Information structure, or the way the information in a sentence is 'divided' into categories such... more Information structure, or the way the information in a sentence is 'divided' into categories such as topic, focus, comment, background, and old versus new information, is one of the most widely debated topics in linguistics. This volume incorporates exciting new work on the relationship between syntax and information structure. The contributors are united in rejecting accounts that assume designated syntactic positions associated with specific informationstructural interpretations, and aim instead to derive information-structural conditions on word order and other phenomena from the way syntax and syntax-external systems interact. Beyond this shared aim, the authors of the various chapters advocate a number of approaches, based on different types of data (syntactic, semantic, phonological/phonetic) from a range of languages. The book is aimed at specialists in syntax and/or information structure, as well as students and linguists in related fields keen to familiarize themselves with current issues in this fascinating area of research. The editors ivona kučerová is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at McMaster University. She specializes in the syntax-semantics and the semantics-morphology interfaces. ad neeleman is Professor of Linguistics at University College London. His research focuses on the theory of syntax and the interaction between syntax and syntax-external systems. He has published some forty research papers and is the author of Flexible Syntax (1999) with Fred Weerman, and Beyond Morphology (2004) with Peter Ackema.
The goal of this thesis is to account for distributional patterns of given and new items in Czech... more The goal of this thesis is to account for distributional patterns of given and new items in Czech, especially their word order. The system proposed here has four basic components: (i) syntax, (ii) economy, (iii) interpretation, and (iv) reference set computation. The approach belongs to the family of interface driven approaches. Two things were difficult about writing my thesis: (i) choosing the topic (there were too many things I would like to write a thesis about) and (ii) choosing an adviser. There were several people I wanted to have as my adviser. In the end I decided to write my thesis on four different topics and to have four advisers. The first decision turned out to be untenable and I ended up dropping three of the topics. The second decision, on the other hand, paid off; except for typographical issues while trying to typeset the cover page of my thesis I have never regretted it. Alec, Danny, David and Sabine (in alphabetical order) are more than wonderful scholars. They have been my mentors and guides without ever telling me what to do. In a sense, they are coauthors of many ideas in my thesis: most of the ideas took their shape while sitting together for hours, playing with puzzles and trying different ways to attack them. I have really enjoyed the eight months I have spent writing my thesis. My stay at MIT was of course more than my dissertation. It is impossible to thank all the people I have met here and whom I have learned from. Among my teachers a special place belongs to Noam Chomsky, Mike Collins, Morris Halle, Irene Heim and Donca Steriade. I want to thank them here for their time and interest in my work. Sometimes it is hard to draw a clear line between a friend and a colleague. Many people were both. Asaf Bachrach, Roni Katzir and Raj Singh became my 'classmates' and provided me with intense underground education and great food. Brooke Cowan, Svea Heinemann and Sarah Hulsey made sure I would know that life at MIT is more than linguistics. Special thanks go to Bc'da Jelinek without whom I would have never applied to MIT. He knows best that there is more I should thank him for. I want to thank also my former teachers without whom I would have not even thought about starting a PhD: Vlasta Dvof~kovai, Jindfich Rosenkranz, Jaroslava Janaikovi, Michael Spirit, Jiff HomoliJd and tAlexander Stich (in chronological order). There is no way I could thank my parents and Roni Katzir without trivializing their place in my life.
This article investigates the syntax of doubly filled COMP patterns in Czech and Slovenian interr... more This article investigates the syntax of doubly filled COMP patterns in Czech and Slovenian interrogatives from a cross-linguistic perspective, concentrating on the differences between Germanic and Slavic doubly Filled COMP. In Germanic, dialects that allow the doubly filled COMP pattern do so to lexicalize a C head specified as [fin] with overt material, which is regularly carried out by verb movement in main clauses (e.g. V2 in German, T-to-C in English interrogatives) and by the interrogative complementizer in embedded polar questions. The insertion of the complementizer has no interpretive effect on the clause and is restricted to embedded clauses. By contrast, in Czech and Slovenian a complementizer can be inserted even in main clauses, and while its presence is optional, its insertion triggers an interpretive difference, resulting in an echo reading. I argue that while in Germanic, the C head is specified as [wh] and is checked off by the wh-element, in Slavic the C is not specified as [wh] and the type of the clause hence matches the properties of the inserted declarative head. In turn, the wh-element moves because it is focused: echo questions are closer to focus constructions than to ordinary questions.
