The be ‐auxiliary's categorial status in Old Russian1

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 613-644
Author(s):  
Hakyung Jung
Keyword(s):  
Categorial Status

scholarly journals When is a Verb not a Verb?

Nordlyd ◽  
10.7557/12.11 ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carson Schütze
Keyword(s):  
Central Issue ◽  
High Position ◽  
Vp Ellipsis ◽  
Categorial Status ◽  
Entire Distribution

Changes are proposed to the categorial status traditionally accorded to Aux-related and verbal elements in the clause, and the new taxonomy is applied in implementing the old insight that <em>be</em> should be analyzed as the default, semantically empty verb. The central issue is when a verb-like element does (not) count as categorially a V for distributional purposes. The major proposals are: 1) to remove <em>be</em> and <em>have</em> from the category Aux and treat them as Vs; 2) to separate out participles from genuine tensed and bare verbs; 3) to group <em>do</em> with modals, rather than with <em>have</em> and <em>be</em>, into a category Mood that also includes a null indicative morpheme. This scheme is used to account for the entire distribution of the forms of <em>be</em> just by treating it as V with no properties. <em>Be</em> fulfills two requirements that cannot always be met by contentful verbs: first, it satisfies the syntactico-semantic need for Tense to c-command a clause-mate V (the “V Requirement”); second, it satisfies the morphosyntactic need for participial affixes ( <em>-ing, -en</em>) to have hosts. It is shown how the former requirement derives the exceptionally high position of finite <em>be</em> by base-generating it above negation etc., rather than raising it across. VP-ellipsis data provide independent support for this treatment. Finally, some tentative suggestions are offered for how the V Requirement might be derived from deeper principles, while still allowing for the fact that it is apparently not fully enforced in languages with null copulas.

Reflexive constructions in German, Spanish, and French as a product of cyclic interaction

2021 ◽  
pp. 137-164
Author(s):  
Matthew L. Maddox ◽  
Jonathan E. MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Old French ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Reflexive Pronoun ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Subject Agreement ◽  
Categorial Status

German sich and Spanish se can have reflexive or anticausative interpretations but only Spanish se can have a passive interpretation. We argue that Spanish Passse is the result of interaction between the subject agreement cycle and the reflexive object cycle. We make two claims: i) pro merges in Spec-Voice in Passse, due to the subject agreement cycle; and ii) se heads Voice due to the reflexive cycle. The types of reflexive constructions a language has depends on the presence/absence of pro and the categorial status of the reflexive pronoun (head or DP). French appears problematic since it has Passse but lacks subject pro. However, Passse existed in Old French (Cennamo 1993), which was a null subject language (Vance 1997). Thus, French is consistent with this claim; i.e., it developed Passse when it had subject pro and se as a head. Passse survived into Modern French as a historical remnant.

Determiners

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phoevos Panagiotidis
Keyword(s):  
Research Work ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Generalized Quantifier ◽  
Word Classes ◽  
Generalized Quantifier Theory ◽  
Nominal Agreement ◽  
Categorial Status ◽  
Semantic Point ◽  
And Function ◽  
Quantifier Theory

Determiners are a nominal syntactic category distinct from both adjectives and nouns; they constitute a functional (aka closed or ‘minor’) category and they are typically located high inside the nominal phrasal structure. From a syntactic point of view, the category of determiners is commonly understood to comprise the word classes of article, demonstrative, and quantifier, as well as non-adjectival possessives and some nominal agreement markers. From a semantic point of view, determiners are assumed to function as quantifiers, especially within research informed by Generalized Quantifier Theory. However, this is a one-way entailment: although determiners in natural language are quantificational, their class contains only a subset of the logically possible quantifiers; this class is restricted by conservativity and other factors. The tension between the ‘syntactic’ and the ‘semantic’ perspective on determiners results to a degree of terminological confusion: it is not always clear which lexical items the Determiner category includes or what the function of determiners is; moreover, there exists a tendency among syntacticians to view ‘Determiner’ as naming not a class, but a fixed position within a nominal phrasal template. The study of determiners rose to prominence within grammatical theory during the ’80s both due to advances in semantic theorizing, primarily Generalized Quantifier Theory, and due to the generalization of the X' phrasal schema to functional (minor) categories. Some issues in the nature and function of determiners that have been addressed in theoretical and typological work with considerable success include the categorial status of determiners, their (non-)universality, their structural position and feature makeup, their role in argumenthood and their interaction with nominal predicates, and their relation to pronouns. Expectedly, issues in (in)definiteness, quantification, and specificity also figure prominently in research work on determiners.

