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The syntax and semantics of the resumptive dependency in hungarian focus-raising constructions
(2004)
Previous work (Gervain, forthcoming) has established that focus-raising may be derived by two strategies in Hungarian. One of them is the traditional movement derivation, the other a resumptive dependency created between the focus constituent base-generated in its matrix focus position and a phonologically null resumptive pronoun in the corresponding argument position in the embedded clause. However, the previous account (Gervain, forthcoming) does not give a detailed description of the nature of this resumptive dependency. The present work aims to address this question. More specifically, by providing a series of empirical tests, it attempts to determine whether the dependency is purely syntactic in nature, i.e. obligatory variable binding, or whether a semantic option is also available, i.e. coreference between the focus constituent and the resumptive pronoun. Thus, it provides new insights into the ongoing debate about the nature of resumptive pronouns.
The ultimate goal of this paper is to find a representation of modality compatible with some basic conditions on the syntax-semantic interface. Such conditions are anchored, for instance, in Chomsky's (1995) principle of full interpretation (FI). Abstract interpretation of modality is, however - be it "only" in semantic terms - already a hard nut to crack, way too vast to be dealt with in any comprehensive way here. What is pursued instead is a case-study-centered analysis. The case in point are the English modals (EM) viewed in their development through time - a locus classicus for a number of linguistic theories and frameworks. The idea will be to start out from two lines of research - continuous grammaticalization vs. cataclysmic change - and to explain some of their incongruities. The first non-trivial point here consists in deriving more fundamental questions from this research. The second, possibly even less trivial one consists in answering them. Specifically, I will argue that regardless of the actual numerical rate of change, there is an underlying and more structured way to account for the notions of change and continuity within the modal system, respectively.
Russian and Spanish each have two variants of the predicational copular sentence. In Russian, the variation concerns the case of the predicate phrase, which can be nominative or instrumental, while in Spanish, the variation involves the choice of the copular verb, either ser or estar. It is shown that the choice of the particular variant of copular sentence in both languages depends on the speaker’s perspective, i.e., on whether or not the predication is linked to a specific topic situation.
This article discusses some syntactic peculiarities of Chinese yes/no questions. Starting from the observation that Standard Mandarin shares significant typological features with prototypical SOV languages, Chinese is treated as an underlyingly verb-final language. Based on this heuristic principle, A-not-AB, AB-not-A and AB-not questions are uniformly derived by means of one simple raising rule that operates within the sentence constituent V'. This novel idea is elaborated on in great detail in the first part of the article. In contrast to the prevailing trend, it is argued that the question operator contained in A-not-A and A-not sentences CANNOT be raised to "Comp". In consequence, A-not-A and A-not questions are "typed" in the head position of a sentence-internal functional phrase that we call Force2 Phrase (F2P) in the present paper. This position is not to be confused with Drubig's (1994) Polarity 1 Phrase (PollP), in the head position of which assertive negations and an abstract affirmative element are located. The existence of a head position F2° other than Poll° is supported by the fact that F2° can be occupied by certain overt question operators, such as assertive shi-bu-shi, which are compatible with negations. In contrast to the assertive question operator shi-bu-shi which is obligatorily associated with information focus, non-assertive shi-bu-shi serves as a compound focus and question operator whose focus feature is complex insofar as it is composed of two subfeatures: a contrastivity and an exhaustivity subfeature. Non-assertive shi-bu-shi is obligatorily associated with identificational focus in the sense of Kiss (1998). In accordance with some basic ideas of Chomsky's checking theory, the two subfeatures of the complex focus feature carried by the non-assertive shi-bu-shi operator check a correlating subfeature in the head position of a corresponding functional phrase (Contrastive Phrase and Focus Phrase, respectively). The question feature contained in the non-assertive shi-bu-shi operator is attracted by the head of Force1 Phrase (F1') at the level of LF. Due to the fact that F1° is sentence-final, the question feature of non-assertive shi-bu-shi must be Chomsky-adjoined to F1'. Unlike identificational focus phrases which are inherently contrastive, topics are non-contrastive in the default case. As separate speech acts, they are located in a c-commanding position outside the sentence structure. Semantically, there is a difference between Frame-Setting Topics and Aboutness Topics. As shown in the article, both A-not-A and A-not questions on the one hand and yes/no questions ending with ma on the other can be used in neutral and non-neutral contexts. The decisive advantage of mu questions, however, is that their question operator has scope over the whole sentence.
In this article, I will present a survey of control structures in Korean. The survey is based on a sample of seventy SOA-argument-taking predicates, which are classified with respect to their complementation patterns and control properties. As a result, Korean is characterized as a language in which semantically determined control is predominant, whereas constructionally induced control is only marginal. In the discussion of the sample, I will show that there are two major classes of verbs exhibiting semantic control: the first class consists of matrix verbs such as hwuhoyhata 'regret' or kangyohata 'force', which require obligatory coreference between a matrix argument and the embedded subject due to their lexical meaning. The verbs of the second class are utterance verbs such as malhata 'tell', which select clauses headed by the quotative complementizer ko. With these verbs, subject, object, or split control arises if specific modal suffixes are attached to the verb heading the complement clause. In the second part of the paper, I will provide a lexical analysis of control in Korean, which adopts the Principle of Controller Choice proposed by Farkas (1988) as well as additional constraints which have to be assumed independently.
The study examines the hypotheses that the acquisition of the finite verb is an indispensable and linking constituent of the development of SVO utterances. Four apparently separate or at least separable processes are analysed over 6 months in one Russian and one German child: a) the emergence of verbs in the child’s utterances, b) the occurrence of correctly inflected (finite) verb forms, c) the development of multi-component utterances containing a verb, and c) the emergence of (potential) subjects and objects. Russian and German exhibit rich verb morphology, and in both languages finiteness is strongly correlated with inflectional categories like person, number and tense. With both children we find a correlation in the temporal order of these four processes and – what is more relevant for our study – a dependency of a certain development on the utterance level on the emergence of finite verbs. Further, our investigation shows that language-specific development comes in to play already when children start to acquire verb inflection and becomes more contrastive when we observe the onset of the production of the SVO utterances.
The purpose of this research was to trace the developmental steps in the acquisition of aspectual oppositions in Russian and to examine the validity of the 'aspect before tense' hypothesis for L1-speaking children. Imperfective/perfective verbs and their inflections, as well as aspectual pairs, were analysed in the first five months of verb production (and the respective months in the input) in three children. Additionally, the first four months of verb production were investigated in one boy with less data. Verb forms marked for the past and for the present occur simultaneously in all children. These early forms relate to 'here and now' situations: verbs marked for the past denote 'resultative' events that are perceived by the children as occurring during the speech time or immediately before it, while verbs marked for the present typically denote on-going events. Thus, with early tense oppositions (or tense morphology) children mark aspectual contrasts in the moment of speech: evidence in favour of the 'aspect before tense' hypothesis.
A strong preference in using the perfective aspect for the past and the imperfective aspect for the present events has been found in both adults and children. Further, only very few aspectual pairs were documented within the analysed period (from the onset of verb production to the period when children produce rule-driven inflectional forms). The productive use of the finite forms of perfective and imperfective verbs doesn't concord with the ability of the productive use of the contrastive forms of one lemma. Data suggest that children (start to) learn aspectual forms in an item-based manner. The acquisition of aspectual oppositions (aspectual pairs) is lexically dependent and is guided by the contextual 'thesaurus'. Aspectual pairs are learned in a peace-meal way during much longer, than observed for this article, period of time. Generally, aspect is not learned as a rule, also because there are no (uniform) rules of forming of aspectual pairs, but as the 'satellite' of the inherent lexical meaning of verbs of diverse Aktionsarten.