... Linguistics and philosophy 26: 51145. Gregory, Michelle and Laura Michaelis. (2001) &amp... more ... Linguistics and philosophy 26: 51145. Gregory, Michelle and Laura Michaelis. (2001) "Topicalization and left dislocation: A functional opposition revisited". ... every mother nom has happy her refl boy acc. 'Every mother likes her boy.'. b. Svého chlapce i má ráda kadá, i matka. ...
This paper proposes a statistical, treeto-tree model for producing translations. Two main contrib... more This paper proposes a statistical, treeto-tree model for producing translations. Two main contributions are as follows: (1) a method for the extraction of syntactic structures with alignment information from a parallel corpus of translations, and (2) use of a discriminative, featurebased model for prediction of these targetlanguage syntactic structures-which we call aligned extended projections, or AEPs. An evaluation of the method on translation from German to English shows similar performance to the phrase-based model of Koehn et al. (2003).
This article presents a case study of Czech that opens the possibility of unifying various second... more This article presents a case study of Czech that opens the possibility of unifying various second-position phenomena as instances of an interface condition on head extension. The condition requires a head to undergo at least two instances of merge within its phase. The core of the article explores properties of T0. It is shown that any merge (external or internal, merge of a head or a phrase) yields a well-formed structure. Since it does not matter to the requirement what category merges to T0, the condition must be stated as a general requirement on what category may be the root.
This chapter provides novel empirical evidence from agreement in Czech copular clauses that the [... more This chapter provides novel empirical evidence from agreement in Czech copular clauses that the [+PERSON] feature is dependent on animacy (Adger and Harbour 2007, Nevins 2007, a.o.). The core evidence comes from agreement with φ-feature-deficient pronouns. It is argued that agreement with φ-feature-deficient pronouns yields a Multiple Agree configuration (Hiraiwa 2005). Strikingly, the interpretation of such a pronoun is restricted by all φ-features present in the Multiple Agree chain. Thus if a φ-feature-deficient pronoun with an unvalued PERSON feature enters a Multiple-Agree chain with valued φ-features, including a valued PERSON feature, then the PERSON feature restricts the interpretation of the antecedent of the pronoun. Crucially, this happens only if the pronoun gets valued as [+PERSON]. It is argued that this is because [+PERSON] pronouns have φ-feature valuation restricted by GENDER presuppositions associated with animate referents (Heim 2008, Sudo 2012, a.o.).
Chapter 6 investigates variation in the domain of gender in Italian. The Standard Italian nominal... more Chapter 6 investigates variation in the domain of gender in Italian. The Standard Italian nominal system morphologically marks two distinct genders, three distinct nominal classes (idiosyncratic nominal endings), and two numbers, a combination which lends itself to a theoretical investigation of complex gender interactions. Crucially, Italian nominal inflection also distinguishes between grammatical, i.e. idiosyncratic, and natural, i.e. context-dependent, gender. The chapter argues that while some nouns come with gender determined from the lexicon, others may get their gender valued only via the context. Such a contextual valuation may arise only at the phase level, with D being the locus of such a valuation. Evidence comes from agreement and derivational morphology.
In the generative tradition, Accusative case ACC is often analyzed as a dependent Case, where bei... more In the generative tradition, Accusative case ACC is often analyzed as a dependent Case, where being dependent means being dependent on another argument (Burzio 1986), more precisely a theta-role, or being dependent on a chain assigning Nominative case NOM to another argument (Marantz 1991), more precisely, an unmarked, i.e. non-lexically governed, case. In both approaches, ACC is a result of grammatical competition. The Minimalist Program (Chomsky 2001, 2008) seems to be an exception: in this framework, abstract Case is assigned by functional heads. Concretely, ACC is assigned by v*. Whether or not v* assigns ACC then depends on whether or not v* is a strong phase. Even though the Minimalist Program doesn't seem to employ a competition view of ACC as a dependent case, it is at its core a look-ahead system. Although the dependency on another argument is not explicitly declared, it is inherent to the system. This paper presents data from Polish, Ukrainian and Northern Russian that contradict the dependency view of ACC and suggest an alternative in terms of structure-dependency, independent of another argument receiving a theta-role or another case being assigned to a chain. This bears on the question of the role of case in syntax and on the nature of spell-out and of cyclic domains.
