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Unbounded dependency constructions in Irish, such as relative clauses, can be made with both gaps, as in (1), and resumptive pronouns, as in (2) (examples from (McCloskey 1979)):
(1) an fear a dúirt mé a shíl mé a beadh _ann
the man AL said I AL thought I AL would-be _there
'the man that I said that I thought would be there'
(2) an t-úrscéal ar mheas mé gur thuig mé é
the novel AN thought I GO understood I it
'the novel that I thought I understood'
This paper will sketch an HPSG treatment of such constructions and their interactions with the distribution of the sentence-initial particles GO, AL, and AN. We focus particularly on relative clauses and constituent questions but believe that the same analysis can be extended to other gap and resumptive constructions. We analyze resumptives with a nonlocal feature RESUMP which is propagated like the SLASH feature used for gaps. This is supported by the existence of a particle pattern that marks intermediate clauses in resumptive dependencies. We also discuss some exceptional particle patterns associated with bare NP adverbials and shown how they can be incorporated into the analysis, though certain unresolved problems remain.
References
McCloskey, J. (1979). Transformational Syntax and Model-Theoretic Semantics: A Case Study in Modern Irish. Dordrecht: Reidel.
In this paper, we claim that the filler-gap linkage in Korean UDCs needs to be handled at the level of syntax and that unbounded dependencies represented by traces, resumptive pronouns, and resumptive reflexives in Korean can be simply captured - without posing any extra mechanisms - in the traditional HPSG analysis of UDCs following Pollard and Sag (1994). It is because in HPSG traces are not all required to have the same feature, unlike in other movement-based approaches including the minimalist program and GB theory. In addition, we argue that the three kinds of Korean UDC elements appearing in gap positions do not form separate categories from their corresponding forms appearing in non-UDCs based on the same semantic and pragmatic properties such as logophoricity and contrastiveness. We also investigate some controversial issues of island constraints and strong crossover with respect to filler-gap linkage in Korean UDCs.
The aim of this paper is to give a unified account of the way that German demonstrative pronouns (henceforth: D-pronouns) like der, die and das behave (a) in sentences where they receive a coreferential interpretation, and (b) in sentences where they receive a covarying interpretation because they are in some way dependent on a quantificational expression – either via direct binding or indirectly, because the value they receive varies with the value that is assigned to the variable bound by an indefinite determiner.
This paper presents a descriptive overview and a formal analysis of the syntax of pronominal arguments, pronominal conjuncts and bound pronouns in Arabic. I argue that Arabic allows first conjuncts to be null and that this is an instance of a more general pattern of zero anaphora that may affect pronominal arguments or their first conjuncts. First Conjunct Agreement and constraints on the distribution of zero anaphora are accounted for by a new feature sharing mechanism which allows a uniform treatment without appeal to the internal structure of argument NPs. I then argue that Arabic bound pronouns should be analyzed as affixes and present an analysis of their relation to argument structure and coordination. Finally, it is shown how constraints on case marking in Arabic coordination can be formalized. The analysis is part of an Arabic grammar fragment implemented in the TRALE system.
Russian shows the mixed agreement with the polite pronoun vy and pluralia tantum nouns, both of which have plural number in form but either singular or plural number in meaning. Two different forms of adjectives – short form and long form – agree in different number with those number mismatch nominals.
I adopted the idea of Siegel (1976) etc. that when a long-form adjective appears in the predicate position, there is always a null head that it modifies, with the HPSG's agreement theory of Wechsler & Zlatic (2003). I propose that all predicates – verbs, SF and LF adjectives – except predicate nominals show CONCORD agreement. LF adjectives show CONC agreement with the null anaphor 'one'. The different number values of LF adjectives results from index agreement between the null anaphor and the subject of the sentence.
This paper examines the distribution of English self-pronouns (himself, herself, etc.) in contrast with personal pronouns. We confirm that there are factors affecting the acceptability of self-pronouns at the syntactic, semantic, and discourse levels, and devise a Principle A with three distinct clauses to account for all of them. Each clause is crucially ordered with respect to the others, with syntax taking precedence over semantics, which in turn takes precedence over discourse constraints.
