Tuesday 26 April 2022

Jackendoff's Ontology

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 427):
Jackendoff takes seriously the relation between conceptual organisation and syntactic organisation; this might be challenged from a classical formalist point of view, but from a functional point of view it is quite natural. In particular, he identifies correspondences between syntactic classes (i.e., categories in generative terms) and conceptual ones. Such correspondence is in fact a major source of evidence for the conceptual ontology. 

In particular, Jackendoff uses wh-items and non-interrogative reference items to support the ontology; he recognises things, amounts, places, directions, manners, events and actions. For instance, both things and places have to be recognised because English has both the forms what did you buy? and where is my coat? 

The ontology is tabulated in Table 10(1) below together with the grammatical evidence for each type. The left-most column provides a rough translation into our ideation base ontology.