We describe a method for incorporating syntactic information in statistical machine translation s... more We describe a method for incorporating syntactic information in statistical machine translation systems. The first step of the method is to parse the source language string that is being translated. The second step is to apply a series of transformations to the parse tree, effectively reordering the surface string on the source language side of the translation system. The goal of this step is to recover an underlying word order that is closer to the target language word-order than the original string. The reordering approach is applied as a pre-processing step in both the training and decoding phases of a phrase-based statistical MT system. We describe experiments on translation from German to English, showing an improvement from 25.2% Bleu score for a baseline system to 26.8% Bleu score for the system with reordering, a statistically significant improvement. Original sentence: Ich werde Ihnen die entsprechenden Anmerkungen aushaendigen, damit Sie das eventuell bei der Abstimmung uebernehmen koennen. English translation: I will to you the corresponding comments pass on, so that you them perhaps in the vote adopt can. Reordered sentence: Ich werde aushaendigen Ihnen die entsprechenden Anmerkungen, damit Sie koennen uebernehmen das eventuell bei der Abstimmung.
The paper investigates some cross-linguistic differences in aspectual interpretations of Slavic a... more The paper investigates some cross-linguistic differences in aspectual interpretations of Slavic and Romance languages. We propose that certain readings cannot be determined compositionally from the syntactic representation but instead they result from semantic competition over available morphological representations.
LSA annual meeting extended abstracts, Oct 16, 2014
We argue that scrambling to the middle field in German does not form a syntactically homogeneous ... more We argue that scrambling to the middle field in German does not form a syntactically homogeneous class. Instead, there are two distinct types of movement involved: (i) feature-triggered movement typically targeting the left periphery (Rizzi, 1997; Miyagawa, 1997, a.o.), i.e., movement which is determined within syntax proper; and (ii) semantically licensed, and competition based type of movement (
This paper argues that the traditional notion of person feature refers to two fundamentally disti... more This paper argues that the traditional notion of person feature refers to two fundamentally distinct objects. One is a feature present in narrow syntax, the other one is an object created as part of labelling by the syntax-semantics interface. The latter one arises via a formal association of the syntactic feature with a semantic index. Crucially, the interface object can give rise to new values of presuppositional φ-features (modulo Maximize Presupposition). In turn, we can identify two classes of number and gender features that differ in their locality properties and their semantic interpretability. Gender and number valued from the lexicon is present throughout the narrow syntax derivation and is not semantically interpreted. Gender and number introduced via person at the syntax-semantics interface appear only in larger syntactic domains (they become available only after a phase has been labelled by the syntax-semantics interface) and are always semantically interpreted (via their presuppositional content). The paper thus contributes to our understanding of mapping of narrow-syntax features onto the interfaces, division of labour among the modules and advances our understanding of some puzzling properties of person features cross-linguistically.
We have argued that in order to understand the Aspectual semantics and the morphology-semantics m... more We have argued that in order to understand the Aspectual semantics and the morphology-semantics mapping in the Aspectual domain, we must also take into account the presuppositional content of the Aspectual morphology. We have established that the denotation of Perfective and Imperfective in the Slavic and Romance languages may be identical but the usage of the Aspectual morphology differs because of distinct presuppositions associated with the morphology in these languages.
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, Jun 12, 2016
We argue that English why-questions are systematically ambiguous between a purpose and a reason i... more We argue that English why-questions are systematically ambiguous between a purpose and a reason interpretation, similarly to Mandarin, Russian, and Polish (contra Stepanov & Tsai 2008). We argue that the distinct semantic interpretations correspond to two distinct base-generated positions of why. While reason why is base-generated within CP (Rizzi 2001, Ko 2005), purpose why is adjoined to vP (Stepanov & Tsai 2008). Furthermore, we show that English purpose why, similarly to previously reported data from Mandarin, is only compatible with dynamic predicates with agentive subjects. We argue that this selectional restriction follows from two properties: (i) why semantically requires a proposition as its argument, and (ii) only dynamic predicates with agentive subjects have a syntactic structure that accommodates two adjunction sites of the relevant semantic type, i.e., they contain two distinct propositional levels (Bale 2007) and therefore two attachment sites for why. In contrast, propositionally simple predicates only have one propositional level and hence only one possible attachment site, which corresponds to the reason interpretation of why. Evidence for this proposal comes from the observation that only the lower why-associated with the purpose reading-is sensitive to negative islands, which suggests that its attachment site is below negation (vP), whereas the higher why is insensitive to island effects of this sort, which suggests that its base generated position is above negation (CP).
