Apparent minimality violations solved by Nested Agree

This paper addresses apparent violations of Sequence of Tense in subjunctive clauses in some Spanish varieties. We show that the coexistence of simultaneous interpretations for the past and the present subjunctive under a matrix past invalidates a crucial prediction of some theories of Sequence of Tense. We then conduct a corpus-based investigation of the [present under past]- pattern in indicative and subjunctive complement clauses in Argentinian Spanish, whose results indicate that there are two distributionally and semantically distinct manifestations of this pattern, one involving indicative and polarity subjunctive clauses, the other involving intensional and factive subjunctive clauses. This provides further evidence in favor of Quer's (1998, 2006, 2016) hypothesis as to the central relevance of the divide between intensional and polarity subjunctives.

This article reports the results of a study of the syntactic acquisition of nine participants in a short‐term study abroad program that was designed to complete the second year of German. Data compared study abroad students' use of accusative and dative case prepositions and ditransitives, auxiliary selection in the past tense, and dative verbs with the use of those constructions by students who completed the second‐year course sequence at the home institution. The study abroad students performed at about the same level as the on‐campus students on all syntactic measures but produced many more ditransitive clauses.

Auxiliary selection and the semantics of unaccusativity

Reviewed by: Phrase structure composition and syntactic dependencies by Robert Frank Caroline Heycock Phrase structure composition and syntactic dependencies. By Robert Frank. (Current studies in linguistics 38.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Pp. 324. ISBN 0262062291. $45 (Hb). The content of this book may be viewed in at least two ways. Most straightforwardly, it is an exposition of tree adjoining grammar (TAG) as the formal basis for a theory of syntax. TAG was first defined in Joshi et al. 1975 and has been developed since by Joshi and a number of his students and colleagues, the author having been one of the former. While those with an interest in formal grammars and computational linguistics know TAG from a number of papers that have been written on its formal properties, this book is aimed at syntacticians who do not necessarily have any prior interest in (or belief in the relevance of) the position on the Chomsky hierarchy of the grammar formalism they or others employ. From another angle, this book may be seen as an interesting and original exploration of the notion of locality in syntactic theory—the empirical pervasiveness of such a concept, how it can be reconciled theoretically with unbounded movement, and, most centrally, the claim that it is a fundamental property of the underlying grammatical system. After a brief preface, the book consists of six chapters. Ch. 1 accomplishes two goals. First, it situates TAG within the history of the generative paradigm—a discussion of more than just historical interest, since both TAG and the minimalist program are illuminated by an understanding of their mutual relation via the generalized transformations of Chomsky 1955. Second, it outlines how the formalism works, in particular the two ways in which the finite tree structures called elementary trees can be combined: by substitution and adjunction. The first may be thought of as a way of inserting a subtree into an unexpanded node at the frontier of another tree; the latter allows a subtree to be inserted at any node within another tree. Both operations introduce the possibility of unbounded recursion into the grammar, but in importantly different ways that are explored in the remainder of the book. In this chapter Frank discusses what he calls the fundamental tag hypothesis: that every syntactic dependency is expressed locally within a single elementary tree. For example, dependencies such as the one between a ‘raised subject’ like John and its trace in the lowest object position (or, more theory-neutrally, between the NP and the verb of which it is an argument) in John seems to have been expected to be elected t, or the one between a wh-phrase and its trace in Who do you think that they will say will be allowed t to leave?, are restricted by the nature of the formalism itself to a particular domain (the elementary tree); the apparent unbounded nature of these dependencies can only arise through subsequent adjunction operations introducing one or more subtrees between the head and the tail of the dependency. Having established that elementary trees constitute the domain of locality within the formalism, F argues in Ch. 2 for a particular definition of this domain as the extended projection of a lexical head (Grimshaw 1991) and discusses the formal details of how this can be implemented. Ch. 3 applies the theory as developed up to this point to one well-known and long-discussed syntactic phenomenon, NP-movement or ‘raising’. His goal is to show how a number of limitations on this construction (including the ungrammaticality of ‘superraising’, the position of the associate of expletive there, the absence of raising in nominals and (some) gerunds, and the behavior of predicate nominals) follow from the nature of the formalism itself without recourse to additional principles such as minimalism’s ‘shortest move’, ‘extension condition’, the preference for Merge over Move, and so on. Ch. 4 explores how to characterize crucial properties of elementary trees in the absence of these principles and includes an attempt to adapt Chomsky’s system of feature-checking in a way that is consistent with the TAG framework. It also includes an extensive discussion of how to handle apparent violations of locality...

