Clausal Domain Research Articles

Subject nominalizations in Setswana

Agent nominalizations of an object-bearing transitive predicate require of-insertion in many languages, including English (e.g., driver *(of ) a truck). Note that the same transitive predicate is not associated with of-insertion in the clausal syntax (e.g., drive (*of ) a truck). This work provides empirical evidence from Setswana (Bantu) and suggests that of-insertion is not necessary in Setswana agent nominalizations and subject nominalizations, more broadly construed. As long as the syntactic licensing requirements are satisfied, they need not resort to of-insertion. Additionally, I add weight to the claim that an external argument can be represented inside subject nominalizations (Baker & Vinokurova 2009). Adopting the Phrasal Layering approach (Alexiadou & Schäfer 2010, among others), I argue that parallels can be drawn between the nominal domain and the clausal domain in Setswana.

On the status of NCIs: An experimental investigation on so-called Strict NC languages

This paper investigates the status of Negative Concord Items (NCIs) in three so-called Strict Negative Concord (NC) languages (namely, Greek, Romanian, and Russian). An experimental study was designed to gather evidence concerning the speakers’ acceptability and interpretation of sequences with argumental NCIs in subject, object, and both positions whendhen/nu/newere not present. Our results show that NCIs are negative indefinites whose presence in a clausal domain is enough to assign a single negation reading to the whole sequence, thus arguing in support of the hypothesis that in NC structures the minimal semantic requirement to convey single negation is that one or more NCIs encoding a negative feature appear within a sentential domain. We argue that in these structuresdhen/nu/neare the instantiations of a negative feature [neg] disembodied from an indefinite negative NCI in order to obey a syntax–phonology interface constraint.

Linguistic markers of autism spectrum conditions in narratives: A comprehensive analysis.

Background & Aims: Narratives are regularly elicited as part of standardized assessments for autism spectrum conditions (ASC) such as the ADOS, but have rarely been utilized as linguistic data in their own right. We here aimed for a specific and comprehensive quantitative linguistic profile of such narratives across nominal, verbal, and clausal domains of grammatical organization, and error patterns. Methods: We manually transcribed and annotated narratives elicited from the ADOS from a sample of bilingual autistic Spanish-Catalan children (n = 18), matched with typically developing controls (n = 18) on vocabulary-based verbal IQ. Results: Results revealed fewer relative clauses and more frequent errors in referential specificity and non-relational content-word choice in ASC. Frequent error types are also discussed qualitatively. Conclusions & Implications: These findings, based on more finegrained linguistically defined variables, help to disentangle previous inconsistencies in the literature, and to better situate language changes in the spectrum of neurocognitive changes in this population.

Canonical and non-canonical (co)predicate agreement in Highest Alemannic dialects

This paper deals with the distribution of agreement patterns for target adjectives or past participles in Swiss German dialects focussing on non-attributive domains. While agreement outside the nominal phrase has been lost in the development towards Standard German and in most dialects, in some Swiss German dialects certain syntactic domains still show formal agreement. Against this backdrop, two topics will be addressed in this paper. It gives an overview of the extent, function and distribution of formal agreement within the clausal domain on the basis of survey data, as far as possible. Another focus is default neuter inflection, which no longer shows canonical gender agreement with a neuter controller, but has developed a new function in the field of aspectuality.

Negative Polarity Items, DPs and Phase Sliding

A negative polarity item (henceforth, NPI) needs a licensor and it may be an overt negation, question force, or a conditional clause (Benmamoun, 1997; Kelepir, 2001; Kumar, 2006; Kural, 1997; Laka, 2013; Mahajan, 1990; Vasishth, 1999). Studies on NPI literature abound and various studies have suggested various licensing conditions of NPIs. However, literature on the licensing conditions of NPIs can be grouped under two major titles. One of them is clausemateness (Choe, 1988; Kelepir, 2001; Muraki, 1978), which basically requires that NPIs and negation be in the same clausal domain. On the other side of the coin stands a more recent account, i.e. phasemateness (Kayabaşı & Özgen 2018; Yamashita, 2003), which states that NPIs must be spelt out within the same domain in which negation exists. Given the two accounts, only phasemateness can predict the behaviors of NPIs in full finite CPs, whereas none of those accounts can predict the grammaticality of nominal DP domains in Turkish with a negative licensor outside of the spell-out domain of the same DP. I attempted to discuss this problem at length, and show that the structural hierarchy within Turkish DPs is somewhat tricky. I will follow Gallego (2010) and Chomsky (2001) and assume that there is phase sliding within DPs, thus NPIs are also licensed within the same domain on the grounds of weak phase impenetrability condition ‘PIC’ (a.k.a. PIC2). The system I will propose here is also borne out by other independent factors such as binding and embedding in Turkish.

