir. Syntactically the ethical dative cannot be fronted or coordinated; neither can it receive main stress. Semantically it can neither be focused nor be in the scope of an operator, and it is not part of the propositional content of the sentence in which it occurs. In this paper, I provide an alternative account to explain its syntactic and semantic properties without treating a personal pronoun as a modal particle. Following the theory of conventional implicatures developed by Christopher Potts (2005), the ethical dative can be analysed as an expression of type 〈ta, tc〉 that yields a second proposition of type tc, which is independent from the proposition to which it is applied. This second proposition is defined by the conventionalized meaning of the ethical dative and expresses – though not propositionally articulated – that the speaker has some personal interest in the hearer's execution of the action requested. With this semantics for the ethical dative in mind, one can explain its syntactic properties without postulating a modal particle mir.

In this paper, I discuss the Sperber/Wilson theory of irony. I argue that this theory does not accomplish its goal, due to the obscurity, broadness and ad hoc application of its key notions: “echo” and “mention.” In particular:1. The notion of echo is too broad. It applies to imagined utterances or thoughts. This leads to odd explanations. One has to assume that the speaker is echoing her own utterances or thoughts. This assumption would be ad hoc. From a practical point of view this leads to a situation in which the hearer does not recognize the intended irony, because she does not recognize the echo character of the utterance.2. The notion of mention is too broad, too. It varies from cases of direct quotation to cases of interpretive resemblance. This latter possibility allows an assumption that the speaker echoes some imagined content indirectly by interpreting its implications, which is absurd.3. The Relevance Principle is not a convincing limit for the echo interpretation. In cases of echoing of some imagined content it is more relevant (in the sense of S&W) to assume that the ironic remark applies to some situation in the world. In many cases, echo interpretation of irony increases effort, which contradicts the Relevance Principle.