The issues addressed here are relevant for other Slavic languages, exhibiting the morphological category of aspect.
This paper investigates the production and comprehension of intrasentential anaphoric pronominal reference in Russian. In particular, it examines the elicited imitation and comprehension of three anaphoric pronouns in subject position – personal 3rd singular masculine, demonstrative and zero – in one hundred and eighty monolingual Russian-speaking children and twenty adults. The three types of pronouns were designed to have an antecedent in the preceding sentence containing a verb and two arguments. These antecedents differ in their syntactical role and animacy. The sentence position, agentivity and topicality remained constant. The sentences with (in)animate subjects and objects constituted the following four 'conditions': two sentences with a subject and an object being either animate or inanimate and two sentences with a subject and an object exhibiting a diverse (in)animacy. Regarding the resolution of the anaphoric pronouns the similarity principle (or feature-concord rule) and its possible violations were tested. This principle suggests that an anaphoric pronoun is most likely resolved to the antecedent with a maximum of similar characteristics or features and it primarily governs the assignment of an antecedent to anaphoric pronouns in subject position in the absence of the violating conditions. Results show the influence of this rule on the anaphora resolution process increasing with age, on the one hand, and the development of the impact of animacy, syntactic role and the type of anaphoric pronouns that violate the feature-concord rule, on the other.
Introduction
(2007)
In what follows, I first briefly review Perlmutter (1968, 1970), in which it is argued that aspectual verbs are ambiguous between control and raising. I suggest that while the argument for the raising analysis is solid, the arguments supporting the control analysis of aspectual verbs are less so. As an alternative hypothesis to consider, I introduce the structural ambiguity hypothesis. In Section 3, I review three recent analyses of control and raising. Although there are important differences among them, they all share the basic assumption that the control/raising distinction is due to differences in selectional restrictions that the lexical items impose. Under such an assumption, the lexical ambiguity hypothesis is the only available option. In Section 4, I present evidence for the structural ambiguity hypothesis from studies concerning aspectual verbs in languages from four distinct families, German (Wurmbrand 2001), Japanese (Fukuda 2006), Romance languages (Cinque 2003), and Basque (Arregi Molina-Azaola 2004). These data strongly suggest that across languages aspectual verbs can appear in two different syntactic positions, either below or above vP, or the projection with which an external argument is introduced (Kratzer 1994, 1996, Chomsky 1995). Given these findings, I argue that it is the aspectual verbs' position with respect to vP which creates the control/raising ambiguity. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is lower than vP, an external argument takes scope over the aspectual verb. Thus, it is interpreted as control. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is higher than vP, on the other hand, it is the aspectual verb that takes scope over an entire vP, including the external argument. Thus, it is interpreted as raising. In section 5, I extend the scope of this study to include a discussion of want-type verbs in Indonesian, as analyzed in Polinsky & Potsdam (2006). Polinsky & Potsdam argue that the Indonesian want-type verbs must be raising in at least certain cases where they allow a rather peculiar interpretation. Although they assume that there are also control counterparts of the want-type verbs, I argue that applying the proposed analysis to the want-type verbs does away with the need for stipulating two distinct lexical entries for these verbs. Section 6 concludes the paper.
Wortformen wie Berliner und Potsdamer treten in pränominaler attributiver Funktion auf: eine Position, in der sowohl Adjektive als auch Substantive stehen können. Substantive kommen in der Position vor als sächsische Genitive (Leos Auto), als vorangestellte Genitivattribute (des Vaters Pflicht) oder als Bestandteile einer engen Apposition (Bundeskanzler Schröder). Adjektive stehen an dieser Stelle als adjektivische Attribute (rotes Auto). Gegen jede dieser Interpretationen von Berliner sprechen jeweils formale Argumente, die im wesentlichen darauf hinauslaufen, daß Berliner in Berliner Ballen niemals flektiert wird - weder wie ein Substantiv noch wie ein Adjektiv.
Welcher Wortart sind Wortformen wie Berliner in Berliner Ballen also zuzuordnen? Zur Beantwortung dieser Frage folgen zunächst einige (kommentierte) Literaturstellen, anschließend werde ich die Bezeichnung 'Stadtadjektive' einführen, ich nehme also zum Zwecke der Benennung eine Entscheidung vorweg. Darauf folgt die Untersuchung: das Verhalten der Stadtadjektive in Bezug auf Flexion, Derivation, Komposition und Syntax.
Der Ausgangspunkt ist die These, daß die verschiedenen Adverbialklassen im Deutschen unterschiedliche Basispositionen aufweisen und daß sich diese durch unterschiedliche strukturelle Anforderungen an die Klassen ergeben. Es soll gezeigt werden, daß sich die plausible Vermutung, daß die Adverbialklassen in Sprachen wie dem Deutschen und dem Englischen entsprechenden strukturellen Bedingungen unterliegen, bestätigt. Unterschiede im Verhalten der Adverbiale in den beiden Sprachen werden demnach nicht durch unterschiedliche Eigenschaften der Adverbiale erfaßt, sondern diese ergeben sich durch die unterschiedlichen Satzstrukturen und die unterschiedlichen Weisen der Argumentverwaltung. Dies wird illustriert anhand von Adverbialen der Art und Weise, Lokal- und Temporaladverbialen, Adverbialen der Subjekthaltung und Satzadverbialen.
In the paper, German disintegrated verb-final 'obwohl' (‘although’) and 'weil' (‘because’) clauses are compared with constructions in which 'obwohl' and 'weil' precedes clauses with main clause word order. The former constructions constitute independent, yet subsidiary speech acts. Thus, the subordinating connectors and the positioning of the verb do not indicate syntactic but textual dependency. The latter constructions are of a very different kind. Here, 'obwohl' and 'weil' do not form a constituent with the following clause. Instead, they appear as syntactically independent discourse markers connecting two discourse units. As discourse markers, 'obwohl' and 'weil' obtain their special syntactic and semantic properties as elements of the derived, but independent module of Thetic Grammar.
The paper characterizes three different domains in the German middle field which are relevant for the interpretation of an indefinite. It is argued that the so-called 'strong' reading of an indefinite is the basic one and that the 'weak' reading needs special licensing which is mirrored by certain syntactic requirements. Some popular claims about the relation between the position and the interpretation of indefinites as well as some claims about scrambling are discussed and rejected. From the findings also follows that the strong reading of an indefinite is independent of its information status.
Das Papier argumentiert anhand einer Reihe von Phänomenen für die Existenz einer ausgezeichneten Topikdomäne im Mittelfeld des deutschen Satzes. Deutsch ist somit Diskurs-konfigurational hinsichtlich Topiks. Die Beobachtung erlaubt die Beantwortung einiger grundlegender Fragen wie die nach der möglichen Anzahl van Satztopiks, nach der Möglichkeit von Satztopiks in eingebetteten Sätzen oder nach dem Zusammenhang von Scrambling und Topikstatus. Die These, die 'starke' Interpretation einer indefiniten Phrase impliziere deren Topikstatus, wird zurückgewiesen. Syntaktische Eigenschaften der Topik-Voranstellung im Mittelfeld werden herausgearbeitet und ihre Implikationen für die Theoriebildung werden erörtert.
