Topicalization and object drop in Jordanian Arabic

This research article provides evidence from Jordanian Arabic (JA) that negation is syntactically bound to the projection of a phasal head, wherein NegP is structurally licensed to project exclusively within phase-bound configurations. Therefore, NegP can project separately in CP and v*P, offering support to the multi-locus view (Alqassas 2012. The morpho-syntax and pragmatics of Levantine Arabic negation: A synchronic and diachronic analysis. Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University) that NegP in Arabic is not restricted to one structural position in the clause structure. NegP can rather project separately above TP or below TP. However, as we argue for in this article the projection of NegP is correlated with the presence of a phasal head (Chomsky 2007. Approaching UG from below. In Uli Sauerland & Hans-Martin Gärtner (eds.), Interfaces+recursion=language? Chomsky’s minimalism and the view from syntax-semantics, 1–30. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter). Our evidence comes from two interrelated phenomena in JA: (1) the possibility of negating the past tense copula ka:n independently from the negation of the main verb in transitive and passive sentences and (2) the impossibility of independently negating the verb and the past-tense copula ka:n in unaccusative clauses. Following Jarrah’s (2023. Passive vs. unaccusative predicates: A phase-based account. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 41. 1397–1424) assumption that unaccusative predicates, unlike passive or transitive verbs, do not project phases in JA grammar, we propose that the use of two NegPs in the same clause with unaccusative clauses is prohibited as these unaccusative predicates do not project phases. This assumption is significant as phases, local domains, are not only found to be independent in terms of their Φ-content (their head bears an independent set of unvalued Φ-features) but also in terms of negation.

The purpose of this paper is to show that there is a striking difference in word order between Modern Japanese and Early Old Japanese. Early Old Japanese lacks the canonical transitive pattern [Subject-ga Object-o V]. The basic word order in Early Old Japanese is [Subject-ga/no Object-O V], in which the subject is marked by the genitive ga or no and a morphologically unmarked object must appear immediately adjacent to the verb. When the object is marked by wo, it is obligatorily moved over a subject, resulting in [Object-wo Subject-ga/no V]. Following Miyagawa (1989) and Miyagawa and Ekida (2003), I argue that a bare object is assigned abstract case under the strict adjacency requirement, but that wo in Early Old Japanese does not function as an accusative case. The particle wo differs crucially from the case particle o in Modern Japanese in that it marks not only the direct object of a transitive verb, but all kinds of internal arguments of both transitive and intransitive verbs. Furthermore, wo conveys a definite interpretation. An element marked by wo moves to a particular structural position, namely Spec(vP) or Spec(CP), where it is assigned definite/topic interpretations.

I argue that semi-lexical have is a transitive verb in the sense that it has the same selectional properties as lexical transitives but is lexically underspecified. I propose a system of argument linking that assigns verbs a set of ‘D-selectors’ (selectors for determiner phrases) that are distinguished by a ‘thematic feature’ ±θ; selectors are licensed by linking rules that associate them with a position in a conceptual structure on the basis of their ±θ-specification. I argue that have is underspecified both syntactically (its initial D-selector can be +θ or –θ) and semantically (it lacks a lexical conceptual structure, which must thus be provided in syntax). I show that this enables the major interpretations of have (causative, affected experiencer, possessive, locative, affectee) to be derived straightforwardly. A particular contribution of the paper is its description and analysis of ‘affectee have’, which, as I show, poses particular problems for recent analyses such as Kim (2012) and Myler (2016).

This article aims to describe and examine the antipassive construction in the Tenetehára language (Tupi-Guarani family). For this, it will be shown that the transitive verbs, on receiving the morpheme {puru-}, then exhibit the following properties of antipassive constructions: (i) they come to have an intransitive syntactic structure and (ii) the abstract Case of the internal argument is not valued by v, but by the postposition -ehe. Generally, such configurations behave essentially like intransitive sentences. Using a minimalist approach, we show that the main difference between an antipassive clause and a transitive one is that although the antipassive vP selects an external argument, its head is not able to value the abstract Case of the internal argument. For this reason, the object is dependent on the postposition -ehe for the oblique Case. Furthermore, unlike what happens in the derivation of transitive constructions, the φ-feature of the antipassive vP is lexically valued, which does not allow the agreement (nominative system) in terms of φ-feature, with its external argument. The result is that this external argument moves to the highest vP Spec position in the tree structure, whose head is instantiated by the verb {-wer} “want”, with which it establishes a relationship agreement in terms of φ-feature , triggering the second agreement paradigm (absolutive system).

