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.

The ‘of’ word

This chapter explores from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives the categorial status of words like English of and equivalent items in other languages. It evaluates, and ultimately comes down in favour of, the arguments for continuing to treat such items as prepositions and heads of PP even when they have lost independent semantic content and serve instead a purely grammatical function. This analysis is contrasted both with the proposal to assign them to the functional category K(ase), as favoured within current nanosyntactic work, and with an account in which they retain prepositional status but as non-projecting members of that class. In broader theoretical terms, the chapter argues that one of the benefits of LFG’s parallel architecture is the consequential economy in its postulated inventory of functional categories.

The Passive Construction in Chinese

Central to the passive construction in Chinese is the categorial status of the passive marker bei and the syntactic nature of passivization. In this respect, different analyses have been proposed in the literature. The passive marker bei is argued to be a preposition, a verb, or a passivization morpheme. Accordingly, some scholars propose analysis of Chinese bei-passives as non-canonical passives, which are different from the be-passive in English. By contrast, others argue differently and think English be-passivization in terms of unaccusativization also applies to Chinese bei-passives, and the only difference between Chinese and English is that the passivization domain for Chinese is the whole verb phrase while that for English is the verb only. In the article, we will review different proposals on the bei-passive in Chinese by examining their crucial arguments and identifying their potential problems.

La grammaticalizzazione dell’it. fa

It. fa ‘ago’ represents a rare case of grammaticalization of a finite verbal form and a typical example of what we call ‘preadaptive change’. Its present categorical status, however, is an object of dispute between the different approaches of historical and theoretical linguistics: on the one hand fa is considered an adverbial, on the other hand a postposition, becoming a sort of test of the explanatory power of both the approaches. After a reconsideration of the data throughout the history of Italian and a scrutiny of the literature, we come to the conclusion that in the case of a grammaticalization process both the structural features and the inherited properties are necessary to assign the categorial status and in the case in question converge towards the adverbial function.

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

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.

Licensing Negative Polarity Items

This chapter concerns the role that syntax plays in licensing NPIs (negative polarity items). Scholars have argued for a semantic approach to characterizing the unifying properties of the wide range of licensors, such as negation, disjunction, interrogation, and subjunctives, licensors that all share the semantic notion of nonveridicality. The author extends this approach to Arabic NPIs in this chapter but also argues that syntax is heavily involved in licensing these items. In particular, the role of the categorial status, syntactic configurations, and syntactic processes such as movement in licensing NPIs are discussed. The author argues for a unified analysis with a minimal set of basic syntactic operations such as Merge and Move, and licensing configurations of c-command and Spec-Head (specifier-head). The analysis captures the true nature of perceived mutual exclusivity between NPIs and the enclitic negative marker as an epiphenomenon of the availability of multiple loci for negation.

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

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.

Aristotle’s Disturbing Relatives

In Categories 7, Aristotle gives two different accounts of relatives, and presents the principle of cognitive symmetry, which seems to help distinguish between relatives and some secondary substances. I suggest that the long-disputed difference between the two accounts lies in a difference in the determination of the categorial status of the object in question, and I formulate the principle of cognitive symmetry such that it plays a crucial role in making explicit how one conceptualizes the categorial status of the object. I then set out some consequences following from this understanding for certain interpretive issues, such as the unity of the Categories.

Existential and Locative Constructions in the Romance Languages

Existential and locative constructions form an interesting cluster of copular structures in Romance. They are clearly related, and yet there are theoretical reasons to keep them apart. In-depth analysis of the Romance languages lends empirical support to their differentiation. In semantic terms, existentials express propositions about existence or presence in an implicit contextual domain, whereas locatives express propositions about the location of an entity. In terms of information structure, existentials are typically all new or broad focus constructions. Locatives are normally characterized by focus on the location, although this can also be a presupposed topic. Romance existentials are formed with a copula and a postcopular phrase (the pivot). A wide range of variation is found in copula selection, copula-pivot agreement, expletive subjects, the presence and function of an etymologically locative precopular proform, and, finally, the categorial status of the pivot, which is normally a noun phrase, but can also be an adjective (Calabrian, Sicilian). As for Romance locatives, a distinction must be drawn between, on the one hand, a construction with canonical SV order and S-V agreement and, on the other hand, another construction, with VS order and, in some languages, lack of V-S agreement. This latter structure has been named inverse locative. Both existentials and locatives have a nonverbal predicate: the locative phrase in locatives and the postcopular noun or adjectival phrase in existentials. In locatives the predicate selects a thematic argument (i.e., an argument endowed with a thematic role), which serves as the syntactic subject, exception being made for inverse locatives in some languages. Contrastingly, in existentials, there is no thematic argument. In some languages the copula turns to the pivot for agreement, as this is the only overt noun phrase endowed with person and number features (Italian, Friulian, Romanian, etc.). In other languages this non-canonical agreement is not licensed (French, some Calabrian dialects, Brazilian Portuguese, etc.). In others still (Spanish, Sardinian, European Portuguese, Catalan, Gallo-Italian, etc.), it is only admitted with pivot classes that can be defined in terms of specificity. When the copula does not agree with the pivot, an expletive subject form may figure in precopular position. The cross-linguistic variation in copula-pivot agreement has been claimed to depend on language-specific constraints on subjecthood. Highly specific pivots are only admitted in contextualized existentials, which express a proposition about the presence of an individual or an entity in a given and salient context. These existentials are found in all the Romance languages and would seem to defy the semantico-pragmatic constraints on the pivot that are widely known as Definiteness Effects.