Predicate doubling in Spanish: On how discourse may mimic syntactic movement

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Muñoz Pérez ◽  
Matías Verdecchia
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Movement

Spelling-Out Scrambling

2004 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 109-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naoki Fukui ◽  
Hironobu Kasai
Keyword(s):  
Natural Consequence ◽  
Syntactic Movement ◽  
Null Operator ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Null Operator Movement ◽  
Reconstruction Effects ◽  
Radical Reconstruction ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Operator Movement

This paper offers a new analysis of Japanese scrambling, under which some instances of scrambling phenomena are derived from the process of linearization. It is specifically proposed that the absence of formal agreement in Japanese enables Spell-Out to apply solely to an argument of the verb. The spelled out argument is “dislocated” at PF by the mechanisms of linearization of spelled out syntactic objects. Radical reconstruction effects, along with various other properties of Japanese scrambling such as the proper binding effects, are captured as a natural consequence of the proposed analysis, because the scrambled constituent actually does not undergo any syntactic movement but rather stays in the base-generated position. It is also argued that an analysis of scrambling ought to be eclectic in the sense that another strategy, which employs null operator movement to establish the relation between the dislocated element and the gap, is also available in Japanese, as originally proposed by Ueyama (2002). Thus, the optionality of Japanese scrambling is shifted under the proposed analysis to the optional application of Spell-Out (made possible by the absence of formal agreement) and the optional selection of a null operator in the numeration. The paper is concluded with the speculation that the availability of the latter strategy is due to the rich use of predication in Japanese.

scholarly journals Neural Connectivity in Syntactic Movement Processing

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduardo Europa ◽  
Darren R. Gitelman ◽  
Swathi Kiran ◽  
Cynthia K. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Neural Connectivity ◽  
Syntactic Movement

scholarly journals QR Obeys Superiority: Frozen Scope and ACD

2001 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Bruening
Keyword(s):  
Quantifier Scope ◽  
Double Object ◽  
Object Shift ◽  
Hierarchical Order ◽  
Syntactic Movement ◽  
Relativized Minimality ◽  
Multiple Object

The phenomenon of “frozen scope” in double object and spray-load constructions is shown to hold robustly across contexts, constructions, and quantifier types. Nevertheless, frozen scope is not absolute, holding only between two objects but not between an object and a subject or an object and some other operator. The rigidity of two object quantifiers follows the pattern of multiple instances of movement cross linguistically (multiple wh-movement, multiple A-scrambling, multiple object shift): movement paths cross, recreating the hierarchical order of the moving elements (Richards 1997). Hypothesizing that quantifier scope is derived by quantifier-specific syntactic movement, movement that is constrained in the same way as other types of movement, permits these phenomena to be unified under accounts of Relativized Minimality effects generally.

scholarly journals The meanings of focus: The significance of an interpretation-based category in cross-linguistic analysis

2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
DEJAN MATIĆ ◽  
DANIEL WEDGWOOD
Keyword(s):  
Common Factor ◽  
Linguistic Analysis ◽  
Stable Category ◽  
Structural Patterns ◽  
Syntactic Movement ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Wide Range

Focus is regularly treated as a cross-linguistically stable category that is merely manifested by different structural means in different languages, such that a common focus feature may be realised through, for example, a morpheme in one language and syntactic movement in another. We demonstrate this conception of focus to be unsustainable on both theoretical and empirical grounds, invoking fundamental argumentation regarding the notions of focus and linguistic category, alongside data from a wide range of languages. Attempts to salvage a cross-linguistic notion of focus through parameterisation, the introduction of additional information-structural primitives such as contrast, or reduction to a single common factor are shown to be equally problematic. We identify the causes of repeated misconceptions about the nature of focus in a number of interrelated theoretical and methodological tendencies in linguistic analysis. We propose to see focus as a heuristic tool and to employ it as a means of identifying structural patterns that languages use to generate a certain number of related pragmatic effects, potentially through quite diverse mechanisms.

scholarly journals (a-)Topics and animacy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriana Belletti ◽  
Claudia Manetti
Keyword(s):  
Left Periphery ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Object A ◽  
Syntactic Movement ◽  
Relativized Minimality ◽  
Production Experiment ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Mismatch Condition