This paper focuses on the characteristics ofcircum’s prefixation in Latin taking into account the properties of this item in different syntactic contexts and its combination with transitive and intransitive base verbs. The analysis follows a non-lexicalist framework −Distributed Morphology (Halle, Morris & Alec Marantz. 1993. Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. In K. Hale & S. Keyser (eds.),The view from building 20, 111–176. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), specifically Acedo-Matellán’s (Acedo-Matellán, Víctor. 2016.The morphosyntax of transitions. A case study in Latin and other languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press) approach−, which is particularly relevant to relate the prefix to its homophonic preposition and adverb. Thus, we assume that this prefix is a Root related to Place in the main structure, not a preposition or an adverb incorporated to a verbal configuration. In fact, we argue that the distinction among the prefix, the preposition and the adverb derives from the merger of the same Root √CIRCUM in different structures. Along this discussion, it is shown that circum’s prefixation has different consequences for the argument structure depending on the location of √CIRCUM in the structure: when it adds the nuance of manner, its presence does not trigger the addition of new arguments; nevertheless, when it is interpreted with reference to final location, unexpected accusative objects frequently appear with the prefixed verb. We argue that these unexpected objects do not end up showing accusative case because ofcircum’s case assignment, but because of the DP position in the main structure. For that reason, the DPs involved in the structure of the prefixed verb behave like any other argumental DP and they are subject to the same syntactic operations (ellipsis, demotion, and so on).

One of the most interesting aspects of the faire-Inf construction in the Romance languages concerns the properties and the structural position of the causee. In the relevant literature, the most consensual hypothesis is that, in these languages, the causee is the grammatical subject of the embedded domain, although it occurs in a post-verbal position and is introduced by a preposition whenever it is dependent on a transitive verb (see Kayne, 1975; Raposo, 1981; Burzio, 1986; Villalba, 1992; Guasti, 1993, 1997, among others). The aim of this paper is to present some evidence against the idea that the causee, in European Portuguese, is the subject of the embedded domain. I will claim that this domain is the projection of a null affix that incausativizes the embedded verb, suspending the assignment of the external θ -role of this verb. In consequence, the causee is merged in the positions classically associated to objects.

Hungarian is often referred to as a discourse-configurational language, since the structural position of constituents is determined by their logical function (topic or comment) rather than their grammatical function (e.g., subject or object). We build on work by Komlósy (1989) and argue that in addition to discourse context, the lexical semantics of the verb also plays a significant role in determining Hungarian word order. In order to investigate the role of lexical semantics in determining Hungarian word order, we conduct a large-scale, data-driven analysis on the ordering of 380 transitive verbs and their objects, as observed in hundreds of thousands of examples extracted from the Hungarian Gigaword Corpus. We test the effect of lexical semantics on the ordering of verbs and their objects by grouping verbs into 11 semantic classes. In addition to the semantic class of the verb, we also include two control features related to information structure, object definiteness and object NP weight, chosen to allow a comparison of their effect size to that of verb semantics. Our results suggest that all three features have a significant effect on verb-object ordering in Hungarian and among these features, the semantic class of the verb has the largest effect. Specifically, we find that stative verbs, such as fed 'cover', jelent 'mean' and övez 'surround', tend to be OV-preferring (with the exception of psych verbs which are strongly VO-preferring) and non-stative verbs, such as bírál 'judge', csökkent 'reduce' and csókol 'kiss', verbs tend to be VO-preferring. These findings support our hypothesis that lexical semantic factors influence word order in Hungarian.

This article aims at focusing on a set of phenomena related to the syntax and semantics of bare count nominals. We will show that bare count nominals unmarked for number (BNs) can occur both in object argument position and in predicate position, and can form denominal verbs. This is because, in syntax, BNs can only occur as internal arguments of relational categories (V, P) to which bare nouns can move and conflate at some point during the syntactic derivation (Hale & Keyser, Prolegomenon to a theory of argument structure, MIT Press, 2002). On the other hand, BNs – being property denoting expressions – can neither occur as internal arguments of unaccusative and complex transitive verbs nor as external arguments due to a structural constraint on subjects / specifiers (Kallulli, The comparative syntax of Albanian. On the contribution of syntactic types to propositional interpretation, University of Durham dissertation, 1999): they must be properly licensed by appropriate functional categories. The novelty of this article is to relate the occurrence of bare nominals with the argument structure position in which they may occur at a syntactic level of representation, and to explain the relationship between argument structure and the interpretation of bare nominals.