Syntax of the Hittite infinitive

The paper reevaluates the evidence for dative case marking of the direct object of the infinitive in Hittite against the Indo-European and cross-linguistic background. It provides a full corpus of relevant examples in Hittite, suggests a new taxonomy of them and proposes that a syntactic rule has to be formulated to account for the non-finite contexts where dative case marks the direct object of the infinitive in Hittite.

Sequence of optional tense

In English, sentences containing a past tense in the complement clause of a past-marked propositional attitude predicate (e.g, John said Mary was sick) are ambiguous between a simultaneous and a back-shifted reading, in a phenomenon known as Sequence of Tense. In languages like Japanese, only a shifted reading is available for such past-under-past sentences. Two families of theories have been proposed in the literature to account for this variation: structural and pragmatic. Structural accounts rely on a syntactic rule or licensing condition to derive simultaneous readings of embedded clauses. Pragmatic accounts rely on competition between past and present tense in embedded clauses to derive the readings. In this paper, I provide new data from Washo, an optional tense language, to weigh in on these theories. In Washo, both tensed and (past-oriented) tenseless embedded clauses can have simultaneous and back-shifted readings. I argue that structural approaches can account for the Washo generalizations fairly straightforwardly, while pragmatic approaches encounter difficulties. The result is that the distribution of simultaneous readings cross-linguistically is more fruitfully viewed as a syntactic phenomenon rather than a pragmatic one.

ADJECTIVE SEQUENCING IN GA

The use of multiple words to describe nouns is a common phenomenon in language and languages that have adjectives employ this word class.Ga, a Kwa language of the Niger Congo, branch is no exception, whereas languages without adjectives may use other lexical categories like nouns and verbs which play the adjectival role. Ga has adjectives and employs them as attributives for nouns. The paper examines the syntactic rule governing the occurence of several adjectives serving as attibtutes of a single head noun. In this paper the noun is considered as the head of the Ga Nominal Phrase. The order of these adjectives has not received scholarly attention in Ga and this is to fill that gap in the literature. I argued that the order of adjectives is not haphazardly arranged but follows a laid down syntactc prescription. For instance the data showed that Dimension adjectives normall occur in first position, whereas colour adjectives occur further from the head noun. It was also revealed that in the ordering of adjectives in which Value adjectives is included, the Age adjective occurs in last position and Value adjective occurs first or last when included in the ordering of adjectives for a noun. Consequently, it is opined that defying the arrangement in the ordering of the adjectives resulted in unacceptable forms.The adjectives are grouped according to Dixon semantic classes. Data is gathered from native speakers of Ga. The findings contribute to the existing literature on adjective sequencing in Ghanaian languages.

The ‘Word’ in Polysynthetic Languages

Polysynthesis presupposes the existence of ‘words’, a domain or unit of phonology and syntax that is extremely variable within and across languages: what behaves as a ‘word’ with respect to one phonological or syntactic rule or constraint may not behave as such with respect to other rules or constraints. Here we develop a system of variables that allows cataloguing all verb-based domains in a language in a bottom-up fashion and then determining any potential convergence of domains in an empirical way. We apply the system to case studies of Mapudungun and Chintang. These confirm earlier observations that polysynthetic languages do not operate with unified units of type ‘word’ in either phonology or syntax.