Subject licensing in non-verbal clauses in Arabic

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-282
Author(s):  
Rashid Al-Balushi
Keyword(s):  
Subject Position ◽  
Standard Arabic ◽  
Present Account ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Categorial Status

Abstract This paper investigates the licensing of subjects in Standard Arabic participial clauses. Unlike verbal clauses, whose subject may appear post-verbally, the subject of participial clauses must precede the participle, having properties of topics of verbal clauses. I claim that this is because the canonical subject position, [Spec, vP], is not available for subjects of participles, due to lack of Nom Case. It is shown that neither tense nor a copula is sufficient to license structural Nom Case on a subject in [Spec, vP]. I conclude that the licensing of Nom Case on post-verbal subjects is dependent on V-to-T raising; that is, Nom Case is licensed by the T-V complex. The present account has implications for the nature of pre-verbal subjects in Arabic as well as for the categorial status of copular elements like kāna.

scholarly journals THE CATEGORIAL STATUS OF INFINITIVAL AND FINITE CLAUSES

1997 ◽  
Vol 14 (0) ◽  
pp. 159-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
KUNIHIRO IWAKURA
Keyword(s):  
Categorial Status

SOME REMARKS ABOUT THE CATEGORIAL STATUS OF MODALITY AND EVIDENTIALITY AS ITS COMPONENT

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 335-341
Author(s):  
Sakmara Ilyenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Categorial Status

The Categorial Status of the Pronoun Ku. Studies in Modern Grammar

2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (87) ◽  
pp. 45-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yong-Ha Kim ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Categorial Status

Inflection and Derivation

2019 ◽  
pp. 241-261
Author(s):  
Andrew Spencer
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Double Object ◽  
Completely Regular ◽  
Auxiliary Verbs ◽  
The Past ◽  
Irregular Verbs ◽  
Categorial Status

The chapter presents an overview of phenomena which pose important problems of description and analysis. I focus on the inflectional system, which has undergone severe attrition and shows idiosyncrasies typical of such systems. For nominals I describe the personal pronoun paradigm and the ‘possessive -s’ clitic/phrasal affix. The controversial categorial status of adverbs in -ly is discussed, while for verbs, all the subcategories prove to be highly problematical. For instance, only 50 irregular verbs distinguish past tense from past participle (e.g. wrote/written), so it is not even clear whether the past participle category is a highly restricted subcategory, with the vast majority of verbs showing past tense/past participle syncretism, or whether this is a case of ‘overdifferentiation’, like the forms am, are, were of the verb BE. On the other hand, the polyfunctionality of the completely regular -ing suffix, which derives verb, noun, and adjective forms, also poses serious unresolved problems. Auxiliary verbs and related phenomena alternate between periphrastic, clitic, and genuinely morphological (affixal) constructions. The chapter concludes with consideration of those aspects of derivational morphology which seem to be indisputably productive, hence part of the grammar, including (certain types of) event nominalization, some cases of double object alternation, and morphosemantic mismatches of the kind electrical engineering ⇒ electrical engineer.

scholarly journals Correlations between island (in)sensitivity and base positions of (non-)standard wh-in-situ

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 806
Author(s):  
Okgi Kim ◽  
Seulkee Park
Keyword(s):  
Categorial Status

It has been well-accepted in the literature that the island (in)sensitivity of wh-in-situ falls under the so-called Noun versus Adverb Generalization (NAG), which states that an in-situ wh-phrase is island-free iff it is (or contains) a wh-nominal (Tsai 1994a,b; Stepanov & Tsai 2008; Fujii et al. 2014). However, we show that the NAG is not sufficient to explain the island behaviors of some (non-)standard in-situ wh-phrases in Korean. Alternatively, we suggest that the island (in)sensitivity of in-situ wh-phrases may correlate not with their categorial status but with their base-generated positions: specifically, we assume that an in-situ wh-phrase that is base-generated in the CP domain (Spec-CP) is island-sensitive, while an in-situ wh-phrase that is base-generated below CP/TP is island-insensitive.

Bare Infinitives in Alemannic and the Categorial Status of Infinitival Complements

2006 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 203-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Brandner
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Comparison ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Southern Germany ◽  
Clausal Structure ◽  
Categorial Status ◽  
Infinitival Complements ◽  
And Function

This article deals mainly with the distribution and function of the infinitival marker in Standard German and in Alemannic, a dialect spoken in Southern Germany.* At first sight both form and distribution differ in these two variants to a great extent. The most important difference is that Alemannic generally lacks the infinitival marker zu (to in English, te in Dutch) in the environments where it occurs in SG. Instead, bare infinitives are used to a much greater extent than in SG. A detailed comparison shows how these Alemannic data can shed some new light on SG infinitival constructions — which are notoriously hard to analyze, especially the use of zu. It will turn out that zu plays hardly any syntactic role in restructuring contexts and is thus best accounted for in the word formation component rather than in the syntax. Another important issue to be discussed is extraposition. As will be shown below, extraposition is a much more widely used option in Alemannic than in SG — nevertheless, the Alemannic constructions show mono-clausal, i.e. coherent properties. I will argue that extraposition should not be taken as an indication for a bi-clausal structure — as it is done traditionally — but rather that the preferred intraposed order in SG should be analyzed in terms of a PF “flip-operation”. The attested variation between SG and Alemannic will thus turn out to be merely variation on the surface. But there are constructions where both variants differ more profoundly, namely in the context of propositional verbs. These differences will be traced back to the existence of a second kind of zu — existing only in SG — that can indeed license a full CP.

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