I Like This Analysis, but I Don’t Think Every Linguist Will: Syntactic NOT-Transportation, VP Ellipsis and VP Pronominalisation

In this article I consider some recent objections raised against the syntactic treatment of negation in English multiclausal structures, in particular what has been called NEG-raising. I argue that the objections based on pronominalisation and ellipsis presented in the recent literature do pose a problem for syntactic accounts of the mechanisms of so-called NOT-transportation that rely on a rule of leftwards movement, as is customary in generative grammar. However, there is an alternative syntactic treatment that assumes that negation originates as a higher predicate and is subject to a rule of lowering. I show that a syntactic theory of NOT-transportation is tenable and accounts for the problematic data if NEG-raising is replaced, in the analysis of the cases considered here, by a rule of NEG-lowering.

Third Factors in Language Variation and Change

In this pioneering study, a world-renowned generative syntactician explores the impact of phenomena known as 'third factors' on syntactic change. Generative syntax has in recent times incorporated third factors – factors not specific to the language faculty – into its framework, including minimal search, labelling, determinacy and economy. Van Gelderen's study applies these principles to language change, arguing that change is a cyclical process, and that third factor principles must combine with linguistic information to fully account for the cyclical development of 'optimal' language structures. Third Factor Principles also account for language variation around that-trace phenomena, CP-deletion, and the presence of expletives and Verb-second. By linking insights from recent theoretical advances in generative syntax to phenomena from language variation and change, this book provides a unique perspective, making it essential reading for academic researchers and students in syntactic theory and historical linguistics.

DP, NP, or neither? Contours of an unresolved debate

Glossa’s Special Collection New perspectives on the NP/DP debate brings together syntactic analyses of various phenomena of complex nominals, shedding light on the central problem of their syntactic category label. In this paper, we survey arguments and analyses offered in the Special Collection, classifying their underlying assumptions and highlighting their relevance to syntactic theory more generally.

Sentence first, arguments after: Mechanisms of morphosyntax acquisition

Natural languages contain complex grammatical patterns. For example, in German, finite verbs occur second in main clauses while non-finite verbs occur last, as in 'dein Bruder möchte in den Zoo gehen' (“Your brother wants to go to the zoo”). Children easily acquire this type of morphosyntactic contingency (Poeppel & Wexler, 1993; Deprez & Pierce, 1994). There is extensive debate in the literature over the nature of children’s linguistic representations, but there are considerably fewer mechanistic ideas about how knowledge is actually acquired. Regarding German, one approach might be to learn the position of prosodically prominent open-class words (“verbs go 2nd or last”) and then fill in the morphological details. Alternatively, one could work in the opposite direction, learning the position of closed-class morphemes (“-te goes 2nd and -en goes last”) and fitting open-class items into the resulting structure. This second approach is counter-intuitive, but I will argue that it is the one learners take.Previous research suggests that learners focus distributional analysis on closed-class items because of their distinctive perceptual properties (Braine, 1963; Morgan, Meier, & Newport, 1987; Shi, Werker & Morgan, 1999; Valian & Coulson, 1988). The Anchoring Hypothesis (Valian & Coulson, 1988) posits that, because these items tend to occur at grammatically important points in the sentence (e.g., phrase edges), focusing on them helps learners acquire grammatical structure. Here I ask how learners use closed-class items to acquire complex morphosyntactic patterns such as the verb form/position contingency in German. Experiments 1-4 refute concerns that morphosyntactic contingencies like those in German are too complex to learn distributionally. Experiments 5-8 explore the mechanisms underlying learning, showing that adults and children analyze closed-class items as predictive of the presence and position of open-class items, but not the reverse. In these experiments, subtle mathematical distinctions in learners’ input had significant effects on learning, illuminating the biased computations underlying anchored distributional analysis. Taken together, results suggest that learners organize knowledge of language patterns relative to a small set of closed-class items—just as patterns are represented in modern syntactic theory (Rizzi & Cinque, 2016).

The Cognitive Foundation of Post-colonial Englishes

Varieties of English are spoken all over the world from Africa to Asia, from Europe to America. In addition to its use as a foreign language, English in many of these countries is a first or second language variety that initially arose in a colonial setting. Currently, the most influential sociolinguistic model for the evolution of these 'Post-Colonial Englishes' is the Dynamic Model. In this Element, I outline how Construction Grammar, the most prominent cognitive syntactic theory, can provide a cognitive foundation for the assumptions made by the Dynamic Model. As I shall argue, Construction Grammar naturally complements the Dynamic Model and, in addition to that, a 'Constructionist Grammar Approach to the Dynamic Model' approach generates new research questions concerning the productivity of syntactic patterns across Dynamic Model phases.

