The Grammar of PP-like Free Relatives: Evidence from Subordinate wo-Clauses in German

This paper addresses the grammar of PP-like free relatives (= PP-FRs) such as the locative clause in Bello schläft, wo Grace schläft ‘Bello is sleeping where Grace is sleeping’. The most prominent compositional analysis of PP-FRs is developed by Caponigro (2004), Caponigro and Pearl (2009), and Hall and Caponigro (2010). They derive PP-FRs from a stacked CP-structure that is based on silent prepositions and a nominal treatment of wh-words such as where. I first take issue with this analysis by means of a detailed discussion of subordinate clauses introduced by wo ‘where’ in German. Specifically, I show that wo-clauses do not involve silent prepositions, and that both wo and wo-clauses have a prepositional instead of a nominal nature. Second, I sketch a surface-oriented alternative approach to PP-FRs that dispenses with silent prepositions and assigns the prepositional nature of PP-like wh-words a key role in the derivation. Specifically, I propose that the fronting of PP-like wh-words in free relatives licenses an abstraction over predicates (instead of entities) and a corresponding type shifting. The new analysis is related to analyses of corresponding subordinate headed relative and interrogative clauses. Furthermore, it is confronted with potential general constraints on higher-order abstraction as argued for, in particular, by Poole (2017).

Definiteness, Uniqueness, and Maximality in Languages With and Without Articles

We present a number of experiments testing influential hypotheses about the meaning of definite descriptions (in languages with articles, represented here by German) and bare nominals (in articleless languages, represented here by Russian). Our results are in line with the commonly entertained hypothesis that definite descriptions convey uniqueness (if singular) or maximality (if plural), but fail to support two hypotheses about bare nominal interpretation, namely that singular bare nominals convey uniqueness ( Dayal 2004) and that topical bare nominals convey uniqueness/maximality ( Geist 2010, among many others). Uniqueness or maximality inferences are expected to arise via covert type-shifting under these approaches. Our results are compatible with what we take to be the null hypothesis, namely that bare nominals in articleless languages are existential and free of presuppositional semantics, even if they correspond—in their use—to definite descriptions ( Heim 2011).

Aspects of Aspect: Phasic and Episodic Dimensions of Verbs

The present study sets out to analyze aspectuality and coercion in Persian from a new perspective. With regard to the transcendental aspectual distinction between perfectivity, characterized by boundedness and heterogeneity, and imperfectivity, specified by uniformity and homogeneity (Langacker, 2008), it is argued that the heterogeneity of verbs may be assessed according to their phasic and episodic variables. In other words, in contrast to homogeneous verbs, which lack any kind of boundedness, heterogeneous verbs may occur either in a bounded phasic domain or in a bounded episodic domain. Concerning phasic-episodic features, this study presents a new model of lexical aspect that can differentiate five aspectual categories. The paper also scrutinizes the combinations of different verbs with different sentential operators in order to explain various kinds of type-shifting triggered by different operators. Thereby, two procedures of phasic coercion and episodic coercion are introduced which are responsible for modifying the phasic and episodic features of verbs in order to resolve the semantic conflicts between verbs and sentential operators. These procedures modify the phasic/episodic attributes of verbs according to the viewing frames evoked by interpretative operators.

pro as a Minimal nP: Toward a Unified Approach to Pro-Drop

In this article, I examine the properties of the partial null subject languages (NSLs) when compared with the consistent and the discourse pro-drop languages and argue that the same basic mechanism underlies pro-drop in partial as well as discourse pro-drop: namely, null NP anaphora, as originally proposed in Tomioka 2003 for discourse pro-drop. The two sets of languages show a correlation between the occurrence of null arguments and the availability of a bare nominal in argument position. I suggest that the null element is a default, minimally specified nominal—the same item that arguably appears as a complement of D in pronouns. It is a proform that minimally consists of the categorizing head n, lacking a root, the meaning of which is ‘entity’ (a property that is trivially true of any individual in the domain). nP introduces a variable that may be bound under Existential Closure, yielding the impersonal interpretation; otherwise, its denotation is type-shifted to an individual (ɩ) under the appropriate conditions. The crosslinguistic differences found in the interpretation of the null subject depend on the resources available in particular languages for application of ɩ type-shifting: the (bare NP) languages that lack such resources only have quasi-argumental and impersonal null subjects (semi pro-drop languages). Finally, I show that the idea that pro reduces to [nP e] can also be successfully extended to the consistent NSLs, provided it is assumed that, in this type of NSL, the head bearing agreement morphology bears a D-feature and interpretable ϕ-features.

Topic Strategies and the Internal Structure of Nominal Arguments in Greek and Italian

In this article, we argue that a set of unexpected contrasts in the interpretation of clitic-left-dislocated indefinites in Greek and Italian derive from structural variation in the nominal syntax of the two languages. Greek resists nonreferential indefinites in clitic left-dislocation, resorting to the topicalization of an often bare noun for nonreferential topics. By contrast, clitic left-dislocation is employed in Italian for topics regardless of their definite/indefinite interpretation. We argue that this contrast is directly linked to the wide availability of bare nouns in Greek, which stems from a structural difference in the nominal syntax of the two languages. In particular, we hypothesize that Greek nominal arguments lack a D layer. Rather, they are Number Phrases. We situate this analysis in the context of Chierchia’s (1998) typology of nominals. We argue that, on a par with Italian nouns, Greek nouns are [−arg, +pred]. However, they do not employ a syntactic head (D) for type-shifting to e . Rather, they resort to covert type-shifting, a hypothesis that is necessary to account for the distribution and interpretations of bare nouns in Greek, vis-à-vis other [−arg, +pred] languages like Italian and French.

Inconsistencies of the Consistency test

The Consistency test from Dayal 2004—inspired by Löbner’s (1985) logical property of Consistency—has been used to distinguish between demonstratives and definite determiners in a language, particularly in a type-shifting analysis of bare nouns following Chierchia 1998 and Dayal 2004. This paper looks at three classifier languages, Nuosu Yi (Jiang 2018), Thai (Jenks 2015), and Shan (Moroney 2018) and examines the use of the Consistency test in the study of N/DP syntax and semantics. While the Consistency test can identify demonstratives from their ability to shift reference using deixis, it cannot identify when a nominal expression ‘counts’ as a definite determiner.