Indefinita und ihre verschiedenen Interpretationsmöglichkeiten sind seit längerem Gegenstand intensiver linguistischer Diskussion. Die folgenden Bemerkungen diskutieren einige in der Literatur häufig vertretene Thesen zum Zusammenhang der Positionierung einer indefiniten NP im deutschen Mittelfeld und ihrer Interpretation. Es wird argumentiert, daß diese Thesen den empirischen Gegebenheiten nicht gerecht werden. Dies gilt damit auch für einige Thesen zur Umstellung im Mittelfeld (Scrambling).
The paper proposes structural constraints for different adjunct classes in German and English. Approaches in which syntax has only the task to provide adjunct positions and in which principles of scope are supposed to explain the distribution of adjuncts are rejected as incomplete. The syntactic requirements are not as rigid as other approaches require, such that there is just one possible position for a given adjunct. Rather the syntactic constraints may be fulfilled in different positions.
Semantics
(2007)
L'article étudie les diverses façons de poser des questions partielles en Embosi (C25). D'une part, la langue possède deux ensembles de pronoms/déterminants interrogatifs: 1) nda/nde, nda renvoyant aux animés et nde aux non-animés, 2) des mots interrogatifs en accord de classe avec le nom qu'ils déterminent ou qu'ils remplacent, segmentalement homophones des démonstratifs. Ces deux catégories de marqueurs appellent des réponses de nature différente. Par ailleurs, deux ensembles de constructions sont possibles pour les questions partielles portant sur le sujet, l'objet direct ou indirect: les constructions avec relatives et les constructions in situ. Les questions partielles sur le lieu, la cause, la manière se posent avec des adverbes et n'admettent que les constructions in situ. Sur le plan prosodique, il n'y a ni intonation ni groupement prosodique spécifique pour les questions partielles en Embosi. Leur seule caractéristique prosodique est un ton H facultatif (variable selon les locuteurs) sur la finale du mot qui précède le mot interrogatif.
The distinction between COMPLEMENTS and ADJUNCTS has a long tradition in grammatical theory, and it is also included in some way or other in most current formal linguistic theories. But it is a highly vexed distinction, for several reasons, one of which is that no diagnostic criteria have emerged that will reliably distinguish adjuncts from complements in all cases – too many examples seem to "fall into the crack" between the two categories, no matter how theorists wrestle with them.
In this paper, I will argue that this empirical diagnostic "problem" is, in fact, precisely what we should expect to find in natural language, when a proper understanding of the adjunct/complement distinction is achieved: the key hypothesis is that a complete grammar should provide a DUAL ANALYSIS of every complement as an adjunct, and potentially, an analysis of any adjunct as a complement. What this means and why it is motivated by linguistic evidence will be discussed in detail.
Introduction
(2010)
The papers in this volume were originally presented at the Bantu Relative Clause workshop held in Paris on 8-9 January 2010, which was organized by the French-German cooperative project on the Phonology/Syntax Interface in Bantu Languages (BANTU PSYN). This project, which is funded by the ANR and the DFG, comprises three research teams, based in Berlin, Paris and Lyon. [...] This range of expertise is essential to realizing the goals of our project. Because Bantu languages have a rich phrasal phonology, they have played a central role in the development of theories of the phonology-syntax interface ever since the seminal work from the 1970s on Chimwiini (Kisseberth & Abasheikh 1974) and Haya (Byarushengo et al. 1976). Indeed, half the papers in Inkelas & Zec’s (1990) collection of papers on the phonology-syntax interface deal with Bantu languages. They have naturally played an important role in current debates comparing indirect and direct reference theories of the phonology-syntax interface. Indirect reference theories (e.g., Nespor & Vogel 1986; Selkirk 1986, 1995, 2000, 2009; Kanerva 1990; Truckenbrodt 1995, 1999, 2005, 2007) propose that phonology is not directly conditioned by syntactic information. Rather, the interface is mediated by phrasal prosodic constituents like Phonological Phrase and Intonation Phrase, which need not match any syntactic constituent. In contrast, direct reference theories (e.g., Kaisse 1985; Odden 1995, 1996; Pak 2008; Seidl 2001) argue that phrasal prosodic constituents are superfluous, as phonology can – indeed, must – refer directly to syntactic structure.
This paper presents preliminary results of a phonetic and phonological study of the Ntcheu dialect of Chichewa spoken by Al Mtenje (one of the co-authors). This study confirms Kanerva's (1990) work on Nkhotakota Chichewa showing that phonological re-phrasing is the primary cue to information structure in this language. It expands on Kanerva's work in several ways. First, we show that focus phrasing has intonational correlates, namely, the manipulation of downdrift and pause. Further, we show that there is a correlation between pitch prominence and discourse prominence at the left and right periphery which conditions dislocation to these positions. Finally, we show that focus and syntax are not the only factors which condition phonological phrasing in Chichewa.
This paper tests three current theories of the phonology-syntax interface – Truckenbrodt (1995), Pak (2008) and Cheng & Downing (2007, 2009) – on the prosody of relative clauses in Chewa. Relative clauses, especially restrictive relative clauses, provide an ideal data set for comparing these theories, as they each make distinct predictions about the optimal phrasing. We show that the asymmetrical phase-edge based approach developed to account for similar Zulu prosodic phrasing by Cheng & Downing also best accounts for the Chewa data.
Introduction
(2006)
The papers in this volume reflect a number of broad themes which have emerged during the meetings of the project as particularly relevant for current Bantu linguistics. [...] The papers show that approaches to Bantu linguistics have also developed in new directions since this foundational work. For example, interaction of phonological phrasing with syntax and word order on the one hand, and with information structure on the other, is more prominent in the papers here than in earlier literature. Quite generally, the role of information structure for the understanding of Bantu syntax has become more important, in particular with respect to the expression of topic and focus, but also for the analysis of more central syntactic concerns such as questions and relative clauses. This, of course, relates to a wider development in linguistic theory to incorporate notions of topic and focus into core syntactic analysis, and it is not surprising that work on Bantu languages and on linguistic theory are closely related to each other in this respect. Another noteworthy development is the increasing interest in variation among Bantu languages which reflects the fact that more empirical evidence from more Bantu languages has become available over the last decade or so. The picture that emerges from this research is that morpho-syntactic variation in Bantu is rich and complex, and that there is strong potential to link this research to research on micro-variation in European (and other) languages, and to the study of morpho-syntactic variables, or parameters, more generally.
This paper presents a sketch of the prosodic, syntactic and morphological means of expressing focus in Chitumbuka, an underdescribed Bantu language of Malawi. The chief prosodic correlate of focus is boundary narrowing – rephrasing conditioned by focus – which is used not only to signal in situ focus but also in syntactic and morphological focus constructions. Of theoretical importance is the fact that rephrasing does not lend culminative prominence to the focused constituent. Although Chitumbuka has culminative sentential stress, its position remains fixed at the right edge of the clause, independent of the position of focus. This makes Chitumbuka a challenge for theories of focus prosody which claim that the focused constituent must have culminative sentential prominence.