The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, Mar 2, 2016
The subject-predicate agreement system in Icelandic appears to show sensitivity to the morphologi... more The subject-predicate agreement system in Icelandic appears to show sensitivity to the morphological marking of case, instead of the syntactic position of the argument to be agreed with. Furthermore, agreement with the Nominative object appears to be optional and may be disrupted by an intervening Dative argument. This article contributes to the existing discussion by proposing a new empirical generalization about the nature of Long-Distance Agreement (lda), i.e., agreement which occurs in a bi-clausal environment, and its interaction with Dative interventions. Based on the new data from an Icelandic variety called Icelandic B, I argue that lda takes place only if the intervening Dative argument undergoes independently motivated A-movement to the edge of vP. The core idea is that the locus of agreement with the Nominative object is v—its Case licensor: lda arises only if v can probe the Nominative argument in the absence of the Dative argument. The proposed analysis thus accounts for the Icelandic patterns in a strictly derivational and locality-based manner, without any recourse to post-syntactic operations, optionality in agreement or significant modifications in the theory of $$\phi $$ϕ-feature Agree, thus restoring the Icelandic agreement system to normalcy.
This paper presents a case study of a group of null‐subject languages in which there is referenti... more This paper presents a case study of a group of null‐subject languages in which there is referential pro that fails to satisfy the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) because it does not move to Spec,TP. Thus, this group of null‐subject languages contrasts with the more familiar type of null‐subject languages, such as Romance and Greek, in which the EPP is always satisfied either by pro or a D‐feature in T. To account for the syntactic distribution of null subjects in these languages, some form of the EPP requirement must be taken into account. This empirical observation has consequences for the typology of null‐subject languages and contributes to the growing literature showing that the [± null‐subject] parameter might need to be refined in order to capture the continuum of types of null‐subject languages attested crosslinguistically.
Information structure, or the way the information in a sentence is 'divided' into categories such... more Information structure, or the way the information in a sentence is 'divided' into categories such as topic, focus, comment, background, and old versus new information, is one of the most widely debated topics in linguistics. This volume incorporates exciting new work on the relationship between syntax and information structure. The contributors are united in rejecting accounts that assume designated syntactic positions associated with specific informationstructural interpretations, and aim instead to derive information-structural conditions on word order and other phenomena from the way syntax and syntax-external systems interact. Beyond this shared aim, the authors of the various chapters advocate a number of approaches, based on different types of data (syntactic, semantic, phonological/phonetic) from a range of languages. The book is aimed at specialists in syntax and/or information structure, as well as students and linguists in related fields keen to familiarize themselves with current issues in this fascinating area of research. The editors ivona kučerová is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at McMaster University. She specializes in the syntax-semantics and the semantics-morphology interfaces. ad neeleman is Professor of Linguistics at University College London. His research focuses on the theory of syntax and the interaction between syntax and syntax-external systems. He has published some forty research papers and is the author of Flexible Syntax (1999) with Fred Weerman, and Beyond Morphology (2004) with Peter Ackema.
The goal of this thesis is to account for distributional patterns of given and new items in Czech... more The goal of this thesis is to account for distributional patterns of given and new items in Czech, especially their word order. The system proposed here has four basic components: (i) syntax, (ii) economy, (iii) interpretation, and (iv) reference set computation. The approach belongs to the family of interface driven approaches. Two things were difficult about writing my thesis: (i) choosing the topic (there were too many things I would like to write a thesis about) and (ii) choosing an adviser. There were several people I wanted to have as my adviser. In the end I decided to write my thesis on four different topics and to have four advisers. The first decision turned out to be untenable and I ended up dropping three of the topics. The second decision, on the other hand, paid off; except for typographical issues while trying to typeset the cover page of my thesis I have never regretted it. Alec, Danny, David and Sabine (in alphabetical order) are more than wonderful scholars. They have been my mentors and guides without ever telling me what to do. In a sense, they are coauthors of many ideas in my thesis: most of the ideas took their shape while sitting together for hours, playing with puzzles and trying different ways to attack them. I have really enjoyed the eight months I have spent writing my thesis. My stay at MIT was of course more than my dissertation. It is impossible to thank all the people I have met here and whom I have learned from. Among my teachers a special place belongs to Noam Chomsky, Mike Collins, Morris Halle, Irene Heim and Donca Steriade. I want to thank them here for their time and interest in my work. Sometimes it is hard to draw a clear line between a friend and a colleague. Many people were both. Asaf Bachrach, Roni Katzir and Raj Singh became my 'classmates' and provided me with intense underground education and great food. Brooke Cowan, Svea Heinemann and Sarah Hulsey made sure I would know that life at MIT is more than linguistics. Special thanks go to Bc'da Jelinek without whom I would have never applied to MIT. He knows best that there is more I should thank him for. I want to thank also my former teachers without whom I would have not even thought about starting a PhD: Vlasta Dvof~kovai, Jindfich Rosenkranz, Jaroslava Janaikovi, Michael Spirit, Jiff HomoliJd and tAlexander Stich (in chronological order). There is no way I could thank my parents and Roni Katzir without trivializing their place in my life.