Linguistic Gender in Arabic, a Theoretical and Analytical Study

This study aims to discuss the phenomenon of masculinization and feminization in Arabic. It seeks to explore the syntactic features that distinguish masculinization and feminization; and their reflections on old Arabic dialects and Qur’anic modes of recitation. Moreover, the study examines the social dimension of the phenomenon of masculinization and feminization, and the effect of the linguistic gender on the Arabic sentence structure. Using the descriptive approach, the syntactic theory confirms that a significant distinction exists between the masculine and feminine references in many syntactic categories such as demonstratives, relative pronouns and verbal predicates. Grammarians’ perception of masculinization as a source, and feminization as a subdivision is firmly rooted in the Arabic culture; emanating from the belief that the masculine is the original creature. Grammarians, therefore, posit that the masculine does not need markers, unlike the feminine. Qur’anic modes of recitation differed in dealing with this phenomenon depending on the reference of the pronoun. Grammarians have employed the rule of meaning to make sentences agree with the masculinization and feminization rules.

Variation in mild context-sensitivity

Aravind Joshi famously hypothesized that natural language syntax was characterized (in part) by mildly context-sensitive generative power. Subsequent work in mathematical linguistics over the past three decades has revealed surprising convergences among a wide variety of grammatical formalisms, all of which can be said to be mildly context-sensitive. But this convergence is not absolute. Not all mildly context-sensitive formalisms can generate exactly the same stringsets (i.e. they are not all weakly equivalent), and even when two formalisms can both generate a certain stringset, there might be differences in the structural descriptions they use to do so. It has generally been difficult to find cases where such differences in structural descriptions can be pinpointed in a way that allows linguistic considerations to be brought to bear on choices between formalisms, but in this paper we present one such case. The empirical pattern of interest involves wh-movement dependencies in languages that do not enforce the wh-island constraint. This pattern draws attention to two related dimensions of variation among formalisms: whether structures grow monotonically from one end to another, and whether structure-building operations are conditioned by only a finite amount of derivational state. From this perspective, we show that one class of formalisms generates the crucial empirical pattern using structures that align with mainstream syntactic analysis, and another class can only generate that same string pattern in a linguistically unnatural way. This is particularly interesting given that (i) the structurally-inadequate formalisms are strictly more powerful than the structurally-adequate ones from the perspective of weak generative capacity, and (ii) the formalism based on derivational operations that appear on the surface to align most closely with the mechanisms adopted in contemporary work in syntactic theory (merge and move) are the formalisms that fail to align with the analyses proposed in that work when the phenomenon is considered in full generality.

The Influence of Strip-City Street Network Structure on Spatial Vitality: Case Studies in Lanzhou, China

In the context of China’s recent urbanization, the agglomeration and diffusion of the strip-city spatial network are gradually being reconstructed. The ways in which the street network structure affects the underlying logic of economic and social development is worthy of in-depth consideration. This study takes Lanzhou (a typical strip city in China) as a case study, using dynamic, geographic, big data and spatial syntactic-theory models to explore the influence of street network accessibility and structure on the spatial and temporal distribution of strip-city spatial vitality. We use Hotspot Analysis (Getis-Ord Gi*) to analyze the dispersal characteristics of street space vitality. In addition, the spatial and temporal heterogeneity characteristics and mechanism of the influence of street accessibility on spatial vitality are evaluated using the spatial Durbin model (SDM). The results show that: the temporal and spatial performance of urban vitality on weekdays and weekends conforms to people’s daily activities, offering similar spatial agglomeration and dispersion effects; accessibility and pedestrian-friendly streets have better urban spatial vitality clustering; street network integration significantly affects the reshaping of urban vitality, but there is apparent temporal heterogeneity in the degree of impact.

The unrealized and the unheard

There are numerous well-known cases where syntactic theory has posited a phonologically null, unrealized/unheard morphosyntactic element. Examples include: null subjects, whether in so-called ‘pro-drop’ or as the target of equi control/raising; dropped arguments, as in non-transitive uses of semantically bivalent verbs (e.g., ‘eat’), or dropped operators, as in bare relatives; morphologically zero-marked diathesis, as demonstrated by inchoatives and inchoative-like verbs; and exceptional constituency associated with particular interpretations, as in so-called ‘constructions’, like the ‘way’-construction. This chapter first argues that null morphosyntactic elements are not necessarily precluded by LFG theory, but that they can be dispensed with, since a unified, general theory of the unrealized and the unheard is offered by templates and Glue Semantics.

Pronominal Feature Re-assembly: L1 and L2 Pronoun Resolution of Spanish Epicene and Common Gender Antecedents

In this paper, we propose the implementation of a full-fledged feature-based lexicalist syntactic theory as a way to represent the possible configurations of features in the learner’s interlanguage and formalize a theory of acquisition based in feature reassembly. We describe gender agreement pronominal coindexation in Spanish using Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and use it to analyze the results of a self-paced reading test with L1 and L2 speakers. We find that the specification of the gender feature value at the syntactic level in epicene antecedents facilitates pronominal resolution in L1 Spanish speakers. Conversely, there is a cognitive cost when the gender feature is underspecified at the syntactic level in common gender antecedents; this cost is not found among L2 speakers. The detailed descriptions in terms of feature specification in the HPSG framework allow us to observe differences between the L1 and L2 grammars in fine-grained detail and represent optionality at the lexical level.