This paper presents a preliminary survey of the positions and prosodies associated with Wh-questions in two Bantu languages spoken in Malawi. The paper shows that the two languages are similar in requiring focused subjects to be clefted. Both also require 'which' questions and 'because of what' questions to be clefted or fronted. However, for other non-subjects Tumbuka rather uniformly imposes an IAV (immediately after the verb) requirement, while Chewa does not. In both languages, we found a strong tendency for there to be a prosodic phrase break following the Wh-word. In Tumbuka, this break follows from the general phrasing algorithm of the language, while in Chewa, I propose that the break can be best understood as following from the inherent prominence of Wh-words.
Introduction
(2011)
In spite of this long history, most work to date on the phonology-syntax interface in Bantu languages suffers from limitations, due to the range of expertise required: intonation, phonology, syntax. Quite generally, intonational studies on African languages are extremely rare. Most of the existing data has not been the subject of careful phonetic analysis, whether of the prosody of neutral sentences or of questions or other focus structures. There are important gaps in our knowledge of Bantu syntax which in turn limit our understanding of the phonology-syntax interface. Recent developments in syntactic theory have provided a new way of thinking about the type of syntactic information that phonology can refer to and have raised new questions: Do only syntactic constituent edges condition prosodic phrasing? Do larger domains such as syntactic phases, or even other factors, like argument and adjunct distinctions, play a role? Further, earlier studies looked at a limited range of syntactic constructions. Little research exists on the phonology of focus or of sentences with non-canonical word order in Bantu languages. Both the prosody and the syntax of complex sentences, questions and dislocations are understudied for Bantu languages. Our project aims to remedy these gaps in our knowledge by bringing together a research team with all the necessary expertise. Further, by undertaking the intonational, phonological and syntactic analysis of several languages we can investigate whether there is any correlation among differences in morphosyntactic and prosodic properties that might also explain differences in phrasing and intonation. It will also allow us to investigate whether there are cross-linguistically common prosodic patterns for particular morpho-syntactic structure.
As work like McCarthy (2002: 128) notes, pre-Optimality Theory (OT) phonology was primarily concerned with representations and theories of subsegmental structure. In contrast, the role of representations and choice of structural models has received little attention in OT. Some central representational issues of the pre-OT era have, in fact, become moot in OT (McCarthy 2002: 128). Further, as work like Baković (2007) notes, even for assimilatory processes where representation played a central role in the pre-OT era, constraint interaction now carries the main explanatory burden. Indeed, relatively few studies in OT (e.g., Rose 2000; Hargus & Beavert 2006; Huffmann 2005, 2007; Morén 2006) have argued for the importance of phonological representations. This paper intends to contribute to this work by reanalyzing a set of processes related to vowel harmony in Shimakonde, a Bantu language spoken in Mozambique and Tanzania. These processes are of particular interest, as Liphola’s (2001) study argues that they are derivationally opaque and so not amenable to an OT analysis. I show that the opacity disappears given the proper choice of representations for vowel features and a metrical harmony domain.
The bulk of this paper deals with an analysis of the voice system of Tukang Besi, which, has both a complex verbal agreement system as well as the last fully developed (and obligatory) case marking system among Austronesian languages with an increasingly head-marking trend to the east (case marking of core constituents only becomes functional again in Vanuatu and the Solomons, and is well-developed in Polynesia). For that reason, as well as personal acquaintance with the language, it is a sensible starting point.
Focus theories distinguish different types of focus according to the pragmatic conditions or communicative point on the one side and different scopes of focus on the other side. The assertion in term focus constructions (Dik 1989), called by others argument focus constructions or identificational sentences (Lambrecht 1994), has the purpose of establishing a relation between an argument and an open proposition. Kar, a north-eastern Senufo language of Burkina Faso, which has the basic word order S-Aux-O-V-other, has at its disposal different strategies to mark argument focus, among them fronting of the focused item. In many West African languages the displacement of the focused argument involves other devices, such as the use of special verb forms. In Kar fronting of a focused argument requires the use of special pronouns in the out-of-focus part of the sentence, called background subject pronouns. They are used in other backgrounded contexts, too, for example in relative clauses, adverbial clauses and constituent questions. Their inconsistent use is attributed to a particular sociolinguistic situation in which the data has been collected. The use of the same focus strategies for completive and contrastive focus suggests that Kar does not distinguish pragmatic conditions on the level of sentence grammar.
Introduction
(2007)
The annotation guidelines introduced in this chapter present an attempt to create a unique infrastructure for the encoding of data from very different languages. The ultimate target of these annotations is to allow for data retrieval for the study of information structure, and since information structure interacts with all levels of grammar, the present guidelines cover all levels of grammar too. After introducing the guidelines, the current chapter also presents an evaluation by means of measurements of the inter-annotator agreement.
We will argue that some seemingly adverbial free DPs in the instrumental in Russian which are traditionally termed measure instrumental are best understood as secondary predicates. We present the relevant syntactic assumptions and propose a semantics of this use of DPs in the instrumental. This proposal hears on the distinction between adjunct modification and secondary predication.
An adjunct-DP in the free instrumental case occurs in a number of surface positions where the DP is syntactically optional. does not depend on any element in the sentence, and has a number of different interpretations. We introduce Bailyn's proposal which postulates a uniform syntactic environment for all the uses of instr. This calls for a uniform semantics of these DPs which can nevertheless accomodate the different interpretations. Starting with the hypothesis of Roman Jakobson about the semantics of the instrumental case we formulate a semantic interpretation theory based on abduction. We give a uniform semantics for three different adjunct uses of instr in this framework. In the concluding part of the paper we discuss some possible alternatives and ramifications as well as questions and objections raised with respect to the treatment proposed in this paper.
The present paper aims at describing different pre-verbal focus strategies in Kisikongo (H16a), spoken in the vicinity of Mbanza Kongo, northern Angola. This western Bantu language is part of the Kikongo Language Cluster (KLC), stretching from southern Gabon to northern Angola, including Cabinda and parts of Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa. Kikongo exhibits a clause-internal pre-verbal argument focus position, which has rarely been reported in Bantu languages, except in Mbuun (B87) (Bostoen and Mundeke 2012) and Nsong (B85d) (Koni Muluwa and Bostoen, this volume), both spoken in the neighboring Kwilu region of the DRC. The more extensively studied eastern and southern Bantu languages generally have a post-verbal argument focus position (cf. Watters 1979, Morimoto 2000, Creissels 2004, Güldemann 2007, Buell 2009, van der Wal 2009, among others). In addition to this mono-clausal argument focus strategy, Kisikongo also relies on different bi-clausal constructions to focus arguments, i.e. cleft-constructions.
Dislocation without movement
(2004)
This paper argues that French Left-Dislocation is a unified phenomenon whether it is resumed by a clitic or a non-clitic element. The syntactic component is shown to play a minimal role in its derivation: all that is required is that the dislocated element be merged by adjunction to a Discourse Projection (generally a finite TP with root properties). No agreement or checking of a topic feature is necessary, hence no syntactic movement of any sort need be postulated. The so-called resumptive element is argued to be a full-fledged pronoun rather than a true syntactic resumptive.
Previous work examining the role of antecedent accessibility in pronominal coreference has often linked coreference to prominent structural positions that in turn are linked to information structure statuses such as topic. Three experiments examine the influence of topichood independently of structural prominence by exploring the influence of the pragmatic notion of aboutness on the written production of pronominal coreferring expressions. The results show that being mentioned in an about-phrase increases the likelihood that a referent will be selected as the future topic of a following sentence as well as increasing the proportion of responses with early, pronominal coreference to that referent, at the expense of coreference with the subject. These results suggest that coreference is sensitive to the status of other, structurally non-prominent referents in discourse, and that the pragmatic notion of aboutness influences pronominal coreference.