The aim of this paper is twofold: first, we intend to contribute to the debate on the identification of the features to which syntactic locality expressed in terms of the featural Relativized Minimality/fRM principle appears to be sensitive (Rizzi 2004; Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi 2009); second, we aim at providing a better characterization of the distributional and interpretive properties of the process of a-marking in the Topic position of the Italian left periphery identified by syntactic cartography, in relation to (in)animacy (Belletti & Manetti 2018). To these aims, we examined the role of animacy in a production experiment eliciting left dislocated topics with 5-year-old children. To the extent that a-marking is related to a kind of affectedness of object topics (Belletti 2018a), we examined whether an inanimate left dislocated object could constitute a felicitous a-Topic. Furthermore, the question whether complexity effects are modulated in the computation of fRM in an animacy mismatch condition (between an inanimate left dislocated object and an intervening (animate) lexical subject) is also addressed within the context of ClLDs. Our results show that, in the tested animacy mismatch condition, children seldom a-marked the pre-posed object. Instead, they appeared to creatively explore other solutions to overcome the production of the hard intervention structure, mainly using null subjects. As children are not ready to compute the intervention configuration with a lexical preverbal subject, but could not naturally adjust it through a-marking of the inanimate topic, they ended up opting for different types of productions in which intervention was eliminated. If the animacy feature seems to be implicated in the process of a-marking to some extent, it is not a feature to which the fRM principle is sensitive in building the object A’-dependency in ClLD: we conclude, in line with previous work, that animacy is not among the features implicated in triggering syntactic movement (in Italian).

scholarly journals Second Language Acquisition of Syntactic Movement in English by Turkish Adult Learners

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 23-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reyhan Agcam ◽  
Mustafa Coban ◽  
Zeynep Karadeniz Cisdik
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Adult Learners ◽  
Syntactic Movement

scholarly journals Introducing Continuations

2001 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Chris Barker
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Computer Science ◽  
Compositional Analysis ◽  
New Technique ◽  
Quantifier Scope ◽  
Scope Ambiguity ◽  
Syntactic Movement ◽  
Working Paper ◽  
A New Technique ◽  
Empirical Generalizations

This working paper introduces CONTINUATIONS (a concept borrowed from computer science) as a new technique for characterizing certain aspects of the semantics of a natural language. I should emphasize at the outset that this is just an introduction, and that more a rigorous and thorough treatment is under development (see Barker (ms)). In the meantime, this paper mentions certain formal results without proving them, and describes certain new empirical generalizations without exploring them. What it will do is provide an explicit account of a range of familiar phenomena relat­ed to quantification, including quantifier scope ambiguity, NP as a scope island, and generalized coordination. What makes the account noteworthy is that it provides a fully and strictly compositional analysis of quantification and generalized coordina­tion that does not rely on syntactic movement operations such as Quantifier Move­ment, auxiliary storage mechanisms such as Cooper Storage, or type ambiguity as in Hendriks' Flexible Types system.

scholarly journals Correspondence between XPs and Phonological Phrases

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 791-811
Author(s):  
Daniel Büring ◽  
Hubert Truckenbrodt
Keyword(s):  
Stress Assignment ◽  
Syntactic Movement ◽  
Constraint Stress ◽  
Reconstruction Effects ◽  
Internal Merge

Bresnan (1971, 1972) establishes an interaction between stress assignment and syntactic movement. We are interested in a restriction on this interaction. We argue that this restriction shows that the constraint STRESS-XP needs to be part of the syntax-prosody mapping and that it needs to be a restriction on a correspondence relation between syntactic XPs and phonological phrases. (A second constraint on the correspondence relation is either WRAP-XP or MATCH-XP.) In the course of our argument, we analyze Bresnan’s interaction between stress assignment and movement within an account in which Internal Merge induces reconstruction effects at both LF and PF.

scholarly journals Stages rather than ages in the acquisition of movement structures: Data from sentence repetition and 27696 spontaneous clauses

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Naama Friedmann ◽  
Julia Reznick
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Crossing Over ◽  
Syntactic Movement ◽  
Sentence Repetition ◽  
Unaccusative Verbs ◽  
Different Ages ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Repetition Task

This study explored the order of acquisition of various types of syntactic-movement and embedding structures in Hebrew, using a sentence-repetition task, in which 60 children aged 2;2-3;10 repeated 80 sentences (with a total of 4800 sentences), and an analysis of the spontaneous speech of 61 children aged 1;6-6;1 (27,696 clauses). The sentence repetition task revealed a set order of acquisition of the various types of syntactic movement: A-movement is acquired first, then A-bar-movement, and finally movement of the verb to C. The analysis of spontaneous speech revealed the same order: A-movement of the object of unaccusative verbs to subject position appears first, together with simple SV sentences; then, wh-questions appear, then relative clauses and topicalization, which appear together with embedding of finite clauses, and lastly, V-to-C movement. Previous studies have shown that Hebrew speakers under age six have difficulty comprehending and producing sentences with A-bar-movement in which a lexically-restricted object crosses over a lexically-restricted subject. And indeed, whereas children produced A-bar structures very early (wh-questions from age 1;6, relative-clauses and topicalization from age 2;6), until age 5;8 these structures never included a lexical DP crossing over another lexical DP. Both tasks indicated that the order of structure acquisition is fixed, creating Guttman scales between structures, but different children acquire the same structure at very different ages. It seems that whereas the syntactic path and the stages of structure acquisition along it are constant between children, each child walks this path in their own pace.

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