What determines the varying relation of case and agreement? Evidence from the Ugric languages

AbstractAgreement and case assignment can be interdependent, partially independent, or independent of each other (Baker & Vinokurova 2010; Baker 2014, 2015). These parametric options appear to have random distribution across languages. This paper claims on the basis of the comparison of the Ugric languages (Mansi, Khanty, and Hungarian) that the correlation of case and agreement or the lack of it may not be random. A strict correlation of case and agreement is attested in sentence structures displaying a fusion of grammatical functions and discourse roles. When these roles are encoded in distinct clausal domains, case and agreement have separate functions and licensing conditions, with case marking grammatical functions, and agreement associated with discourse roles. At the same time, relics of their former syntactic interdependence may survive in morphology, resulting in a partial correlation between case and agreement. It is shown that dependent case theory can account for the whole range of variation attested in the relation of case and agreement.

Finiteness in South Slavic Complement Clauses

This paper shows that the distribution of (non‑)finiteness in the South Slavic languages reflects an implicational scale along an independently attested semantic complementation hierarchy (e.g., Givón 1980). We suggest that in the South Slavic languages, finiteness is triggered by clausal agreement features associated with different syntactic heads. Building on a complexity approach to the complementation hierarchy, we propose that cross-linguistic variation in finiteness and variation across different types of complements are the result of language-specific differences in the distribution of agreement features. More broadly, we conclude that there is no (universal) semantic correlate of (non‑)finiteness and, contra cartographic approaches, that finiteness is not confined to a particular domain in the clause. Following Adger (2007), we argue that finiteness can be distributed over all clausal domains.

Category Mismatches in Coordination Revisited

We reexamine cases of coordinated elements that do not match in syntactic category. We show that these fall into two types. The first type includes predicates, modifiers in the clausal domain, and such modifiers apparently coordinated with arguments. We argue that these do not actually involve coordination of unlike categories. The second type involves coordinated arguments of different categories. With this type, unlike the first, noninitial conjuncts may violate selectional restrictions. To account for these violations, researchers have typically posited a special status for the first conjunct in a coordinate structure, such that it alone can determine the category of the coordinate phrase. We show that such accounts are untenable. First, the final conjunct can be what matters for selection, if it is closest to the selecting or selected element. Second, category mismatches are not free, but are extremely limited and exactly match those observed in ellipsis and displacement. This calls for a uniform account of these mismatches, not one specific to coordination. We spell out such an analysis, in which displacement, ellipsis, and coordination permit certain categories to behave as certain other categories through their effects on null syntactic heads.

Coalescence: A Unification of Bundling Operations in Syntax

This article revisits the status of two proposed bundling operations that affect heads: Feature Scattering ( Giorgi and Pianesi 1997 ), which accounts for variation in the distribution of features across functional heads, and M-Merger ( Matushansky 2006 ), which accounts for head adjunction in head movement. While these mechanisms have been situated in the presyntactic lexicon and a postsyntactic module, respectively, I argue that they can receive a unified analysis in terms of one syntactic operation called Coalescence, which bundles structurally adjacent heads in particular configurations. This eliminates redundancies in the architecture of the grammar while maintaining prior empirical coverage, and sheds new light on long-puzzling properties of head movement. The proposal is illustrated in the analysis of several patterns of head bundling in the inflectional and clausal domains.