Fronting a noun phrase changes the focus structure of a sentence. Therefore, it may affect truth conditions, since some operators, in particular quantificational adverbs, are sensitive to focus. However, the position of the quantificational adverb itself, hence its informational status, is usually assumed not to have any semantic effect. In this paper I discuss a reading of some quantificational adverbs, the relative reading, which disappears if the adverb is fronted. I propose that this reading relies not only on focus, but on B-accent (fall-rise intonation) as well. A fronted Q-adverb is usually pronounced with a B-accent; since only one element can be B-accented, this means that the scope of the adverb contains no B-accented material, hence no relative readings. Thus, the effects of fronting range more widely than is usually assumed, and quantificational adverbs are a useful tool with which to investigate these effects.
In this paper I discuss four type of bare nominal, and note that, in some sense, all of them appear to imply stereotypicality. I consider an account in terms of Bidirectional Optimality Theory: unmarked (bare) forms give rise to unmarked (stereotypical) interpretations. However, it turns out that, while the form of bare numerals is unmarked, the interpretation sometimes is not. I suggest that the crucial notion is not unmarkedness, but optimal inference: unmarked forms give rise to interpretations that are best used for drawing inferences. I propose a revision of Bidirectional Optimality Theory to reflect this.
The current study focuses on the prosodic realization of negators in Saisiyat, an endangered aboriginal language of Taiwan, and compares its prosodic realization of negation with that of English. The results of this study indicate that sentential subjects are the most acoustically prominent items in the Saisiyat negative sentences measured. This contrasts sharply with the English experimental sentences, in which the negator itself was the most acoustically prominent item. These findings suggest that Saisiyat is a pitch-accent language; thus, the presence of negators does not significantly change the prosodic parameters of surrounding words. English, in contrast, is an intonation language, so the presence of negation results in substantial prosodic modification. This suggests that the phenomenon of negation is universally prominent; however, languages with different prosodic systems will adopt different strategies for realizing prominence.
It has long been observed that subjects cross-linguistically have topic properties: they are typically definite, referential and/or generic (Givón 1976). Bantu languages are said to illustrate this generalization: preverbal position for NPs is equated with both subject and topic status and postverbal position with focus (and non-subject). However, there is a growing body of work showing that preverbal subjects are not necessarily syntactically or semantically equivalent to topics. For example, Zerbian’s (2006) careful study of preverbal position in Northern Sotho shows that preverbal subjects meet few of the semantic tests for aboutness topics. The study of restrictions on preverbal subjects in Durban Zulu presented in this paper builds on Zerbian (2006) and Halpert (2012). In particular, we investigate the interpretational properties of preverbal indefinite subjects. These subjects show us that preverbal subjects carry a presupposition of existence. We explore an analysis connecting the "strong reading" of preverbal subjects with how high the verb moves in Zulu (following Tsai’s 2001 work on Mandarin).
This paper examines locative relatives in Durban Zulu. We show that locative relatives differ from nominal relatives crucially in prosodic phrasing as well as in resumptive pronoun marking. We propose that the best way to account for locative relatives in Zulu is to resort to the old style adjunction analysis of relative clauses, with an empty operator. The system we propose assumes that such an adjunction analysis co-exists with a head-raising analysis, which accounts for the nominal relative clauses.
Tone as a distinctive feature used to differentiate not only words but also clause types, is a characteristic feature of Bantu languages. In this paper we show that Bemba relatives can be marked with a low tone in place of a segmental relative marker. This low tone strategy of relativization, which imposes a restrictive reading of relatives, manifests a specific phonological phrasing that can be differentiated from that of non-restrictives. The paper shows that the resultant phonological phrasing favours a head-raising analysis of relativization. In this sense, phonology can be shown to inform syntactic analyses.
The claim of this paper is that embedded definites can, despite the appearances, be accounted for on the uniqueness approach. Far from being a surprise, we argue that the behavior of embedded definites is actually expected once two independent facts are taken into account: the ability of noun phrases to take scope, i.e., to be interpreted in a different place from their syntactic position, and the interaction of presuppositions and scope-taking elements. Specifically, we analyze embedded definites as a case of inverse linking (Gabbay and Moravscik, 1974; May, 1977): the embedded definite takes scope over the embedding one. The presupposition of the embedded definite is weakened as a result of the independently motivated process of intermediate accommodation (Kratzer, 1989; Berman, 1991). In our case, this process transfers the presupposition of the embedding definite into the restrictor of the embedded one.
Like other scope-taking processes, inverse linking is generally taken to be subject to locality constraints: if a syntactic island, such as a finite clause boundary, intervenes in the path of a scope-taking element, then the resulting reading is unavailable or degraded (Rodman, 1976). Since our account views embedded definites as cases of inverse linking, we predict that inserting an island into an embedded definite, all else being equal, should lead to a similar degradation. We report results from an online survey with 800 participants that confirm this prediction.
Since Haiman (1978), a general assumption concerning the information structure of conditional sentences is that "conditionals are topics". However, in Chadic South Bauchi West languages spoken in Northern Nigeria, as well as in Banda Linda, an Adamawa language spoken in the République Centre-Africaine, conditionals share their structure with focus, not topic. This seriously questions Haiman’s claim and forces us to reconsider the facts and characterizations of conditionals, topic and focus in general.
In order to do this, we will first examine the facts of conditionals in some Chadic languages, then their information structure. We will see how both data and theory invalidate Haiman's claim. Then we will see that if they are not topics, they are different from focus as well. We will argue that if the elements which make a topic or a focus can appear in conditionals, these must be separated from what constitutes the identity of conditions. Then, we will see if these can be characterized in the same way as Lambrecht characterizes temporal clauses, viz. as "activated propositions" (Lambrecht 1994). We will finally conclude that they should rather be defined as "fictitious assertions" (Culioli 2000).
Genitive focus in Supyire
(2006)
Supyire has two distinct genitive constructions, one consisting of juxtaposed nouns, and the other marked with a particle. This study demonstrates that the marked genitive correlates significantly in natural discourse with contrastive focus as operationally defined in Myhill and Xing (1996). The method used avoids the vicious circularity of many discourse-based studies of focus. Contrastive focus, rather than being "coded", is a pragmatic construal which is dependent on other elements in the communicative context. This construal is only one of the possible construals of the marked genitive (contra Carlson 1994). In this it is not unlike other so-called "contrastive focus" constructions noted in the literature, such as contrastive stress in English.
Zulu shows an alternation of conjoint and disjoint (conjunctive/disjunctive, short/long) verb forms. Certain contexts suggest that the distribution of these forms is related to focus. For example, certain adverbial expressions receive a focal interpretation when preceded by a conjoint form but not when preceded by a disjoint form. Similarly, a wh-phrase must be preceded by a conjoint form. This has led some researchers to argue or suggest that the alternation encodes focus directly. This paper examines two different focal hypotheses, one in which a disjoint form encodes focus on the verb and another in which the conjoint form encodes focus on the element following the verb. It is shown that both of these hypotheses are inadequate because certain contexts requiring the conjoint form do not display the predicted focal interpretation. Relativization morphology is argued to also support an analysis independent of focus. It is proposed that the alternation is regulated entirely by the position of the verb within the surface constituencies first proposed in Van der Spuy (1993) and that the associated focal interpretations are the result of a range of interpretations permitted within the different constituencies. Elements remaining within the relevant constituent are nontopical, and focus is one of a range of interpretations they can receive.