This book proposes a new solution to the long-standing puzzle of auxiliary selection in Romance languages, in particular Italian. The following questions are addressed: why the perfect auxiliary appears in the two forms be and have within a single language, what drives this distribution, and how cross-linguistic data can be accounted for. The solution to these issues consists of an Agreebased analysis that accounts for auxiliary selection in root clauses and restructuring in Standard Italian and in Italo-Romance varieties, which is also compatible with participle agreement. By answering these questions, the book also touches upon more theoretical and foundational problems, such as the distribution of labor between syntax, morphology and the lexicon, and the conditions on the operation Agree (in particular, multiple probing, locality, and minimality). This work contributes to the discussion in the fields of formal morpho-syntax, theoretical linguistics, and Romance linguistics.

This article examines the distribution and the usage pattern of the two perfect auxiliaries – have and be – in contemporary spoken Danish in order to investigate whether the choice between the two auxiliaries is undergoing systematic changes. To do so the LANCHART corpus of contemporary spoken Danish is used. First, the macro-level distributional pattern is established through quantitative apparent and real-time analysis. In the subsequent qualitative micro-level analysis, particular attention is paid to cases where the selection of the auxiliary deviates from what could be expected based on Sorace’s Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy and grammars of Danish. The investigation focuses on the verbs gå ‘go’ and komme ‘come’ – the two most frequent verbs of motion in the corpus. The apparent time analysis of gå indicates an increased use of have across generations. In real time, no change is registered, indicating that any change is stemming from generational differences. With komme – although unexpected examples with have are attested – no statistically significant change is registered neither in apparent nor in real time. The micro-level analysis shows that the variation in auxiliary selection largely conforms to expectations; however, deviations are registered and discussed.

In Standard Italian, restructuring clauses are characterized by apparently optional transparency effects in the choice of the clausal perfect auxiliary. In the perfect periphrasis, the auxiliary associated with the modal verb can be either HAVE or the one corresponding to the lexical verb (BE or HAVE). In this paper, I argue that there is no true optionality: different auxiliaries show up because the modal verb can select complements of different sizes. Assuming that auxiliary selection is a form of person Agree, different complement sizes determine different Agree domains. In particular, the “transparent” auxiliary results from a vP complement, while a TP complement leads to HAVE insertion.

This paper focuses on child acquisition of perfective auxiliaries in French and Italian by analysing auxiliary productions in naturalistic corpora and considering the role of input. Unlike languages like English or Spanish, which use have with all verb types, French and Italian use both be and have to express the perfective. Be-selection is a general marker for unaccusative and reflexive verbs, while unergative and transitive verbs select have. Previous work has shown that there exists considerable variation in auxiliary selection in some varieties of French, with increased use of have in contexts which require be in standard French. In acquisition studies, it is not yet clear whether non-adultlike child productions in French are evenly distributed or restricted to be-selecting verbs, while an asymmetry by person/number form has been reported for reflexives. Our results show firstly that child errors in French are indeed restricted to be-selecting verb types, but this pattern is specific to French and does not occur in child Italian. Importantly, the absence of variability in the input shows that these are child innovations. We further show that the asymmetry by person/number form is specific to 1SG be and occurs with intransitives in addition to reflexives. A more detailed analysis considering homophonous forms in spoken French demonstrates that these 1SG errors are not auxiliary selection errors but instead represent extensions of 3SG be to 1SG be contexts due to the later production of the 1SG form of the be paradigm.

