Quoi-sluices in French

Sluicing has traditionally been analyzed as an operation involving wh-movement and deletion (Merchant 2001). French is a language that has both fronted and wh-in situ strategies; on the surface, however, it seems that French sluices do not involve (overt) movement, in spite of this being an available option. For nearly all wh-words, the in situ and moved forms are the same; the exception is que/quoi ‘what’— que is found in fronted wh-questions alone, while quoi is found in situ. In sluicing, only quoi surfaces, suggesting that French may be a challenge for the movement-and-deletion approach (Dagnac 2019). By formalizing an analysis within a late insertion approach to the syntax-morphology interface, I argue that not only do sluices in French involve full structure, but that they involve movement as well. I assume that the wh-word is initially represented in the syntactic derivation as an abstract feature bundle. The morphological form is determined in the mapping of syntax to morphology by locality-dependent Vocabulary Insertion (VI) rules that are sensitive to C. These rules apply only after ellipsis occurs. Following Thoms (2010), I argue that C is targeted in sluicing, and as a result destroys the context that would trigger que. This analysis is able to capture sluicing in French, while explaining the behavior of quoi more generally.

Active participles in Jordanian Arabic

This study examines the categorial status, syntactic derivation, and tense of active participles in an urban variety of Jordanian Arabic. It is shown that unlike in other Arabic varieties, active participles in Jordanian Arabic fall into three distinct categories (namely, nominal, adjectival, and verbal) with respect to their morphophonological, syntactic and semantic structures. Moreover, it is argued that active participles are not lexically underspecified or homophonous, but are rather derived distinctively in the syntax. This study also explores tense in active participle clauses. Verbless clauses with adjectival and nominal active participles as the only predicates solely project present tense; a past or future tense is available only if a copula is involved. In contrast, clauses with verbal active participles, which are morphologically unmarked for tense, are shown to license temporal adverbs of different time references. It is argued that such clauses project a covert agreement tense whose time frame is established by time adverbs.

Resultatives and low depictives in English

We argue against a purely semantic account of the Unique Path Constraint (Goldberg, Adele. 1991. It can’t go down the chimney up: Paths and the English resultative. In Proceedings of the seventeenth annual meeting of the Berkeley, 368–378. Linguistics Society), i.e., the constraint that there can only be one result state in a single clause, and in favor of a syntactic restriction regarding event structure. We propose, following Mateu, Jaume & Víctor Acedo-Matellán. 2012. The manner/result complementarity revisited: A syntactic approach. In M. Cristina Cuervo & Yves Roberge (eds.), The end of argument structure? Syntax and semantics, 209–228. New York: Academic Press, that structurally there can only be one result predicate per clause since the little v head selects for one result predicate as its complement. In order to make our claim, we provide novel data that violate the Unique Path Constraint defined as a semantic constraint. Further, we analyze examples that at first blush pose a problem for the present account as they appear to involve two result phrases, e.g., shot him dead off the horse. We argue, however, that the second result phrase is not syntactically a result, but rather constitutes a case of what Acedo-Matellán, Víctor, Josep Ausensi, Josep Maria Fontana & Cristina Real-Puigdollers. forthcoming. Old Spanish resultatives as low depictives. In Chad L. Howe, Timothy Gupton, Margaret Renwick & Pilar Chamorro (eds.), Open romance linguistics 1. Selected papers from the 49th linguistic symposium on romance languages. Berlin: Language Science Press have called low depictives, which join the syntactic derivation through a low applicative head.

Function words and polarity

Function words are commonly considered to be a small and closed class of words in which each element is associated with a specific and fixed logical meaning. Unfortunately, this is not always true as witnessed by negation: on the one hand, negation does reverse the truth-value conditions of a proposition, and the other hand, it does not, realizing what is called Expletive Negation. This chapter aims to investigate whether a word that is established on the basis of its function can be ambiguous by discussing the role of the syntactic derivation in some instances of so-called Expletive Negation clauses, a case in which negation seems to lose its capacity to deny the proposition associated with its sentence. Both a theoretical and an experimental approach has been adopted.

Cyclic Selection: Auxiliaries Are Merged, Not Inserted

Traditional approaches to verbal periphrasis (compound tenses) treat auxiliary verbs as lexical items that enter syntactic derivation like any other lexical item, i.e. via Selection/Merge. An alternative view that has received much attention in recent years is that auxiliary verbs are not base-generated but rather inserted in a previously built structure (i.a. Bach 1967; Embick 2000; Arregi 2000; Cowper 2010; Bjorkman 2011; Arregi and Klecha 2015). Arguments for the insertion approach to auxiliaries include their last-resort distribution and the fact that, in many languages, auxiliaries are not systematically associated with a given inflectional category (the "overflow" distribution discussed in Bjorkman 2011). In this paper, I argue against the insertion approach. First, I demonstrate that the overflow pattern and last-resort distribution follow from Cyclic Selection (Pietraszko 2017)—a Merge-counterpart of Cyclic Agree (Béjar and Rezac 2009). And second, I show that the insertion approach makes wrong predictions about compound tenses in Swahili, a language with overflow periphrasis. Under the approach advocated here, an auxiliary verb is a verbal head externally merged as a specifier of a functional head, such as T. It then undergoes m-merger with that head, instantiating an external-merge version of Matushansky’s (2006) conception of head movement.