In his 1995 monograph, Apresyan suggests that it would be extremely interesting to investigate the means of expressing the definiteness/indefiniteness opposition in languages that do not have articles. In this paper, I will attempt to find possible correlations between the organization of discourse and the positions in which the (in)definite nominals may appear within a sentence of Russian. I will examine the information structure of Russian sentences and, based on the previous analyses, provide a new account of their organization with respect to information packaging. I will then look at various nominal elements contained in certain parts of a sentence and arrive at a system describing the distribution of NPs in Russian with respect to the information structure. The ultimate goal of this paper is to establish and motivate a system of correlations between various types of NPs and functions of information structure. This goal will be achieved by determining which characteristic of a NP may serve as a criterion allowing to provide a one-to-one mapping.
The effects of different forms of predication have been insightfully (and almost exclusively) studied for 'simple' cases of predication, of which the 'presentational sentence' is maybe the paradigm instantiation. It is the aim of this paper to show that thc same kind of effects as well as in fact the same kind of structures are present at embedded levels in thematically and otherwise more complex structures. Beyond presentational sentences, 'unaccusative' experiencing constructions involving a dative subject, 'double object constructions' and - to a lesser extent - spraylload constructions are discussed. For all of these, it is argued that they comprise a predication encoding the ascription of a transient temporal property to a location. On this basis, a proposal is made as to how the scope asymmetry between the two arguments involved in the colistructions can be explained. Furthermore, a proposal is made as to how what has been called 'argument shift' is motivated.
This paper presents psycholinguistic evidence on the factors governing the resolution of German personal pronouns. To determine the relative influence of linear order versus grammatical function of potential antecedents, two interpretation-preference tasks were designed. Their specific aim was to disentangle salience factors conflated in previous research on pronoun interpretation, such as linear or-der, first mention and topicalization. Experiment 1 tested pronoun resolution to non-sentence-initial position (scrambling) and Experiment 2 tested pronoun resolution to sentence-initial position (topicalization). The results across different verb types and across different syntactic contexts in Experiments 1 and 2 show that grammatical function, yet neither linear order, first mention nor topicalization predicts pronoun resolution in German.
This paper discusses results from a corpus study of German demonstrative and personal pronouns and from a reading time experiment in which we compared the interpretation options of the two types of pronouns (Bosch et al. 2003, 2007). A careful review of exceptions to a generalisation we had been suggesting in those papers (the Subject Hypothesis: "Personal pronouns prefer subject antecedents and demonstratives prefer non-subject antecedents") shows that, although this generalisation correctly describes a tendency in the data, it is quite wrong in claiming that the grammatical role of antecedents is the relevant parameter. In the current paper we argue that the generalisation should be formulated in terms of in-formation-structural properties of referents rather than in terms of the grammatical role of antecedent expressions.
Morphology
(2007)
In anaphora resolution theory, it has been assumed that anaphora resolution is based on a reversed mapping of antecedent salience and anaphora complexity: minimal complex anaphora refer to maximal salient antecedents. In order to ex-amine whether and by which developmental steps German children gain command of this mapping maxim we conducted an experiment on production and comprehension of intersentential pronouns including the three pronoun types zero, personal, and demonstrative pronoun. With respect to antecedent salience, the experiment varied syntactic role (subject/object) and in/animacy. Six age groups of children (age range from 2;0 to 6;0) and an adult control group has been tested. The hypothesis arising from the mapping maxim is that zero pronoun correlates with more salient antecedents than personal and demonstrative pronoun, the latter correlating with the least salient antecedents. The results are: In production, children first establish the opposition of zero pronoun with animate antecedents vs. demonstrative pronoun with inanimate antecedents. In a next step, syntactic role comes into play and a more complex system opposing the three presented pronoun types is established. In comprehension, however, the effect of pronoun type re-mains weak and antecedent features remain a strong factor in reference choice. However, also adults employ pronoun type and antecedent features. The oldest children and the adults show variation in personal pronoun resolution according to the animacy pattern of the potential antecedents. In case of identical animacy features, the subject is the preferred candidate; in case of distinct animacy features, there is a tendency to choose the object antecedent.
Der Beitrag referiert Ergebnisse eines mit Erwachsenen durchgeführten Experiments zum Verständnis des bestimmten Artikels. Das Testmaterial entstammt einem für Kinder konzipierten Blickpräferenzexperiment. Die Durchführung des Tests mit Erwachsenen diente als Kontrolle der Verwendbarkeit der Materialien und der Überprüfung folgender Hypothese: Die referentielle Grundfunktion des Artikels besteht im Verweis auf begrenzte Ganze bzw. einen bestimmten (=begrenzten) Umfang einer Entität. Der interessante Aspekt des Experiments war, dass die Entscheidung zwischen [+begrenzt] vs. [-begrenzt] innerhalb einer pluralischen Kondition fallen musste, die Begrenztheitslesart wurde also nicht durch einzahlig auftretende zählbare Objekte erzeugt. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die pluralische Kondition sich auf das Antwortverhalten der Probanden auswirkte. Probanden mit durchschnittlich längerer Reaktionszeit entscheiden sich anders als Probanden mit vergleichsweise kurzer Reaktionszeit. Während von der Gruppe mit spontanerem Entscheidungsverhalten die Hypothese im Hinblick auf den Artikel bestätigt wurde, scheint sich die Gruppe mit höheren Reaktionszeiten für das prototypischere Bild innerhalb der Pluralkondition zu entscheiden.
Eine wesentliche morpho-syntaktische Eigenschaft pronominaler Formen ist ihre Kongruenz mit dem Nomen. In den Grammatiken werden die pronominalen Paradigmen deshalb anhand der Kategorien des Nomens konstruiert. So wird traditionellerweise im Deutschen für all die verschiedenen pronominalen Elemente wie bestimmter/unbestimmter Artikel, Negationsartikel, Possessiv- und Demonstrativpronomen, starke/schwache Adjektive ein und dieselbe Struktur des Paradigmensystems zugrundegelegt. Die 3 Genusklassen konstituieren je ein Paradigma im Singular sowie ein gemeinsames Pluralparadigma. Jedes dieser 4 Paradigmen hat 4 Kasuspositionen, Nom., Gen., Dat., Akk. Dies ergibt ein Paradigmensystem mit 16 Paradigmenpositionen. Jede Position beschreibt eine der möglichen syntaktischen Umgebungen von nominalen Einheiten auf der Äußerungsoberfläche. Nicht nur im Deutschen existiert nun aber keineswegs für jede dieser Positionen auch eine eigenständige pronominale Form. Die Diskrepanz ist bekanntlich beachtlich. Das Paradigmensystem des bestimmten Artikels - das hier exemplarisch diskutiert werden sol1 - weist mit 6 Formen noch den größten Formenreichtum auf. Das Demonstrativpronomen dies und der Negationsartikel kein z.B. haben 5 distinkte Formen, die schwachen Adjektive schließlich nur 2.