This article investigates the syntax of doubly filled COMP patterns in Czech and Slovenian interr... more This article investigates the syntax of doubly filled COMP patterns in Czech and Slovenian interrogatives from a cross-linguistic perspective, concentrating on the differences between Germanic and Slavic doubly Filled COMP. In Germanic, dialects that allow the doubly filled COMP pattern do so to lexicalize a C head specified as [fin] with overt material, which is regularly carried out by verb movement in main clauses (e.g. V2 in German, T-to-C in English interrogatives) and by the interrogative complementizer in embedded polar questions. The insertion of the complementizer has no interpretive effect on the clause and is restricted to embedded clauses. By contrast, in Czech and Slovenian a complementizer can be inserted even in main clauses, and while its presence is optional, its insertion triggers an interpretive difference, resulting in an echo reading. I argue that while in Germanic, the C head is specified as [wh] and is checked off by the wh-element, in Slavic the C is not specified as [wh] and the type of the clause hence matches the properties of the inserted declarative head. In turn, the wh-element moves because it is focused: echo questions are closer to focus constructions than to ordinary questions.
... Linguistics and philosophy 26: 51145. Gregory, Michelle and Laura Michaelis. (2001) &amp... more ... Linguistics and philosophy 26: 51145. Gregory, Michelle and Laura Michaelis. (2001) "Topicalization and left dislocation: A functional opposition revisited". ... every mother nom has happy her refl boy acc. 'Every mother likes her boy.'. b. Svého chlapce i má ráda kadá, i matka. ...
This paper proposes a statistical, treeto-tree model for producing translations. Two main contrib... more This paper proposes a statistical, treeto-tree model for producing translations. Two main contributions are as follows: (1) a method for the extraction of syntactic structures with alignment information from a parallel corpus of translations, and (2) use of a discriminative, featurebased model for prediction of these targetlanguage syntactic structures-which we call aligned extended projections, or AEPs. An evaluation of the method on translation from German to English shows similar performance to the phrase-based model of Koehn et al. (2003).
This article presents a case study of Czech that opens the possibility of unifying various second... more This article presents a case study of Czech that opens the possibility of unifying various second-position phenomena as instances of an interface condition on head extension. The condition requires a head to undergo at least two instances of merge within its phase. The core of the article explores properties of T0. It is shown that any merge (external or internal, merge of a head or a phrase) yields a well-formed structure. Since it does not matter to the requirement what category merges to T0, the condition must be stated as a general requirement on what category may be the root.
This chapter provides novel empirical evidence from agreement in Czech copular clauses that the [... more This chapter provides novel empirical evidence from agreement in Czech copular clauses that the [+PERSON] feature is dependent on animacy (Adger and Harbour 2007, Nevins 2007, a.o.). The core evidence comes from agreement with φ-feature-deficient pronouns. It is argued that agreement with φ-feature-deficient pronouns yields a Multiple Agree configuration (Hiraiwa 2005). Strikingly, the interpretation of such a pronoun is restricted by all φ-features present in the Multiple Agree chain. Thus if a φ-feature-deficient pronoun with an unvalued PERSON feature enters a Multiple-Agree chain with valued φ-features, including a valued PERSON feature, then the PERSON feature restricts the interpretation of the antecedent of the pronoun. Crucially, this happens only if the pronoun gets valued as [+PERSON]. It is argued that this is because [+PERSON] pronouns have φ-feature valuation restricted by GENDER presuppositions associated with animate referents (Heim 2008, Sudo 2012, a.o.).