The head the construct: Construct state nominals as a novel window to syntactic movement difficulties in hearing impairment

Children with hearing-impairment often show difficulties related to different kinds of syntactic movement. According to current syntactic analyses, Hebrew construct state nominals (CSN) involve syntactic movement, in which the noun moves to the determiner position. This kind of movement has never been tested in individuals with hearing-impairment. In this study we examined how Hebrew-speaking hearing-impaired children produce definite CSNs. A well-functioning movement of N to D prevents an overt determiner before the head of the definite CSN, and therefore we took the (incorrect) addition of a determiner before the head noun as an indication of a difficulty in moving the N to D.The participants were 32 children with hearing-impairment aged 9;1–12;2 whose performance was compared to 18 hearing children aged 8;10–10;7. We tested their oral reading of 63 CSNs in texts. The results showed that the children with hearing-impairment had a remarkable difficulty in reading the CSNs. The most noticeable error they made was that they incorrectly added a determiner before the head of the definite CSN, in addition to the determiner preceding the complement of the noun. The hearing control children virtually never made this error.Since the D position before the head should not be available if the noun had moved to D, we concluded that they could not properly move the noun to D. This illustrates, for the first time, a deficit in N-to-D movement in this population. The difficulty in N-to-D movement in the nominal domain is consistent with these children’s difficulties in other movement-derived structures in the clausal domain such as object A-bar movement and V-to-C movement. More broadly, these results support a movement analysis of CSN.

Strict vs. free word order patterns in Korean nominal phrases and Cyclic Linearization

AbstractKorean nominal phrases display both flexibility in their internal word order and also rigidity in the sequencing of certain elements. This paper focuses on a linear ordering constraint on the occurrence of arguments of nouns which requires a strict relative sequencing of such elements, no matter where they are distributed across different locations within DPs. The paper suggests that the most appropriate mechanism to capture the complex patterns observed is Fox and Pesetsky's () Cyclic Linearization approach, which records and compares the linear ordering of elements across different Spell‐out domains. It is argued that the patterns found in Korean can be successfully captured in a Cyclic Linearization analysis if it is assumed that Korean nominal projections consist in two Spell‐out domains–DP and nP – in a way resembling the bi‐cyclic composition of clauses, and that Korean provides novel support from the syntax of nominal phrases for Cyclic Linearization, originally motivated by patterns found in clausal domains.

The cost of raising quantifiers

The main proposal of this paper is that quantifier raising (QR) is not subject to QR-specific locality or domain restrictions but that differences observed between overt and covert movement are the result of an increased processing burden associated with multiple steps of covert movement and the lack of a cue for the parser to initiate a search for a covert dependency. One of the main observations is that QR from different types of clausal complements is gradient and speakers’ acceptance of non-local inverse scope tracks syntactic complexity defined over clausal domains. The account develops a preliminary algorithm for calculating processing costs based on the complexity of the structure, which in turn is reflected in the number of steps QR has to undergo in a cyclic movement approach to inverse scope.

Introducing the Special Issue: Clausal and Nominal Complements in Monolingual and Bilingual Grammars

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 [...]

Recasting the typology of multiple <i>wh</i>-fronting: Evidence from Pontic Greek

In this paper we revisit and revise the typology of multiple questions and multiple wh-fronting (MWF) in the light of data from Romeyka, a Greek variety spoken in Pontus, Turkey, and from another Pontic Greek variety spoken in northern Greece. Both varieties provide evidence for wh-fronting as focus movement, their most striking feature being the availability of single-pair interpretations in spite of strict Superiority. It turns out that the parametric system deriving the space of variation in multiple wh-fronting must be extended to accommodate the facts presented here, which seem to instantiate a further type of MWF (with a corresponding type of non-MWF languages), not predicted by the existing typology. At the same time, put in a cross-linguistic perspective, the Romeyka facts may help us uncover independent restrictions on the possibilities that this parametric system makes available. We propose that the availability of peripheral positions and their activation in the left or low periphery may be a point of parametric variation. Furthermore, still complying with Bošković’s (2007) theory of Attract-1/all, certain Focus heads can be Attract-1, thus deriving the compatibility of Superiority with single pair readings. Finally, we present some speculations about a potential correlation between word order/head directionality in the clausal domain and the kind of information structure-related head (e.g. Topic vs. Focus) that can take on an Attract-1 feature.

