The present paper investigates the Hijazi Arabic (HA) morphosyntactic properties of the widely known linguistic phenomenon of sluicing from a generative perspective, taking into account the latest advancements of the Minimalist Approach (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2001). In this paper, sluicing is a linguistic phenomenon of deleting an entire TP clause, leaving only a wh-remnant. Adopting the Structural PF-Deletion approach, we

The Preposition Stranding Generalization and Conditions on Sluicing: Evidence from Emirati Arabic

This paper reports the results of three acceptability judgment experiments on Saudi Arabic elliptical questions (sluicing) with prepositional phrases. We show that in standard cases of merger type sluicing and contrastive sluicing there is no penalty for leaving out the preposition. Under an analysis of sluicing with syntactic identity between antecedent and ellipsis site, such examples require preposition stranding in the ellipsis site. We call this pattern OPUS, which the reader is invited to interpret as an abbreviation, depending on their theoretical predilections, as Ostensible P-stranding Under Sluicing or as Omission of Preposition Under Sluicing. Our findings show that Saudi Arabic violates Merchant’s (2001) second form identity generalization. Further experiments reveal that the status of the examples depends on the status of the most acceptable synonymous source within the ellipsis site; in particular, when neither a cleft structure nor a resumptive structure are grammatically available in the ellipsis site, the acceptability of OPUS decays. We interpret this as evidence that there is syntactic structure at the ellipsis site and that the wh-remnant in these elliptical questions can – and sometimes must – relate to a resumptive pronoun in the ellipsis site.

This chapter discusses two strands of research where the interaction of ellipsis with movement has been used to construct arguments pertaining to the implementation of movement in the grammar, the architecture of the grammar, and the nature of the grammar more broadly. Both lines of research discussed in this chapter take as their empirical starting point asymmetries in the behavior of moved constituents depending on whether movement originates within an ellipsis site or not. Movement from an ellipsis site is sometimes less restricted than movement from an overt phrase hypothesized to correspond to the silent structure at the ellipsis site and sometimes more restricted. The overall conclusions that can be drawn from the phenomena sampled here are that syntactic structure is present at the ellipsis site, that locality constraints are most likely not lifted within the ellipsis site, and that the identity condition on ellipsis is semantic/pragmatic rather than syntactic.

The phenomenon of clitic doubling is known to be especially interesting with respect to the Romance languages. As its name suggest, clitic doubling involves the doubling of a verbal argument by a clitic pronoun inside the same propositional structure. From a generative perspective it was initially investigated focusing on its properties as exhibited in those Romance languages where it is attested. Thus Jaeggli (1982) who was the first to notice its theoretical importance, describes it for River Plate Spanish (spoken in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay). Over the years, different factors that make clitic doubling possible, likely or even obligatory have been studied. Grammatical factors such as e.g. pronominal vs. non-pronominal, accusative vs. dative, the occurrence vs. non-occurrence of different object marking together with semantic and pragmatic factors such as e.g. animacy, specificity or definiteness have been held responsible for the occurrence and distribution. This volume is a collection of papers given at the workshop “Clitic Doubling and the syntax/semantic interface in Romance DPs” held at the University of Hamburg in November 2014. The workshop was a joint event organized by NEREUS (Research Network for Referential Categories in Spanish and other Romance languages” and the DFG-project “Clitic Doubling across Romance”. The papers of this volume deal with different aspects of the clitic doubling construction and related issues, such as its semantic, pragmatic and morphosyntactic properties across the Romance languages and beyond, thereby contributing to the understanding of the nature of the cross-linguistic variation, as well as the micro-variation observed within.

This chapter provides an introduction to syntax from a generative perspective. Due to space constraints, the chapter zooms in on mainstream derivational (‘transformational’) approaches, essentially along the lines developed by Chomsky and many others. The chapter highlights the long-standing and constant ingredients of the mainstream theory, and it does so by emphasizing and illustrating the characteristic theory-driven deductive argumentation. After introducing and motivating hierarchical structure and the structural relation c-command, the chapter explores the concept of abstract structure by studying long-distance dependencies. In particular, it is shown how copies left by moved constituents play a role in interpretive processes. Furthermore, a case study of VP ellipsis provides arguments that although the ellipsis site is not associated with any overt material, it nevertheless has internal structure. In sum, the chapter seeks to illuminate the nature of the interplay between data and theory construction within generative approaches.