One more time about syntactic derivation (addressing the issue of syntactic and communicative-textual causality)

The study deals with the difficulty in identifying the relations between word formation on the one hand and syntax in its broad sense (i. e. including text as a linguistic unit) on the other. The paper focuses on the semantics and grammatical properties of verbs derived from adjectives (cf.: красный / red – краснеть / to redden, толстый / thick – толстеть / to thicken and others). The aim is to describe the correlation between the systemic grammatical properties and the functional-textual potential of such verbs on the basis of the available existing literature on denominal verbs with the semantics of property change. The research will help to redefine the understanding of syntactic derivation. The functional-semantic approach proposed by G. A. Zolotova is employed to examine verb vocabulary.

Nouns Formed with -ism Suffix as a Type of Nominalization in Modern Russian Language

In the article Russian nouns formed with -ism suffix, often containing borrowed roots from other Indo-European languages, are analyzed from the perspective of their syntactic function as nominalization. As nominalization regarded in linguistics as a type of pure syntactic transformation (or “syntactic derivation” according to the definition of Jerzy Kuryłowicz), the -ost’ suffix as a word-formational formant for syntactic derivation is well acknowledged and described. As a contrast, the studied group of nouns with -ism suffix is seldom associated with or regarded as deadjectival nominals in previous works and dictionaries. Our analysis based on explanatory and morpheme dictionaries has shown, the motivational correlation between nouns with -ism suffix and adjectives are described in multiple ways, often contrasted one another. For instance, -isms are described in the morpheme dictionary (Lopantin, Ulukhanov 2016) as deadjectival nouns, while in the Shvedova dictionary as non-derivatives, motivating adjectives of quality. In addition, the seme ‘quality’ is also described variously in the two dictionaries – directly or using synonyms with different formants. The analysis of word-usages of -isms was conducted with the corpus “Russian Newspapers of the End of the XX Century”, developed by the Laboratory for General and Computational Lexicology and Lexicography (Lomonosov Moscow State University). The analysis has shown that the diagnostic context automatically differentiate the usage of -isms as nominalizations are the dependent names of the “feature carrier”, which as a result of nominalization has been moved from the position of subject to a dependent attribute.

On Middle applicatives

The Mandarin bǎ-construction has been one of the most well studied subjects in Chinese grammar. Although the previous studies have achieved some exciting results, the exact nature of bǎ and the syntactic derivation of the bǎ-construction remain largely controversial. The current paper constitutes an attempt to clarify the two issues under the minimalist framework. In particular, while keeping in line with the little v analysis of bǎ proposed by Sybesma 1999; Lin 2001 among others, I argue that there is a Middle applicative projection (an affected applicative) between V and v; the bǎ-NP is formed by a movement of VP-internal arguments to Spec.ApplPmid, which can optionally be occupied by gěi, and it gets an accusative Case from bǎ in v. With this analysis, we can better account for the core syntactic and semantic properties of bǎ-constructions. Furthermore, I will show that the proposed applicative approach has some interesting consequences for Taiwanese ka-constructions, a near counterpart of Mandarin bǎ-constructions. Finally, I will compare bǎ-constructions to languages with differential object marking in arguing that Mandarin uses a special strategy – light verb marking to mark the specific/affected objects.

Mediating functions and the semantics of noun incorporation

Noun incorporation is commonly thought to avoid the weak compositionality of compounds because it involves conjunction of an argument noun with the incorporating verb. However, it is weakly compositional in two ways. First, the noun’s entity argument needs to be bound or saturated, but previous accounts fail to adequately ensure that it is. Second, non-arguments are often incorporated in many languages, and their thematic role is available for contextual selection.We show that these two weaknesses are actually linked. We focus on the Kiowa language, which generally bars objects from incorporation but allows non-arguments. We show that a mediating relation is required to semantically link the noun to the verb. Absent a relation, the noun’s entity argument is not saturated, and the entire expression is uninterpretable. The mediating relation for non-objects also assigns it a thematic role instead of a postposition. Speakers can choose this role freely, subject to independent constraints from the pragmatics, syntax, and semantics.Objects in Kiowa are in fact allowed to incorporate in certain environments, but we show that these all independently involve a mediating relation. The mediating relation for objects quantifies over the noun and links the noun+verb construction to the rest of the clause. The head that introduces this relation re-categorizes the verb in the syntactic derivation. Essentially, we demonstrate two distinct mechanisms for noun incorporation.Having derived the distribution of Kiowa, we apply the same relations to derive constraints on English complex verbs and synthetic compounds, which exhibit most of the same constraints as Kiowa noun incorporation. We also look at languages with routine object incorporation, and show how the transitivity of the verb depends on whether the "Equation missing" head introducing the external argument assigns case to the re-categorized verb.