Marking Mirativity in Syntax: Minimalsit Mechanisms

This paper offers a generative minimalist investigation to the derivation and interpretation of mirativity information in Central Najdi Arabic (CNA), arguing that grammar of CNA morphologically marks mirativity in syntax by means of the discourse particle wara. Implementing minimalist mechanisms (Chomsky 2001), it is shown that wara instantiates a functional, discoursal projection MrvP in the left periphery of the sentence, articulating the feature [Mrv] at the PF-interface. LF-interface analyses demonstrate that [Mrv] on wara is interpretable/valued, while the counterpart on the subject DP that wara marks is uninterpretable/unvalued. Agree between wara and the subject DP creates a PF-chain wara>SubjectClitic>SubjectDP that results in the subject DP being marked with and interpreted mirativity at LF-interface. Further explorations show that movement of the subject DP across wara is only legitimised if the subject DP has a discourse, information structural feature beyond [Mrv]. Evidence for this claim comes from the fact that when wara marks the subject DP with mirativity, the subject DP remains in situ. Thus, on minimalist empirical groundings, movement is argued to be motivated by interpretive reasons beyond mirativity. Further analyses show that Agree between wara and subject is of mutual manner; wara u-[φ]-probes the subject goal, while the goal seeks valuation of u-[Mrv] on it (Alshamari 2017).

Finnish word order: Does comprehension matter?

Finnish word order is relatively free, making room for all mathematically possible word orders in many constructions. Because there is no evidence in this language for radical nonconfigurationality, explanations must be sought from syntax. It is argued in this article that morphosyntax and word order represent syntactic structure at the PF-interface. Rich morphosyntax frees word order, poor morphosyntax freezes it. The hypothesis is formalized within the context of a parsing-oriented theory of the human language faculty (UG) combining left-to-right minimalism with the dynamic syntax approach. The analysis was implemented as an algorithm and successfully tested with a corpus of 119,800 unique Finnish word orders.

Constraining Head-Stranding Ellipsis

Ellipsis of a constituent whose head has moved out of it (“headless ellipsis”) is possible in some cases but not in others. Headless ellipsis is licensed only if the stranded head has not crossed a Spell-Out domain. The reason is that the silencing instruction responsible for ellipsis must be PF-visible on the head of the elided constituent, and PF-visibility is cut off at Spell-Out domain boundaries. A parallel effect is observed with remnants of head movement that are frozen for movement (“headless movement”). The two effects can possibly be united if ellipsis and copy deletion recruit the same silencing instruction at PF, hosted on the head of the deleted constituent. A third, mirror-image effect is observed with reprise fragments, which must be visibly headed. This time head movement removes the PF instruction that spares these fragments from ellipsis. Overall, these phenomena establish the significance of headedness for the syntax-PF interface.

Labeling for linearization

The primary goal of the present paper is to argue for the hypothesis that labeling is required for linearization, which is called Labeling for Linearization (LfL). To achieve this goal, it is first argued that labels are not necessary for semantic interpretation. It is then proposed that labels are necessary for linearization at the PF-interface in that they serve as a device to encode structural asymmetries that are employed to determine precedence relations, which are asymmetric as well. It is also shown that LfL can remove several problems of the original labeling framework. Building on the idea that Spell-Out applies to the whole phase but not its subpart, it is illustrated that the LfL-based analysis can solve the problem concerning the variable ways of applying Spell-Out, which arises in the standard phase theory. Extending the LfL-based framework to Japanese, a novel analysis of particle-stranding ellipsis is also proposed. Incorporating some insights of recent approaches that particle-stranding ellipsis arises through a PF-deletion process, it is shown that the proposed analysis based on LfL offers a theoretically more suitable characterization of the PF-deletion process. In this way, the present article contributes to not only sharpening the core theoretical notions regarding structure building and linearization in terms of labeling but also deepening our understanding of the structure of Japanese.

Constraining long-distance allomorphy

This paper presents a cross-linguistic survey of non-local allomorphy and it develops a formal model that accounts for the observed patterns. The distance between the trigger and target of allomorphy in non-local patterns is much more conservative than expected. A model of Vocabulary Insertion is developed, where the limited distance follows from the basic linear computational properties of the PF-interface.

Parameter Preservation at the Syntax-PF Interface: The Ba Construction Revisited

In this paper, I argue for an analysis that treats the ba construction in Chinese as a case of shape preservation-induced movement structure. Specifically, the robust preverbal adverbial and PP expressions and the mandatory ba-DP movement in ditransitive structures are both derived from a violable head directionality macroparameter under the Symmetrical Syntax Hypothesis, which allows directionality parameters to examine word order throughout the derivation. In addition to being able to capture the parallel syntactic properties of Scandinavian object shift, this account receives further empirical support from word order facts of Archaic Chinese and Bambara.

German V2 and the PF-Interface: Evidence from Dialects

This investigation of certain verb-second structures found in the German dialects Kiezdeutsch, Yiddish (both Eastern and Western), Bavarian, and Cimbrian, and to a more limited extent in colloquial German, leads to the hypothesis that Phonological Form, via the interface with the narrow syntax, provides three strategies for compliance with the verb-second restriction on main clauses. These are i) the remapping of two syntactic constituents into a single prosodic phrase, ii) the reduction and remapping of two or more words into a single prosodic word, and iii) the prosodic marking of the syntactic edge of a main clause where a restart of the clause occurs. The investigation, using minimalist tools, underscores the central role of the syntax-phonology interface without eliminating the need for the semantic interface in the derivation of German verb-second structures.*

Clitic metathesis in the Friulian dialect of Forni di Sotto

In this article we entertain the hypothesis that cliticization involves a rule of m-merge, which brackets a functional head with another constituent under linear adjacency to build a structure legible at the PF interface. We therefore argue for a division of labour between syntax and morphology in the spirit of Halle and Marantz (1993), although we depart from their model in rejecting a single post-syntactic Morphological Component, and instead assume that syntactic derivation and morphological operations such as m-merge are cyclically interleaved. In the first part of the article, we focus on the behaviour of clitics in contexts of V-to-C movement. As object clitics and negation are pied-piped by the verb to C, crossing the position of subject clitics, we argue that subject clitics are m-merged after V-to-C movement. The second part of the article deals with some puzzling permutations affecting the order of clitic elements. In particular, we focus on the Friulian dialect of Forni di Sotto (Manzini & Savoia 2005, 2009) to show that such permutations are due to morphological rules of fission and metathesis operating after m-merge. We therefore claim that the Forni pattern provides further evidence for syntactically void operations taking place at the Syntax/PF interface.