The goal of this squib is to explain an intriguing data set involving appositives and fragment answers, thereby providing support for the idea that appositives, and by extension parentheses more generally, are related to the host clause in syntax, via parenthetical coordination.

Previous studies proposed that there is no CP ellipsis in English (Kennedy and Merchant 2000) and Korean (Ahn and Cho 2009, 2010, cf. Park 2009). In particular, Ahn and Cho (2009, 2010) suggested that apparent CP ellipsis in Korean be in fact DP ellipsis (null realization of DPs in more neutral terms), which is subsumed to pro-drop in Korean. Specifically, Ahn and Cho (2010) make it clear that there is no genuine DP ellipsis in Korean and apparent DP ellipsis is explained with pro. However, close examination of other data reveals that this is not always the case; considering sentences with reflexives, NPIs, indefinite DPs and free choice DPs, we claim that Korean has both pro with no internal structure and DP ellipsis with an internal structure in the ellipsis site, which explain frequent zero realization of argument DPs in many constructions. We propose that the DP contained in the target clause undergoes partial deletion - the DP is stripped of phonological and semantic features only - when it is identical with the one in the antecedent clause. That is, the internal structure remains intact in the ellipsis site. As to the interpretation of the null argument, we propose that the ellipsis site is filled in with semantic features by overt nominals in the antecedent clause and obtains interpretation at LF (cf. Oku 1998, Saito 2007).

To introduce this Special Issue entitled Clausal and Nominal Complements in Monolingual and Bilingual Grammars, we begin by explaining what originally motivated this Special Issue [...]

Theories differ as to how people recover the meaning of verb-phrase (VP) ellipsis. According to the syntactic account, people reproduce the syntactic structure of the antecedent during the processing of VP ellipsis. This account thus predicts that the ellipsis site contains syntactic information. Using the structural priming paradigm, we found that, in Mandarin, an ellipsis prime (a double-object or prepositional-object dative antecedent plus a VP ellipsis) was less effective in priming than a full-form prime sentence (the same antecedent plus the full-form equivalent of the VP ellipsis) but behaved similarly to a baseline prime (the same antecedent plus a neutral sentence). The result thus suggests that syntactic structure is not reproduced at the ellipsis site and supports the semantic account in which VP ellipsis is interpreted via a semantic representation.

We are now in a position of apparent contradiction: how can the form- identity effects be reconciled with the island-insensitivity? In this chapter, I will propose a two-pronged approach to this conundrum: some islands are indeed PF-phenonema, with the deviancy repaired by PF-deletion, while other cases of apparent insensitivity to islands are illusory on closer inspection. At the core of my analysis rest two ideas: first, that the condition on identity that deletion is sensitive to is a fundamentally semantic one, not a structural one, as proposed in Chapter 1, and second, that ellipsis in sluicing is the result of PF-deletion. This combination of semantic conditions with deletion will strike some as odd: generally, the proponents of deletion have been identified with those who claim that the conditions on deletion are indeed structural, while the semantic theories of conditioning have tended to leave the syntactic side underinvestigated. But there is no inherent incompatibility in the claim that I am making here. Rather, it simply states that while ellipsis sites contain syntactic structure (unpronounced due to PF-operations of deletion, triggered by the E feature of Chapter 2), the fact that they are ellipsis sites is due to semantic considerations (ideally also implemented by means of E, as proposed in Chapter

This study provides an argument for syntactic approaches to sluicing. We base our study on the novel observation that Parasitic Gaps (PG) are licensed in sluicing contexts. We show that, in order for PGs to be licensed in sluicing contexts, overt wh-movement must occur, leaving a real gap in the ellipsis site. Therefore, the ellipsis site has the full-fledged syntactic structure that licenses PGs.

This paper focuses mainly on negative polar questions. Following on from the relevant literature, we distinguish between two types of negative polar questions – those with inner negation and those with outer negation – showing that each is associated with specific morphosyntactic and semantic properties. Previous studies have revealed that there is a strong correlation between negative polar questions and the notion of epistemicity, based on the hypothesis that a speech act epistemic operator occurs in the syntactic structure of both types of negative polar questions. In this paper, we argue that epistemicity is involved in the derivation of all polar questions, irrespective of their being positive or negative, reflecting the intuition that the speech act of request expresses the uncertainty of the speaker with respect to a certain propositional content. Accordingly, we propose a syntactic derivation of polar questions in which the role of the functional projection encoding epistemicity ( EpistP ) is central. Finally, we show that the morphosyntactic and semantic properties of negative polar questions stem from the interaction between the proposed structure and negation.