Chapter 6 investigates variation in the domain of gender in Italian. The Standard Italian nominal... more Chapter 6 investigates variation in the domain of gender in Italian. The Standard Italian nominal system morphologically marks two distinct genders, three distinct nominal classes (idiosyncratic nominal endings), and two numbers, a combination which lends itself to a theoretical investigation of complex gender interactions. Crucially, Italian nominal inflection also distinguishes between grammatical, i.e. idiosyncratic, and natural, i.e. context-dependent, gender. The chapter argues that while some nouns come with gender determined from the lexicon, others may get their gender valued only via the context. Such a contextual valuation may arise only at the phase level, with D being the locus of such a valuation. Evidence comes from agreement and derivational morphology.
In the generative tradition, Accusative case ACC is often analyzed as a dependent Case, where bei... more In the generative tradition, Accusative case ACC is often analyzed as a dependent Case, where being dependent means being dependent on another argument (Burzio 1986), more precisely a theta-role, or being dependent on a chain assigning Nominative case NOM to another argument (Marantz 1991), more precisely, an unmarked, i.e. non-lexically governed, case. In both approaches, ACC is a result of grammatical competition. The Minimalist Program (Chomsky 2001, 2008) seems to be an exception: in this framework, abstract Case is assigned by functional heads. Concretely, ACC is assigned by v*. Whether or not v* assigns ACC then depends on whether or not v* is a strong phase. Even though the Minimalist Program doesn't seem to employ a competition view of ACC as a dependent case, it is at its core a look-ahead system. Although the dependency on another argument is not explicitly declared, it is inherent to the system. This paper presents data from Polish, Ukrainian and Northern Russian that contradict the dependency view of ACC and suggest an alternative in terms of structure-dependency, independent of another argument receiving a theta-role or another case being assigned to a chain. This bears on the question of the role of case in syntax and on the nature of spell-out and of cyclic domains.
We describe a method for incorporating syntactic information in statistical machine translation s... more We describe a method for incorporating syntactic information in statistical machine translation systems. The first step of the method is to parse the source language string that is being translated. The second step is to apply a series of transformations to the parse tree, effectively reordering the surface string on the source language side of the translation system. The goal of this step is to recover an underlying word order that is closer to the target language word-order than the original string. The reordering approach is applied as a pre-processing step in both the training and decoding phases of a phrase-based statistical MT system. We describe experiments on translation from German to English, showing an improvement from 25.2% Bleu score for a baseline system to 26.8% Bleu score for the system with reordering, a statistically significant improvement. Original sentence: Ich werde Ihnen die entsprechenden Anmerkungen aushaendigen, damit Sie das eventuell bei der Abstimmung uebernehmen koennen. English translation: I will to you the corresponding comments pass on, so that you them perhaps in the vote adopt can. Reordered sentence: Ich werde aushaendigen Ihnen die entsprechenden Anmerkungen, damit Sie koennen uebernehmen das eventuell bei der Abstimmung.
The paper investigates some cross-linguistic differences in aspectual interpretations of Slavic a... more The paper investigates some cross-linguistic differences in aspectual interpretations of Slavic and Romance languages. We propose that certain readings cannot be determined compositionally from the syntactic representation but instead they result from semantic competition over available morphological representations.
LSA annual meeting extended abstracts, Oct 16, 2014
We argue that scrambling to the middle field in German does not form a syntactically homogeneous ... more We argue that scrambling to the middle field in German does not form a syntactically homogeneous class. Instead, there are two distinct types of movement involved: (i) feature-triggered movement typically targeting the left periphery (Rizzi, 1997; Miyagawa, 1997, a.o.), i.e., movement which is determined within syntax proper; and (ii) semantically licensed, and competition based type of movement (
This paper argues that the traditional notion of person feature refers to two fundamentally disti... more This paper argues that the traditional notion of person feature refers to two fundamentally distinct objects. One is a feature present in narrow syntax, the other one is an object created as part of labelling by the syntax-semantics interface. The latter one arises via a formal association of the syntactic feature with a semantic index. Crucially, the interface object can give rise to new values of presuppositional φ-features (modulo Maximize Presupposition). In turn, we can identify two classes of number and gender features that differ in their locality properties and their semantic interpretability. Gender and number valued from the lexicon is present throughout the narrow syntax derivation and is not semantically interpreted. Gender and number introduced via person at the syntax-semantics interface appear only in larger syntactic domains (they become available only after a phase has been labelled by the syntax-semantics interface) and are always semantically interpreted (via their presuppositional content). The paper thus contributes to our understanding of mapping of narrow-syntax features onto the interfaces, division of labour among the modules and advances our understanding of some puzzling properties of person features cross-linguistically.