On binding domains
(2005)
In this paper I want to explore reasons for replacing Binding Theory based on the anaphor-pronoun dichotomy by a Binding Theory allowing more domains restricting/defining anaphoric dependencies. This will, thus, have consequences for the partitioning of anaphoric elements, presupposing more types of 'anaphors'/'pronouns' than standard Binding Theory offers us.
Recent analyses of mismatches at the syntax-semantics interface investigate e.g. modification of agentive nouns (Larson, 1998), modification of quantifying pronouns (Abney, 1987), or recursive modification (Kasper, to appear). Each of these analyses is tailored to a specific set of data, and it is not immediately obvious how they could be generalised to cover a larger set of data. I propose a unified analysis for these mismatches that attempts to bring out their common ground. This analysis shares some of its basic intuitions with the one of Kasper, but is more general because the mismatches are handled locally in the CONT feature. Its pivot is an elaborate syntax-semantics interface that is based on a surface-oriented syntactic analysis. This analysis generalises easily to the mismatches at the morphology-semantics interface for German separable-prefix verbs that were discussed in (Müller, 2003).
A number of the languages of Polynesia, including Tongan and Samoan, display a process whereby a pronominal argument of the main predicate of a clause appears to be realized as a preverbal 'second position' (2P) pronoun. All other arguments, if overt, are realized postverbally, the languages being rigidly predicate-initial. This paper examines the characteristics of these pronouns in Tongan arguing that in most cases they are best treated as distinct words in their own right (though often phonologically deficient) while in a handful of cases they are affixal material composed morphologically with a preceding preverbal Tense/Aspect Marker (TAM). Despite the fact that Tongan preverbal pronouns clearly do not appear in a typical argument position, standard approaches to 2P pronominal elements (e.g. 'clitic climbing' and 'prosodic inversion') do not seem naturally applicable to the Tongan data. The relation-based analysis provided here exploits a natural consequence of various potential definitions of 'subjecthood' within HPSG, treating the preverbal pronouns as the (unique) instantation of the valence feature SUBJ and correctly blocking the possibility of the pronoun appearing in true second position above the TAM when a clause-initial conjunction is present, except in particular specified circumstances. Thus the Tongan pronouns are not strict '2P' elements despite the fact that they most often appear in second position in a clause.
Within recent work on the treatment of resumption in HPSG, there is growing consensus that resumptive unbounded dependency constructions (=UDCs) should be modelled on a par with gap-type UDCs (Alotaibi and Borsley, 2013; Borsley, 2010; Crysmann, 2012b; Taghvaipour, 2005), using a single feature for both types of dependencies, rather than separate features, as proposed by Vaillette (2001a,b). Yet, authors disagree as to where exactly in the grammar the resumptive function of pronominals should be established: while Crysmann (2012b, 2015) advances an ambiguity approach that has pronominal synsem objects being ambiguous between a resumptive and an ordinary pronoun use, Borsley (2010); Alotaibi and Borsley (2013), by contrast, treat all pronominals, resumptive or not, as ordinary pronouns and effect their resumptive use by means of tailoring the amalgamation principle to potentially include pronominal indices. While their decision provides a straightforward account of McCloskey’s generalisation that resumptives always look like the ordinary pronouns of the language, it fails to capture the difference in semantics between ordinary pronominal and resumptive uses. In this paper, I shall reexamine the evidence from Hausa and propose to synthesise the approaches put forth by Alotaibi and Borsley (2013) and Crysmann (2012b), and propose that the potential for pronominal and resumptive function (including their difference w.r.t. semantics and non-local features) is captured by means of underspecification, yet the decision as to canonical vs. non-canonical use is made at the level of the governing head (Borsley, 2010; Alotaibi and Borsley, 2013). I shall argue that this division of labour is sufficient to derive the correct gap-like semantics for resumptives, maintains standard deterministic amalgamation, and, finally, provides an answer to McCloskey’s generalisation.