Previous studies have suggested that the degree of visibility of oropharyngeal structures (OP class) and mandibular space (MS) length can predict difficult laryngoscopy. However, those studies were either inconsistent or omit description of how to perform these tests with regard to body, head and tongue position, and the use of phonation, hyoid versus thyroid cartilage and inside versus outside of the mentum. The purpose of this investigation was to determine which method of testing best predicts difficult laryngoscopy. In each of 213 consenting adults the OP class was determined in 24 method combinations: two body positions (sitting and supine), three head positions (neutral, sniff, and full extension), two tongue positions (in and out), and with and without phonation. In each patient MS length was measured in 24 method combinations: two body positions (sitting and supine), three head positions (neutral, sniff, and full extension), two distal end points (hyoid and thyroid cartilage), and two proximal end points (inside and outside of the mentum). In each patient the laryngoscopic grade was determined at the time of induction of anesthesia. We defined laryngoscopic grades III (n = 24) and 4 (n = 0) as difficult. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC area) for each combination was used to compare the combinations and determine significant differences: ROC area = 0.5 implied a totally uninformative combination and ROC area = 1.0 a combination that predicted perfectly. Logistic regression analysis was used to calculate a predictor of difficult intubation that combined both OP class and MS length (the performance index). The performance index could then be used to calculate sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive value, and probability of difficult intubation. The ROC areas for the different combinations used to assess OP class ranged from 0.78 to 0.94. The best combination was with the patient sitting, head in extension, tongue out, and with or without phonation. For MS length, the ROC areas ranged from 0.58 to 0.77; the best combination was the patient sitting, with the head in extension, with distance measured from the inside of the mentum to the thyroid cartilage. Combining the OP class and MS length (performance index = 2.5 X OP class - MS length in centimeters) significantly increased predictability of difficult intubation. At performance index = 0 and = 2, the probability of difficult intubation was 3.5% and 24%, respectively. With clinically relevant cutpoints for the performance index it was found that most difficult intubations could be predicted, but approximately half of those predicted to be difficult would in fact be easy. Based on the above ROC areas and ease of performing the test for the patient, we recommend that these tests be performed with patients in the sitting position, with the head in full extension, the tongue out, and with phonation, and with distance measured from the thyroid cartilage to inside of the mentum. Nevertheless, it is clear that these two tests, either used alone or in combination, will fail to predict a few difficult laryngoscopies and that they will predict difficult laryngoscopy in a significant number of patients in whom the trachea is easy to intubate.

Introduction: Broca and Wernicke’s patients perform satisfactorily regarding the processing of canonical syntactic structures, as maintained by previous studies; however, there has been a gap in the literature because no particular research has yet investigated the performance of these patients in the Persian circumstances once they were required to analyze sentences which would demand extra-semantic processing. This study clarifies the role of two critical semantic operations demanding extra-semantic processing at the sentential level: Aspectual coercion. It complements to provide some evidence on the localist view of the brain. Our rationale for selecting these operations was their pure semantic nature, not relying on morphosyntactic properties. Materials and Methods: Having recruited two age- and education-matched Broca, two Wernicke, and four healthy controls, we conducted a semantic judgment task in which the participants were asked to express their correct semantic judgment in the two coercion and two normal conditions. Results: Our results showed an approximately above-chance performance of the Broca group for all conditions; however, in the Wernicke group, the same result was not observed due to their poor performance in coercion conditions, though in ordinary sentences, they performed much better. Conclusion: Our findings, along with similar off-line and imaging studies, corroborate the view of localism, based on which Wernicke’s area is mainly responsible for the primary semantic operations while Broca’s area predominantly takes over syntactic parsing.

Across many languages, multiple sluicing obeys a clausemate constraint. This can be understood on the empirically well-supported assumption that covert phrasal wh-movement is clause-bounded and subject to Superiority. We provide independent evidence for syntactic structure at the ellipsis site and for locality constraints on movement operations within the ellipsis site. The fact that the distribution of multiple sluicing is substantially narrower than that of multiple wh-questions, on their single-pair as well as their pair-list reading, entails that there must be mechanisms for scoping in-situ wh-phrases that do not rely on covert phrasal wh-movement. We adopt the choice-functional account for single-pair readings. For pair-list readings, we develop a novel functional analysis, argue for the functional basis of pair-list readings, and present a new perspective on pair-list readings of questions with quantifiers.