Nominal architecture in Jamaican Creole

Our study shows that the extended projection of nominals in Jamaican Creole (JC) is composed of a rich array of hierarchically organized functional projections, in line with cartographic research (Cinque 2002, Rizzi 2004, Belletti 2004). The functional material identified strikes parallelisms with that previously reported for the clausal domain of JC, both in their distributive and interpretative properties and their tendency to overtly realize either their specifier or their head (Durrleman 2001, 2005, 2015). We argue that the identified nominal architecture, coupled with the last resort phenomenon of doubly filling both head and specifier positions (Chomsky & Lasnik 1977, Koopman 1993, Dimitrova-Vulchanova & Giusti 1998, Starke 2004), has implications for another construction in Creole, namely ‘bare sentences’ (Dechaine 1991). These sentences give rise to telicity effects depending on, amongst other things, properties of the internal argument, whose high functional structure must be made visible by respecting the doubly filled XP filter.

Phases, Reflexives, and Definiteness

AbstractThis paper investigates a puzzling correlation between two seemingly disparate phenomena: the crosslinguistic distribution of reflexive possessives and definiteness marking. As observed in Reuland 2007, 2011 and supported here by additional crosslinguistic evidence, reflexive possessives are available only in languages that either lack definiteness marking or encode definiteness postnominally. Languages that have prenominal (article‐like) definiteness marking, on the other hand, systematically lack reflexive possessives. I argue that such facts support a particular approach to reflexive binding—specifically, one that has the following properties: (i) binding domains are stated in terms of phases, (ii) in addition to CPs and vPs, DPs are phases, and (iii) DP is not universal. I closely examine another robust crosslinguistic correlation regarding definiteness marking—Bošković's (2008) Left Branch Extraction generalization—and show how it directly follows from the key assumptions of the analysis. I situate my proposals within a broader context of the phase theory, arguing that the syntactic representation of (in)definiteness is the crucial factor in determining the phasehood status of nominal categories. I extend my analysis to the clausal domain and discuss it in the context of languages that allow reflexives in the subject position.

Floating around in the Dutch nominal domain

In this article I investigate the internal syntax of Dutch nominal expressions liketwee slangen van elk twee meter(two snakes of each two meter). The prepositionvanseparates the quantifierelkfrom the expressiontwee slangento which it is connected interpretatively. From a purely observational view, the quantifier could be said to be floating in the nominal domain. In this article I argue that this floatingelkis an instance of so-called ‘binominaleach’. So far, discussions of the binominal-each-phenomenon have concentrated on dependencies involving material in the clausal domain. In this article I show that dependencies involving binominalelkare also attested DP-internally. Syntactic issues that will be discussed in the context of the DP-internal binominal-each-phenomenon include: Constituency of the nominal expression, the nature of the DP-internal anaphoric dependency, the various manifestations of the binominal pattern, and word order rearrangements by DP-internal displacement.

On Dependent Ergative Case (in Shipibo) and Its Derivation by Phase

Focusing on the Shipibo language, I defend a simple ‘‘dependent case’’ theory of ergative case marking, where ergative case is assigned to the higher of two NPs in a clausal domain. I show how apparent failures of this rule can be explained assuming that VP is a Spell-Out domain distinct from the clause, and that this bleeds ergative case assignment for c-command relationships that already exist in VP and are unchanged in CP. This accounts for the apparent underapplication of ergative case marking with ditransitives, reciprocals, and dyadic experiencer verbs, as opposed to the applicatives of unaccusative verbs, which do have ergative subjects. Finally, I show how case assignment interacts with restructuring to explain constructions in which ergative case appears to be optional.

Verb cognates in Haitian Creole

AbstractThis article bears on three “verb cognate” (VC) constructions attested in Haitian Creole, where the verb and a homonymous replica of the verb cooccur within the same clausal domain. In the first two constructions – VC1 and VC2 – the verb's cognate is crucially unstressed and supports further lexical material, while in the third construction – VC3, which subsumes the subcase known as

Syncretism and functional expansion in Germanic wh-expressions

This paper investigates syncretism patterns in the inventory of wh-items across North Germanic (Scandinavian) in comparison with other Germanic varieties. Based on the empirical evidence it is argued that syncretism only arises across query types that are structurally adjacent. A “nanosyntactic” account of the data is developed whereby the query types are structured along two functional sequences, one for expressions in the nominal domain and the other for expressions in the clausal domain: the Superset Principle (Caha, 2009) in conjunction with a concept of best fit ensures that exponents of a question type can also spell out all other structurally embedded question types unless there exists a different exponent without the superfluous higher structure. Issues concerning directionality for expansion of spell-out ranges are also discussed.