Die Frage, die sich unmittelbar aufdrängt, ist, welche (grammatische) Ratio steckt hinter diesem hohen Maß an Formidentitäten. Inwieweit haben wir es hier mit motivierten Synkretismen, d.h. auf inhaltlich begründeten Neutralisationen beruhenden Formidentitäten, und/oder zufälligen Homonymien zu tun?
Speakers have a wide range of noncanonical syntactic options that allow them to mark the information status of the various elements within a proposition. The correlation between a construction and constraints on information status, however, is not arbitrary; there are broad, consistent, and predictive generalizations that can be made about the information-packaging functions served by preposing, postposing, and argument-reversing constructions. Specifically, preposed constituents are constrained to represent discourse-old information, postposed constituents are constrained to represent information that is either discourse-new or hearer-new, and argument-reversing constructions require that the information represented by the preposed constituent be at least as familiar as that represented by the postposed constituent (Birner & Ward 1998). The status of inferable information (Clark 1977; Prince 1981), however, is problematic; a study of corpus data shows that such information can be preposed in an inversion or a preposing (hence must be discourse-old), yet can also be postposed in constructions requiring hearer-new information (hence must be hearer-new). This information status – discourse-old yet hearer-new – is assumed by Prince (1992) to be non-occurring on the grounds that what has been evoked in the discourse should be known to the hearer. I resolve this difficulty by arguing for a reinterpretation of the term 'discourse-old' as applying not only to information that has been explicitly evoked in the prior discourse, but rather to any information that provides a salient inferential link to the prior discourse. Extending Prince’s notion in this manner allows us to account for the distribution of noncanonically positioned peripheral constituents in a principled and unified way.
Reflexive pronouns as central anaphoric elements are subject to general principles determined by Universal Grammar and shared by all languages that use reflexives as part of their grammatical structure. In addition to these general conditions, there are language particular properties, which different languages can exhibit on the basis of different regulations. One variation of this sort is the particular role of Reflexives in German, which can show up as improper Arguments, which are subject to standard syntactic and morphological conditions, but do not represent an argument of the head they belong to. Hence the particular property is the effect of syntactic, morphological and semantic conditions. A simple illustration of the phenomena I will explore in this contribution is based on the following observation.
Vor gut vierzig Jahren hat Milewski (1950) das Werkzeug der Syntaxtypologie um das Begriffspaar "kon- und exzentrische Struktur" vermehrt. Dieses Klassifikationsmittel wurde später von Nichols (1984,1986) erneuert und terminologisch mit der Unterscheidung von head- und dependent-marking erfasst. Dabei hat die Autorin vorgeschlagen, diese Unterscheidung auch für die Typologie der Relativkonstruktion fruchtbar zu machen.
This paper deals with the possessive constructions — either connective or relative — in Mbochi (C25), a Bantu language spoken in Congo-Brazzaville. In Mbochi, as in most languages of the same group (C20), the underlying /CV-/ form of nominal prefixes never surfaces as such but is targeted by two main processes: consonantal dissimilation and vowel elision. Both processes are in complementary distribution and the alternations triggered by them may explain the surface forms of both connective and relative constructions. In order to provide the necessary background for the study of Mbochi relative clauses, the three subject markers of Mbochi are introduced and the main verbal suffixes are also discussed. Thereafter, a detailed presentation and analysis of the relative constructions is given. Finally, we discuss the prosody of these constructions, showing that relative clauses in Mbochi have no particular tonal markers and we propose a model involving superimposed boundary tones to account for their intonation.
The syntactic structure of predicatives : clues from the omission of the copula in child english
(2001)
This paper explores the syntax of main clause predicatives from the perspective of trying to account for an asymmetry in copular constructions in certain languages. One of the languages in which we find such an asymmetry is child English (around age 2). Specifically, new results show that children acquiring English tend to use an overt (and inflected) copula in individual-level predicatives, but they tend to omit the copula in stage-level predicatives. The analysis adopted to account for this pattern draws on evidence from adult English, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese that stage-level predicates are Aspectual (they contain AspP) while individual-level predicates are not (they involve only a lexical Small Clause predicate). Children's omission of the copula in structures with AspP is linked to the fact that at this stage of development, children fail to require finiteness in main clauses. In particular, Asp0 is temporally anchored in child English, thereby obviating the need for a finite (temporally anchored) Infl, i.e. an inflected copula.
It is the aim of this paper to evaluate the various types of sentential complementation available in terms of complement control cross-linguistically. I will propose a lexical classification of control classes on the basis of the instantiated subordination patterns. I want to focus on an important distinction, namely that of structural vs. inherent control. Structural control is found with predicates that select a clausal complement whose structure requires argument identification and thus 'induces' control. Infinitival complements are prototypical cases for this kind of control because in most languages infinitival complements can only 'survive' in structures of control or raising. The interesting question is which predicates license structural control and which cross-linguistic differences emerge between potential licensors. Inherent control is found with predicates that require control readings independent of the instantiated structure of sentential complementation (e.g. a directive predicate such as zwingen 'force'). In addition, I will recapitulate and add arguments for the dual lexical-syntactic nature of complement control.
Complex focus versus double focus : investigations on multiple focus interpretations in Hungarian
(2006)
The main aim of this paper is to point out several problems with the semantic analysis of Hungarian focus interpretation and 'only'. For current semantic analyses the interpretation of Hungarian identificational/exhaustive focus and 'only' is problematic, since in classical semantic analyses 'only' is identified with an exhaustivity operator. In this paper I will discuss multiple focus constructions and question-answer pairs in Hungarian to show that such a view cannot be applied to Hungarian exhaustive focus. Next to this I will discuss possible interpretations of Hungarian sentences containing multiple prosodic foci: complex focus versus double focus. My claim is that in order to interpret multiple focus (in Hungarian) we have to take into consideration the different intonation patterns, the occurrence of 'only', and the syntactic structure as well.
In my paper, I show that the so-called German right dislocation actually comprises two distinct constructions, which I label 'right dislocation proper' and 'afterthought'. These differ in their prosodic and syntactic properties, as well as in their discourse functions. The paper is primarily concerned with the right dislocation proper (RD). I present a semantic analysis of RD based on the 'separate performative' account of Potts (2004, 2005) and Portner (forthc.). This analysis allows a description of the semantic contribution of RD to its host sentence, as well as explaining certain semantic constraints on the kind of NP in the RD construction.
The claim advanced in this paper is that the presence of a left-dislocated element together with a resumptive clitic in Bulgarian is a special case of argument saturation with implications for the focus structure of the clause, while contrast involves discontinuous focus (contrastive topics/foci) with no clitics present in the derivation. Contrastive topic/focus constructions in Bulgarian can be united on the view that they involve (sets of) ordered pairs where the higher element is valuing a contrastive feature (cf. OCC in Chomsky 2001) while the element in the VP is a non-contrastive topic or focus. The contrastive feature participates in wh-structures but not in clitic-left-dislocated structures where pairing between arguments is 'accidental'.
