Serialization in Complex Predicates in MalakMalak

<p>While complex verbs are well attested in Australian languages and elsewhere, in MalakMalak two systems of multi-verb constructions combine in a typologically rare setup: First, complex predicates consist of an uninflecting open-classed coverb and an inflecting verb (IV) of a closed class of six. Second, coverbs combine in serial constructions as part of a complex predicate with up to four coverbs encoding multiple or single events. This overlap provides a unique opportunity to examine shared and distinctive features. I argue for an analysis of MalakMalak’s complex predicates’ argument structure in terms of argument unification (Bowern 2010) of coverb and IV. </p>

Syntactic categories informing variationist analysis: The case of English copy-raising

<p>This paper re-examines variation between the comparative complementizers (AS IF, AS THOUGH, LIKE, THAT, and Ø) that follow verbs denoting ostensibility (SEEM, APPEAR, LOOK, SOUND, and FEEL) in the large city of Toronto, Canada. Given that younger speakers appear to be using more of these structures in the first place, I evaluate the hypothesis that there is a trade-off in apparent time between these finite structures and the non-finite construction of Subject-to-Subject raising. Focusing on the verb SEEM, I find that the non-finite structures are losing ground in apparent time to the finite ones. I subsequently address the issue of how best to divide up the finite tokens as co-variants opposite the finite constructions, and find that a split according to syntactic properties – whether or not the copy-raising transformation is permitted – tidily accounts for the patterning and reveals a straightforward change in progress. The results reaffirm the value of using variationist methodology to test competing claims, and also establish that variation can behave in a classic way even among whole syntactic categories.</p>

Improving juror comprehension: reading while listening

<p><strong>see attached pdf. [charts don't paste properly into this box]</strong></p>

Are phonological features of roots in syntax? Evidence from Guébie

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>Based on original field data, I demonstrate that in Guébie (Kru, Niger-Congo), third person pronouns </span><span>phonologically </span><span>resemble their antecedents. This system, along with other phonologically determined agreement systems, pose problems for our traditional Y-model of grammar, which assumes that phonological features are not present in the syntax (cf. DM, Marantz 1995), thus morphosyntactic processes like agreement should not be able to access phonological features. </span></p><p><span>Here I address the question of whether phonologically determined agreement systems can be modeled without requiring syntax to be sensitive to phonological features. To do this I argue that pronouns select for an NP complement (cf. Elbourne 2001), where the pronoun enters into an agree relation with its NP complement. When spelled out, the morphologically agreeing heads must be phonologically similar, and this overt agreement licenses ellipsis of the NP. </span></p></div></div></div>

The emphatic interpretation of English verb-phrase preposing

<p class="p1">This paper examines the emphatic interpretation associated with English verb-phrase preposing (VPP). Two main conclusions emerge. First, the emphatic interpretation is not an idiosyncratic property of VPP. Second, the interpretation is triggered not by any property of VPP, but rather by repetition of a lexical verb with a particular intonational contour.</p>

A unified treatment of the exceptions to the Agent/ECM Correlation

<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT';">Based on the contrast between the </span><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-style: italic;">believe-class </span><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT';">and the </span><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-style: italic;">wager-class </span><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT';">verbs, Pesetsky (1992) makes a generalization that agentive verbs do not allow ECM (the Agent/ECM Correlation). <span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT';">However, he notes two classes of exceptions to the generalization.</span> I argue that the two classes of exceptions can be uniformly treated as causatives and that the Agent/ECM Correlation can be seen as an instance of the broader l-syntax finding that “not all internal arguments are created equal”–with agentive activity verbs the root selects an internal argument, but not with change-of-state verbs (Basilico 1998, Hale and Keyser 2002, Alexiadou and Schäfer 2011, Cuervo 2014). </span></p><p> </p>

Swedish relative clauses as weak island

<p>Some recent accounts of relative clause extraction (RCE) in Swedish assume that clauses that allow extraction do not themselves involve A-bar dependencies, and that RCE is possible only from subject relatives (e.g. Kush et al. 2013). I present evidence that Swedish allows A-bar movement from non-subject RCs as well. But not just any type of phrase can be extracted. For example, certain non-argument wh-phrases cannot move out. This means that Swedish RCs are weak, rather than strong islands (cf. Szabolcsi 2006). Szabolcsi takes an algebraic approach to weak islands where phrases that denote individuals, which can be collected into sets forming Boolean algebras, can be extracted, whereas phrases that denote non-individuals, which cannot be collected into such sets, cannot. However, it is not obvious how to extend such an approach to Swedish RCs, since they allow extraction of some phrases that denote non-individuals, like ‘how late’, as long as they are linked to the discourse. Instead, I propose that the phrases that can move out of relative clauses carry discourse-related features (DR), and that the C-heads in Swedish RCs attract DR-marked phrases, making them available in later stages of the derivation. </p>

Boundedness of verbal and adjectival predicates in Mandarin

<p dir="ltr"><span>This study extends the boundedness account for </span><span>ba</span><span>-construction in Mandarin to transitive comparatives and hypothesizes that the selection in </span><span>ba</span><span>-construction and transitive comparatives constrained by boundedness, where boundedness can be manifested in terms of telicity of VPs, quantization of internal arguments or measure phrases.</span></p><p dir="ltr">This generalized account shows how formal semantic properties affect syntactic selection and explains some sentences that existing accounts do not. Also, the proposal implicates a homomorphic syntax-semantics mapping across V and A categories, which is superior than category-specific theories.</p><div><span><br /></span></div>

