Natural Language & Linguistic Theory最新文献

Complementizer agreement in minority and nonstandard West Germanic languages is well-known and frequently studied, but there is little agreement on its analysis. In this paper, I add to this debate by presenting novel and underdiscussed data from Frisian and Limburgian on intervention effects: what happens to complementizer agreement when the complementizer and the subject are separated by an intervening element. In Frisian, intervention leads to ungrammaticality, and in Limburgian, it leads to the realization of complementizer agreement between the intervener and the subject. These effects cannot be accounted for by existing Agree and PF analyses of complementizer agreement. Instead, I argue that the complementizer agreement morpheme is a clitic. Adopting the approach to clitic doubling of van Craenenbroeck and van Koppen (2008), I develop an analysis of complementizer agreement as clitic doubling. The intervention effects in Frisian and Limburgian follow from an interplay of the structural size of the clitic and restrictions on movement. Specifically, the ungrammaticality of intervention in Frisian is the result of competition between the clitic and the intervener for the same structural position, and the subject-internal realization of complementizer agreement in Limburgian is the result of movement of the clitic below the intervener.

This work investigates the morphosyntax of nominal expressions in Standard Italian that have multiple adjectives in “split coordination,” which permits a plural noun to be modified by singular adjectives, for example le mani destra e sinistra (the hand.pl left.sg and right.sg). The proposal is (i) that these expressions are built from multidominant structures, with a constituent shared by the conjuncts, and (ii) that plural marking on the noun reflects “summative” feature resolution on the nP comparable to coordination resolution. This proposal captures various properties of split-coordinated expressions, including the availability of adjective stacking and of feature-mismatched conjuncts, as well as agreement with a class of nouns that “switch” gender in the plural. Taking agreement with resolving features to be a form of semantic agreement, which has been argued to be possible only in certain syntactic configurations (Smith 2015, 2017, 2021), the account captures prenominal-postnominal adjective asymmetries in split coordination. The work offers a coherent account of coordination and semantic agreement in the nominal domain, connects split coordination to related phenomena such as nominal right node raising and adjectival hydras, and, more broadly, evinces the unity of nominal and verbal agreement, pace analyses of nominal concord (Norris 2014).

This article discusses verbs of change that allow a formally transitive construal that, nevertheless, has anticausative semantics. Verbs forming such “transitive anticausatives” (e.g., The water raised its temperature) also form canonical anticausatives (cf. The temperature of the water rose). Such verbs differ from verbs that only form canonical anticausatives (cf. The water warmed) in that they do not lexicalize a fixed scale along which they measure change, so that the DP merged in the internal argument position of these verbs (a DP denoting a property concept like the temperature) can determine the actual scale of change. When these verbs form canonical anticausatives, the entity undergoing change along this scale is realized as the possessor of this internal argument DP. When these verbs form transitive anticausatives, the entity undergoing the change is realized in the verb’s canonical external argument position, where it is, however, not assigned any external argument role. Instead, as in the canonical anticausative variant, it is interpreted as the possessor of the internal argument DP. This possessive relation is overtly reflected in English and other languages where the subject of the transitive anticausative construal binds a possessive pronoun in the internal argument DP. After an illustration of the phenomenon in typologically different languages, the article lays out the above semantic properties of the transitive anticausative construal and the verbs occurring in it. It then subsumes transitive anticausatives under the theory of the causative alternation in Alexiadou et al. (2006, 2015) and Schäfer (2008). Particular attention is, thereby, given to the morphological marking that sets apart, in many languages, the lexical causative and the anticausative variant of (a subset of) alternating verbs (cf. English raise/rise). Transitive anticausatives show a theoretically challenging but informative behavior here. Even though the transitive anticausative construal expresses anticausative semantics, its verb necessarily features the morphological marking that is canonically associated with its lexical causative use. This suggests that the morphological difference often found between pairs of lexical causative and anticausative verbs is only indirectly related to causative and anticausative semantics but is ultimately determined by more abstract, syntactic properties.

