Variation in wh-expressions asking for a reason

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 study aims at exploring the adverb largely in late Middle English based on the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, in terms of its functioning as a sentence Focus marker. The article considers syntactic changes in English from the language with V2 tendencies to the one with verb-medial order. Such differences make sentence information structure disrupted, and new elements arise in the language as ‘therapy.’ The assumption made in this paper is as follows: the word largely emerging in English in ca. 1200 starts functioning as a focusing adverb in 1400 as a result of the shift in the main word order patterns. Moreover, investigating late Middle English syntactic structure and taking into account different types of foci based on information structure tagging throughout the Corpus, the study found that positional variations of adverb largely are used as a mechanism of marking a peculiar type of Focus and are governed by its position in relation to the word it modifies.

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 argue that HA employs sluicing and that the ellipsis site contains a fully-fledged syntactic structure that must be deleted at the PF level after the movement of the remnant to a higher CP. On a par with previous crosslinguistic ellipsis studies, the current study shows that ellipsis is permitted if and only if there is a specific head carrying some specific morphosyntactic properties occurring in a local relation to the ellipsis site. This specific head, with its morphosyntactic properties, licenses for the ellipsis phenomenon to occur. The head properties trigger the whword to move from its base-generated position to the specifier position of this particular head, i.e., Spec CP, and then delete all other constituents included within the TP.