Rescuing Broken Dependency in Korean Fragments

<p>◊ Korean FAs with/without their morphological markers can be captured by ellipsis approach.</p><p>◊ The presence and absence of trouble makers encoded with offending *s determines the acceptability of FAs.</p><p>◊ The proposed analysis extends to the variability of postposition-stranding and a certain asymmetry in island-violating fragments. </p>

Evidence of Language Contact: Source Prepositional Phrases in Taiwanese Southern Min

<p align="center"><strong>Evidence of Language Contact: Data from source Prepositional Phrases in Taiwanese Southern Min </strong></p><p><strong> </strong>This paper presents a new corpus-based study on the distributional pattern of source Prepositional Phrases (source PPs) in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM), as evidence of contact with Austronesian languages. Literature on language contact suggests that while contact-induced changes affect the less powerful/prestigious language, effects also occur in the inverse direction due to imperfect second language acquisition (LaPolla 2001, Chappell 2006). Due to its geographical proximity to the Austronesian language territory, Taiwan serves as a linguistic laboratory for studying language contact. Unlike other Chinese spoken varieties, TSM has contact with Austronesian languages.</p><p><strong>Evidence &amp; Explanation: </strong>A TSM concordance (Iûnn 2003) used as a database, captures the dominant pattern of source PPs, marked by <em>àn</em> ‘from/via’ and <em>tuì/uì</em> ‘from/via/towards’. The preposition <em>àn</em> ‘from/via’ is commonly shared by Southern Min dialects. The source PP <em>àn tó-uī<strong> </strong></em><strong>‘</strong>from/via where’<strong> </strong>either precedes the verb <em>kiânn</em> ‘to go’in (1a), or follows in (1b), with the same interpretation. Despite its flexible order, the <em>àn</em>-phrases display a strong [PP-V] tendency (94% of tokens). The [V-PP] order in (1b), which is not reported historically in any other Southern Min dialect or Sinitic language, is distinctively rare, suggesting possible contact with Austronesian languages.</p><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td rowspan="3" valign="top" width="54"><p>(1a)</p><p> </p><p>(1b)</p></td><td valign="top" width="42"><p>lí</p><p>2sg</p></td><td valign="top" width="120"><p><strong>àn tó-uī </strong></p><p>from/via where</p></td><td valign="top" width="60"><p>kiânn</p><p>go</p></td><td valign="top" width="156"><p> </p><p> </p></td><td valign="top" width="108"><p>lâi/khì ?</p><p>come/go</p></td></tr><tr><td valign="top" width="42"><p>lí</p><p>2sg</p></td><td valign="top" width="120"><p> </p></td><td valign="top" width="60"><p>kiânn</p><p>go</p></td><td valign="top" width="156"><p><strong>àn tó-uī </strong><strong></strong></p><p>from/via where</p></td><td valign="top" width="108"><p>lâi/khì ?</p><p>come/go</p></td></tr><tr><td colspan="5" valign="top" width="486"><p>‘Where are you from/via?’</p></td></tr></tbody></table><p> </p><p> Another preposition, <em>tuì/uì</em> ‘from/via/towards’, dating back to the historical text <em>Li Jing Ji</em> (1566) in Southeast China, has only been observed in TSM. (2a) instantiates a [PP-V] pattern, while (2b) displays a new [V-PP] pattern. <em>Tuì</em>-phrases occur more frequently with [PP-V] order (about 65%), and with [V-PP], the spatial NPs are classified as source in 8% of the instances. (There were not morphological selection properties inherent to the verbs which did not trigger the variation, with different verbs selecting for PP-V and some verb selecting for V-PP).</p><table width="684" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td rowspan="3" valign="top" width="54"><p>(2a)</p><p> </p><p>(2b)</p></td><td valign="top" width="42"><p>lin</p><p>2pl</p></td><td valign="top" width="222"><p><strong>tuì tôo-su-kuán</strong></p><p>from/via/towards library</p></td><td valign="top" width="66"><p>kiânn</p><p>go</p></td><td valign="top" width="204"><p> </p></td><td valign="top" width="96"><p>lâi/khì </p><p>come/go</p></td></tr><tr><td valign="top" width="42"><p>lin</p><p>2pl</p></td><td valign="top" width="222"><p> </p></td><td valign="top" width="66"><p>kiânn</p><p>go</p></td><td valign="top" width="204"><p><strong>tuì tôo-su-kuán</strong></p><p>from/via/towards library </p></td><td valign="top" width="96"><p>lâi/khì </p><p>come/go</p></td></tr><tr><td colspan="5" valign="top" width="630"><p>‘You (pl.) walked from/via/towards the library.’</p></td></tr></tbody></table><p> </p><p> The emergence of this [V-PP] order may be attributed to contact with Austronesian languages based on their distributional pattern and contact history in Taiwan. The Austronesian languages, Atayal, Rukai, Puyuma, and Siraya exhibit a [V-PP] pattern (Adelaar 2011; Dryer, personal communication). Starting from the 16^th century, sinocization through education and intermarriage with Chinese men had accelerated the acquisition of Southern Min by native speakers of Austronesian languages (Shepherd 1993). </p><p><strong>Theoretical Implications: </strong>The positional variation of source PPs in TSM demonstrates an unusual typological pattern within its own language family, and provides evidence for additional contact. It also provides evidence for a process of contact-induced change during which the structure of the target language may be changed due to imperfect second language acquisition. Finally, the empirical investigation in the corpus supports the perspective that both an areal and a diachronic explanation may account for diversity in the synchronic data (Dryer 2003, 2006). </p>