In this work, I provide an analysis of adjectival depictive constructions which accounts for most of their fundamental properties. First, I focus on the restrictions having to do with the integration of the depictive and the verbal predicate: they are based on aspectual compatibility between the two predicates, which, in turn, will depend on the ability, on the part of the depictive, to make reference to some (sub)event in the event structure of the verbal predicate. Facts not captured by previous approaches in the literature will be straightforwardly accounted for, among them the possibility to have I-L depictive constructions, and the impossibility to combine a depictive with some non-stative verbal predicates. Second, it will be shown that the informational import of the depictive in the sentence can be equivalent to that of the verbal predicate: both can be the primary lexical basis of predication. This is reflected in the sentence in various ways, having to do with aspectual modifiers, and in the properties of the sentential subject. In this connection, we will reconsider the notion of subject, arguing that no subject-predicate relation takes place in the lexical domain of sentences, and hence that the argument the depictive is oriented to, the common argument, cannot be a subject of the depictive. Finally, a minimalist analysis is proposed for the syntax of the construction, in terms of direct syntactic merge of predicative constituents and sidewards (q-to-q) movement for the common argument, from the lexical domain of the depictive to the lexical domain of the verb. As to morphosyntactic properties, a syntactic Double Agree relation is assumed to hold between T/v, as probes, on the one hand, and the common argument and depictive, as simultaneous goals, on the other, which would allow for the deletion of Case features on both goals. The assumed presence of Structural Case on the adjectival depictive will be responsible for the well-known restriction on the orientation of depictives to the sentential subject or object.
The German word also, similar to English so, is traditionally considered to be a sentence adverb with a consecutive meaning, i.e. it indicates that the propositional content of the clause containing it is some kind of consequence of what has previously been said. As a sentence adverb, also has its place within the core of the German sentence, since this is the proper place for an adverb to occur in German. The sentence core offers two proper positions for adverbs: the so-called front field and the middle field. In spoken German, however, also often occurs in sentence-initial position, outside the sentence itself. In this paper, I will use excerpts of German conversations to discuss and illustrate the importance of the sentence positions and the discourse positions for the functions of also on the basis of some German conversations.
It has often been noticed that one syntactic argument position can be realized by elements which seem to realize different thematic roles. This is notably the case with the external argument position of verbs of change of state which licenses volitional agents, instruments or natural forces/causers, showing the generality and abstractness of the external argument relation. (1) a. John broke the window (Agent) b. The hammer broke the window (Instrument) c. The storm broke the window (Causer) In order to capture this generality, Van Valin & Wilkins (1996) and Ramchand (2003) among others have proposed that the thematic role of the external argument position is in fact underspecified. The relevant notion is that of an effector (in Van Valin & Wilkins) or of an abstract causer/initiator (in Ramchand). In this paper we argue against a total underspecification of the external argument relation. While we agree that (1b) does not instantiate an instrument theta role in subject position, we argue that a complete underspecification of the external theta-position is not feasible, but that two types of external theta roles have to be distinguished, Agents and Causers. Our arguments are based on languages where Agents and Causers show morpho-syntactic independence (section 2.1) and the behavior of instrument subjects in English, Dutch, German and Greek (section 2.2 and 3). We show that instrument subjects are either Agent or Causer like. In section (4) we give an analysis how arguments realizing these thematic notions are introduced into syntax.
In many languages, a passive-like meaning may be obtained through a noncanonical passive construction. The get passive (1b) in English, the se faire passive (2b) in French and the kriegen passive (3b) in German represent typical manifestations. This squib focuses on the behavior of the get-passive in English and discusses a number of restrictions associated with it as well as the status of get.
This paper is a preliminary comparative study of the relation between word order and information structure in three Null Subject Languages ((NSLs) Spanish, Italian and Greek). The aim is twofold: first I seek to examine the differences and the similarities among these languages in this domain of their syntax. Secon, I investigate the possible derivations of the various patterns and attempt to localize the differences among these languages in different underlying syntactic structures.
It is common knowledge in the field of Philippine linguistics that an ang-marked direct object in a non-actor focus clause must be definite or generic, while a ng-marked object in an actor focus clause typically receives a nonspecific interpretation. However, in contexts like wh-questions, the oblique object in an antipassive may be interpreted as specific, as noted by Schachter & Otanes (1972), Maclachlan & Nakamura (1997), Rackowski (2002), and others. […] In this paper, I propose to account for the specificity effects […] within the analysis of Tagalog syntax put forth by Aldridge (2004). I analyze Tagalog as an ergative language […]. Cross linguistically, antipassive oblique objects receive a nonspecific interpretation, while absolutives are definite or generic. I show in this paper how the Tagalog facts can be subsumed under a general account of ergativity.
Predication and equation
(2001)
English is one language where equative sentences and non-equative sentences have a similar surface syntax (but see Heggie 1988 and Moro 1997 for a discussion of more subtle differences). In this paper we address the fact that many other languages appear to use radically different morphological means which seem to map to intuitive differences in the type of predication expressed. We take one such language, Scottish Gaelic, and show that the real difference is not between equative and non-equative sentences, but is rather dependent on whether the predicational head in the structure proposed above is eventive or not.
We show that the aparently odd syntax of “equatives” in this language derives from the fact that they are constructed via a non-eventive Pred head. Since Pred heads cannot combine with non-predicative categories, such as saturated DPs, “equatives” are built up indirectly from a simple predicational structure with a semantically bleached predicate. This approach not only allows us to maintain a strict one-to-one syntax/semantics mapping for predicational syntax, but also for the syntax of DPs. The argument we develop here, then, suggests that the interface between the syntactic and semantic components is maximally economical— one could say perfect.
This paper deals with left and right dislocation in Embɔsi, a Bantu language (C25) spoken in Congo-Brazzaville. The prosody of dislocation has gathered considerable attention, as it is particularly informative for the theories of the syntax-prosody mapping of Intonation Phrases (a.o. Selkirk, 2009, 2011; Downing, 2011). Concentrating on selected Bantu languages, Downing (2011) identifies two main phrasing patterns. She primarily distinguishes languages in which only right dislocated phrases display a lack of prosodic integration ("asymmetric" languages), from languages in which both left and right dislocations phrase separately ("symmetric" languages). Hiatus avoidance processes, boundary tones and register expansion/reduction indicate that Embɔsi displays a somewhat more intricate phrasing pattern. In this language, both left and right dislocated items sit outside of the Intonation Phrase formed by the core-clause, but only the latter form their own Intonation Phrase. We also discuss the prosody of multiple dislocations (i.e. with two dislocated arguments), which have not so far received all the attention they deserve. What we observe in Embɔsi is that either the two dislocated items phrase together and are not integrated to the core Intonation Phrase, or only the outermost dislocated element phrases separately.
This paper demonstrates that there are no empirical and theoretical motivations for regarding verbal predicate focus constructions as (diachronically) derived from cleft constructions. Instead, it is argued that predicate fronting for the purpose of focus or topic is comparable to verb (phrase) fronting structures in other languages (e.g., Germanic). The proposed analysis further indicates that related doubling strategies observed in certain languages are the consequences of parallel chains that license the fronted verb (phrase) in the left periphery, and the Agree-tense-aspect features inside the proposition.
This questionnaire is intended as an aid to eliciting different relative clause types – restrictive, non-restrictive, free, cleft. We have taken care to include examples where the head plays a variety of grammatical functions in the relative clause (subject, object, indirect object, possessor, adjunct). We have also taken care to include examples where the relative clause is in different positions in the sentence: initial, medial and extraposed. The questionnaire is intended as a guide, only, as every language will have its own set of possibilities and complications. At the end of the questionnaire is a checklist, as well as some illustrative examples in English and Swahili of the basic relative clause types. While we had Bantu languages in mind in devising the questionnaire, we hope it could also be useful to linguists with an interest in other languages.