The nature of head movement has been debated since its discovery (see Dékány 2018 for discussion). While it is generally agreed that head movement (the sort that results in the formation of complex heads) is subject to more stringent locality restrictions than phrasal movement, little else is uncontested. In this article, I will argue that a flexible (but literal) interpretation of Harizanov and Gribanova’s (2019) definition of head movement (more specifically, their “amalgamation”) is needed to account for the movement of suffixal adjectives (As) in Aleut. These As typically suffix to nominals, but under certain conditions surface in verbs between the root and agreement morphology. I show that these As base-generate as adjuncts of NPs and undergo head movement into the verbal complex. I then explore two theories of word-building which would require only phrasal movement on the part of suffixal As—based on ideas put forth in Julien (2002) and Compton and Pittman (2010)—and conclude that phrasal movement alone is too unrestricted to account for the phenomenon, overgenerating As in unacceptable sites. In contrast, previous theories of head movement are too restrictive, only permitting a head and the head of its complement to form a complex head (e.g., Travis 1984; Embick and Noyer 2001); this excludes heads in adjunct positions, like suffixal As, from participating. However, Harizanov and Gribanova’s definition of amalgamation, whereby heads Raise or Lower into the nearest c-commanding or c-commanded head, uniquely allows head movement to occur out of specifier positions and even adjunct positions. This comparative flexibility correctly permits Aleut suffixal As to form a complex head with verbal morphology, explaining their incorporation deep within the structure of the verbal complex.

U-syncretism is the identical morphological marking of the passive and other verbal categories that have reduced syntactic valency, including the anticausative and verbal reflexive (Embick 2004). Nonactive morphology in Greek exhibits u-syncretism, while English and German have dedicated passive morphology. An influential body of literature holds that u-syncretism is the hallmark of a middle or nonactive Voice structure, which has a range of interpretations, while its absence is symptomatic of a canonical passive (Alexiadou and Doron 2012; Alexiadou et al. 2015; Spathas et al. 2015; Schäfer 2017; a.o.). The Turkish passive suffix also marks anticausatives and some verbal reflexives (Gündoğdu 2017). Nevertheless, the present paper argues that Turkish has a canonical passive that is morphosyntactically distinct from nonactive/middle Voice. U-syncretism is found only with verb stems that lack transitive marking. With stems that take an overt marker of transitivity—a causative suffix or an active light verb—the passive suffix is rigidly passive in interpretation, licensing a by phrase but not a by-itself or causer phrase in the case of alternating change-of-state verbs, and rejecting a reflexive reading even with a naturally reflexive verb. I conclude that the Turkish passive is derived with a transitive verb stem, while the anticausative and reflexive are derived with intransitive stems. U-syncretism arises only where transitive marking is null, and therefore, I argue, reflects a morphosyntactic ambiguity rather than different interpretations of the nonactive/middle Voice construction. This paper thus shows that a canonical passive can exhibit surface u-syncretism.

This paper investigates a verbal category called “assistive” in two closely related Turkic languages, Kyrgyz and Kazakh, which appears to have a helping-like interpretation. The assistive construction includes a dative-marked Agent argument, which is not to be introduced by one of the commonly known noncore-argument-introducing heads, Cause, Applicative and Voice. The paper argues that the assistive does not encode a helping event; rather it is a hitherto unidentified type of event pluralizer (pluractional), which can introduce an Agent argument. The paper presents novel data showing that the assistive defines event plurality at the level of subevents: it requires that the embedded event be divided into two subevent sets such that the embedded event is the sum of the two subevent sets and the dative-marked argument is the Agent of one of the subevent sets. Thereby, the paper contributes to the inventory of pluractionals and to the cross-linguistically attested noncore-argument-introducing categories.