We have argued that in order to understand the Aspectual semantics and the morphology-semantics m... more We have argued that in order to understand the Aspectual semantics and the morphology-semantics mapping in the Aspectual domain, we must also take into account the presuppositional content of the Aspectual morphology. We have established that the denotation of Perfective and Imperfective in the Slavic and Romance languages may be identical but the usage of the Aspectual morphology differs because of distinct presuppositions associated with the morphology in these languages.
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, Jun 12, 2016
We argue that English why-questions are systematically ambiguous between a purpose and a reason i... more We argue that English why-questions are systematically ambiguous between a purpose and a reason interpretation, similarly to Mandarin, Russian, and Polish (contra Stepanov & Tsai 2008). We argue that the distinct semantic interpretations correspond to two distinct base-generated positions of why. While reason why is base-generated within CP (Rizzi 2001, Ko 2005), purpose why is adjoined to vP (Stepanov & Tsai 2008). Furthermore, we show that English purpose why, similarly to previously reported data from Mandarin, is only compatible with dynamic predicates with agentive subjects. We argue that this selectional restriction follows from two properties: (i) why semantically requires a proposition as its argument, and (ii) only dynamic predicates with agentive subjects have a syntactic structure that accommodates two adjunction sites of the relevant semantic type, i.e., they contain two distinct propositional levels (Bale 2007) and therefore two attachment sites for why. In contrast, propositionally simple predicates only have one propositional level and hence only one possible attachment site, which corresponds to the reason interpretation of why. Evidence for this proposal comes from the observation that only the lower why-associated with the purpose reading-is sensitive to negative islands, which suggests that its attachment site is below negation (vP), whereas the higher why is insensitive to island effects of this sort, which suggests that its base generated position is above negation (CP).
The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, Mar 2, 2016
The subject-predicate agreement system in Icelandic appears to show sensitivity to the morphologi... more The subject-predicate agreement system in Icelandic appears to show sensitivity to the morphological marking of case, instead of the syntactic position of the argument to be agreed with. Furthermore, agreement with the Nominative object appears to be optional and may be disrupted by an intervening Dative argument. This article contributes to the existing discussion by proposing a new empirical generalization about the nature of Long-Distance Agreement (lda), i.e., agreement which occurs in a bi-clausal environment, and its interaction with Dative interventions. Based on the new data from an Icelandic variety called Icelandic B, I argue that lda takes place only if the intervening Dative argument undergoes independently motivated A-movement to the edge of vP. The core idea is that the locus of agreement with the Nominative object is v—its Case licensor: lda arises only if v can probe the Nominative argument in the absence of the Dative argument. The proposed analysis thus accounts for the Icelandic patterns in a strictly derivational and locality-based manner, without any recourse to post-syntactic operations, optionality in agreement or significant modifications in the theory of $$\phi $$ϕ-feature Agree, thus restoring the Icelandic agreement system to normalcy.
This paper presents a case study of a group of null‐subject languages in which there is referenti... more This paper presents a case study of a group of null‐subject languages in which there is referential pro that fails to satisfy the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) because it does not move to Spec,TP. Thus, this group of null‐subject languages contrasts with the more familiar type of null‐subject languages, such as Romance and Greek, in which the EPP is always satisfied either by pro or a D‐feature in T. To account for the syntactic distribution of null subjects in these languages, some form of the EPP requirement must be taken into account. This empirical observation has consequences for the typology of null‐subject languages and contributes to the growing literature showing that the [± null‐subject] parameter might need to be refined in order to capture the continuum of types of null‐subject languages attested crosslinguistically.
a handout of new work on Nominative case as the syntactic reflex of person feature on D based on ... more a handout of new work on Nominative case as the syntactic reflex of person feature on D based on comparative data with numerals in Slavic (presented at the MOTH Syntax Workshop, University of Toronto, April 2016)
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