For intransitive verbs in languages with a choice of perfective auxiliaries, off-line acceptability judgments conform to a semantically based Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy (ASH) (Sorace, Language 76: 859–890, 2000, Gradience at the lexicon-syntax interface: Evidence from auxiliary selection, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). According to the ASH, inherently telic verbs regularly selecting auxiliary be appear to be core exemplars of unaccusative syntax, while atelic verbs of agentive activity regularly selecting have are core exemplars of unergative syntax. Non-core verbs that are inherently neither telic nor agentive allow either auxiliary to degrees depending on context and on distance from telic and agentive poles. ASH effects have not yet been investigated in real-time language processing. This paper demonstrates ASH effects on processing of Italian auxiliaries essere ‘be’ and avere ‘have’ in on-line comprehension and production. For native speakers reading Italian sentences, total reading times display the ASH effect: a stronger advantage for correct over incorrect auxiliaries with aspectually prototypical core verbs than with peripheral exemplars. In word production, the ASH effect appears when visually presented auxiliaries prime production of participles corresponding to infinitive stimuli. The pattern of results conforms to linguistic markedness and suggests how the ASH may be reflected in the real-time processing of auxiliaries.

German manner-of-motion verbs can take both haben ‘have’ and sein ‘be’ as perfect auxiliaries. It has recently been proposed that, in these cases, auxiliary selection is determined by the feature [locomotion], where [+locomotion] triggers sein ‘be’ and [-locomotion] triggers haben ‘have’ (Randall 2007). In this paper, we explore the notion of locomotion from an empirical semantic perspective. We report the results of an acceptability judgment task and we show that some manner-of-motion verbs are more typically associated with [+locomotion] than others depending on the prominence of directionality involved in verb semantics. However, we argue that locomotion is not a property of verbs themselves but rather a property of constructions (Goldberg 1995), which impose a specific semantic construal on the verbs.

The retreat of BE as perfect auxiliary in the history of English is examined. Corpus data are presented showing that the initial advance of HAVE was most closely connected to a restriction against BE in past counterfactuals. Other factors which have been reported to favor the spread of HAVE are either dependent on the counterfactual effect, or significantly weaker in comparison. It is argued that the effect can be traced to the semantics of the BE perfect, which denoted resultativity rather than anteriority proper. Related data from other older Germanic and Romance languages are presented, and finally implications for existing theories of auxiliary selection stemming from the findings presented are discussed.

The main purpose of this paper is to provide experimental evidence that two syntactic reflexes of split intransitivity in German – the selection of perfective auxiliaries and the impersonal passive construction – are sensitive to an aspectual/thematic hierarchy of verb classes. We show that there is a split between ‘core’ verbs that elicit categorical intuitions from native speakers, and ‘intermediate’ verbs that exhibit gradience. Furthermore, crossdialectal differences between northern and southern German with respect to auxiliary selection tend to occur only with intermediate verbs. We argue that these findings lend support to the view that the unaccusative/unergative distinction is considerably more unstable than often assumed, and suggest that projectionist theories of the lexicon-syntax interface such as those directly derived from the Unaccusative Hypothesis may not be able to account for the systematic variation exhibited by the data.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the properties associated with unaccusativity and the selection of auxiliary verbs (AUX) in the perfect tenses of the modern Romance languages. The modern languages that have a split-AUX system (such as Italian and French) operate under a principle in which some intransitive verbs select the equivalent of to be as their AUX in the compound past tenses, and others select the equivalent of to have. In research I have conducted over the past decade in the Italian language classroom, Bentley and Eythórsson’s auxiliary selection hierarchy (ASH) is best suited to explain how L2 Italian learners acquire the ability to make the appropriate surface AUX selection.

This article presents an apparent locality condition violation observed in Standard Breton masculine human plurals ending in -où. It proposes a unique impoverishment rule deleting a syntacticosemantic feature conditioned by a specified phonological exponent. Adopting a specific architectural view of lenition, it forces a rethinking of the precise timing of various postsyntactic processes, including certain types of impoverishment rules as well as Agree-Copy in dissociated Agr nodes. It also lends support to the independent claims that syntacticosemantic features are not overridden during Spell-Out and that Vocabulary Insertion applies to a linearized structure, not a hierarchical one.

The value of computer tomografy for localization of lost guiding wire in a non-palpable breast lesions