Double object constructions provide an ideal context in which to investigate interactions between multiple instances of movement. With two internal arguments, we can construct scenarios where one A-moves and another Ā-moves, such as in the passive wh-question What was Sue given? Holmberg et al. (2019) observe that in many languages (e.g. Norwegian) that otherwise permit either object of a double object construction to A-move to subject position, a restriction emerges when the indirect object wh-moves: the indirect object must also A-move (e.g. Who was given a book?). One cannot pronounce an indirect object wh-question in a clause where the direct object A-moves instead (*Who was a book given?). In this paper, I observe that this restriction is only found in languages that otherwise permit the indirect object to A-move. In languages such as Greek, which have no indirect object passives, indirect objects can freely wh-move in a direct object passive, and thus do not exhibit the same restriction as in Norwegian. I propose that this restriction comes about in languages such as Norwegian but not Greek due to the timing of wh-movement relative to A-movement within vP. Indirect objects wh-move through the position that controls A-movement early, blocking a direct object from A-moving, so long as the indirect object can A-move itself. The analysis features a smuggling approach to passives of ditransitives (Collins 2005) and an economy condition like van Urk and Richards’ (2015) Multitasking, which jointly predict the order of operations that gives rise to the wh-movement restriction observed in Norwegian.

This paper investigates control constructions in the Niger-Congo language Wolof, which offers several insights into the phenomenon of control. First, I show that one and the same predicate can take infinitival complements of different sizes, giving additional suport to the claims in Wurmbrand (2014c, 2015), Wurmbrand and Lohninger (2023). Next, I present arguments in favor of Grano’s (2012, 2015) claim that Exhaustive Control (EC) and Partial Control (PC) are derived via different strategies, specifically, that EC is the result of movement (Hornstein 1999 et seq.). Control in Wolof is only exhaustive, both with cross-linguistically typical EC predicates and with typical PC predicates, and, notably, all control constructions in Wolof restructure, and all control verbs are monotransitive, properties that usually characterize EC, but not PC predicates. This confirms a correlation between EC, restructuring, and monotransitivity argued for by Cinque (2004, 2006) and Grano (2012, 2015). While Cinque’s and Grano’s approaches treat EC predicates as functional verbs, I argue that this bundle of properties cannot be a simple consequence of monoclausal syntax and propose that movement of the subject from the infinitival into the matrix clause must be available in bi-clausal constructions as well, supporting the view that at least one type of control is derived via movement, and does not involve PRO. An additional argument for this claim comes from ditransitive verbs: I show that Wolof does not have object control, and attribute this property to the larger size of infinitival complements in ditransitive constructions, resulting in the subject movement into the higher clause being impeded.

This paper investigates an interaction between locality requirements and syntactic dependencies through the lens of hyperraising constructions in Cantonese and Vietnamese. We offer a novel piece of evidence from subject displacement in support of the claim that phasehood can be deactivated by syntactic dependencies during the derivation. We show that (i) hyperraising (to subject) constructions are attested in both languages, and that (ii) only attitude verbs that encode an indirect evidential component allow hyperraising constructions. We propose a phase deactivation account for hyperraising, where the phasehood of a CP is deactivated by an Agree relation in terms of an evidential feature with the embedding verb. The findings of this paper suggest that locality requirements in natural languages are less rigid than previously thought, and that there is a non-trivial semantic dimension to hyperraising phenomena.

In Modern Hebrew, some, but not all, nominals exhibit obligatory /a/-syncope in open syllables if they are antepretonic in a simple (nominal) word. The same vowels optionally syncopate in any pretonic syllable in non-final members of compounds. Here we first show that syncope in compounds fills a gap in the typology of weak positions. We then propose a formal analysis in Gradient Harmonic Grammar (Smolensky and Goldrick 2016), which distinguishes between a weak /a/ and a strong /a/. Only the former undergoes syncope in both configurations; and only in non-compounds is it protected by a positional faithfulness constraint referencing the head foot of the prosodic word. Optionality in compounds is shown to follow from Base-Derivative faithfulness.