Full Clauses Research Articles

Gapping also needs vP-coordination: An argument from French NPI licensing

AbstractThe analysis of gapping still leaves many questions open. At least three aspects remain controversial: whether it involves unpronounced structure, whether clausal or non-clausal constituents are conjoined, and whether all gapped sentences are must be analyzed uniformly. On the basis of French gapped constructions such as Marie n’est jamais allée à Rome ni Jean à Pékin ‘Mary never went to Rome nor John to Beijing’, the paper argues that gapping is not an homogeneous phenomenon. It first shows that in such gapped clauses involving ni, a strict Negative Polarity Item, a negation low inside the first TP can license the ‘negative coordinator’ ni, a fact that a TP-deletion analysis of gapping or a fragment coordination one can capture. Conversely, it shows that a vP-coordination analysis correctly predicts the properties of ni-gapped clauses. However, such an analysis cannot extend to gapped clauses conjoined by double ni : the second conjunct, this time, must be a full clause or a fragment.

Clause linking in L2 English

The development of clause linkage in a second language has been studied extensively in the fields of applied linguistics and second language research. Several studies have focused on the development of specific types of complex structures, essentially based on the development of different classes of subordinate clauses distinguished by traditional grammar. The present contribution uses as a theoretical framework Role and Reference Grammar. RRG’s model of clause linkage proposes a different array of possible relations between combined clauses, adding the concept of cosubordination to the traditional dichotomy coordination/subordination, and pays attention to both predicate-based complexification within the clause and full clause combinations. RRG bases its classification of linkage types on the Interclausal Relations Hierarchy (Van Valin & LaPolla 1997), which unites syntactic and semantic aspects of clause complexification. The present article focuses on the syntax-semantics interface as realized within the Interclausal Relations Hierarchy, and on its impact on the acquisition of clause linkage structures by adolescent L2 learners of English. The corpus consists of oral narrative English interlanguage data elicited from 12- to 18-year-old Dutch-speaking secondary school pupils in Flanders (Belgium). Results show that RRG’s main principles of clause linkage are easily applicable to second language acquisition. The syntactic and semantic strength of a given juncture were found to often coincide in the data, as predicted, and any syntactic encoding of a semantic juncture which matches its semantic strength is likely to be acquired more easily and/or earlier than non-matching realizations. Although not all predictions made by RRG concerning structural variation were confirmed by our L2 English data, we conclude that RRG provides a fruitful, coherent and powerful framework for studying clause linkage and sentence complexification in spoken L2 learner discourse.

Reconceiving Personal Jurisdiction: Sovereignty, Authority, and Individual Rights

This article re-examines the subject personal jurisdiction from the ground up, taking into account four recent decisions by the Supreme Court and reconciling them with the political theory of authority. Most of the academic commentary on the recent decisions is critical. This article, instead, tries to reconstruct from them into a coherent theory of personal jurisdiction that reconciles the conflicting principles of sovereignty and individual rights. Sovereignty speaks at the national level in terms of the assertion of power by the government representing the collective will. Individual rights operate at the opposite extreme, protecting individual interests. Both principles have been invoked to justify the law of personal, reflecting its roots in two different constitutional sources of restraints on personal jurisdiction: the Full Faith and Credit Clause, which speaks to relations among states, and the Due Process Clauses in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which protects natural and artificial persons. The article reconciles these conflicting principles and conflicting sources of law by relying on modern political theories of legitimate authority. These theories are deployed to justify the prevailing distinction between general and specific jurisdiction, re-emphasized in the recent decisions of the Supreme Court. As a result of this analysis, this article proposes a rule for close cases of personal jurisdiction — allowing nonresident individuals and corporations to be free of state power if they have taken feasible precautions against being subjected to it. This allows individuals and firms to escape the power of a state with which they do not want to have any affiliation. It also avoids the problem, first identified in International Shoe Co. v. Washington, that sufficient contacts with the forum are not a matter of “a little more or a little less.” Instead, they mark a qualitative difference between acts that constitute submission to jurisdiction and acts that do not. The article then offers an analysis of the recent decisions and why they are, in the main, correct, and why forum selection clauses deserve the deference that they have received, certainly in litigation between business firms.

Predicting contrast in sentences with and without focus marking

How do we know when a contrast is coming? This study explores the prediction of parallel contrastive phrases, especially NPs, in sentences with and without overt focus marking. A written sentence-completion questionnaire with clauses followed by the conjunction “but” compared unmarked initial clauses to ones with the focus marker “only” on the subject or object. Both conditions with “only” elicited more contrasts overall than the condition without focus marking, and many of the contrasts were with the focus-marked NP. While the baseline (no-only) condition had full clauses for half of the completions, subject focus increased clausal completions and object focus increased negative ellipsis completions (“not”+NP structures), both changes in syntax which make a contrast with the marked NP easy. The production of negative ellipsis sentences primarily in the object-focus condition suggests that the object bias of these sentences in comprehension could relate to their being used more frequently with this meaning. Finally, the overall pattern of results shows that overt marking of contrastive focus increases continuations with contrasts, and the conjunction “but” does not reliably predict explicitly-stated contrasts within a sentence without overt focus marking.

Encasing the Absolutes

The paper explores the issue of structure and case in English absolute constructions, whose subjects are deduced by several descriptive grammars as being in the nominative case due to its supposed neutrality in terms of register. This deduction is countered by systematic accounts presented within the framework of the Minimalist Program which relate the case of absolute constructions to specific grammatical factors. Each proposal is shown as an attempt of analysing absolute constructions as basic predication structures, either full clauses or small clauses. I argue in favour of the small clause approach due to its minimal reliance on transformations and unique stipulations. Furthermore, I propose that small clauses project a singular category, and show that the use of two cases in English absolute constructions can be accounted for if they are analysed as depictive phrases, possibly selected by prepositions. The case of the subject in absolutes is shown to be a result of syntactic and non-syntactic factors. I thus argue in accordance with Minimalist goals that syntactic case does not exist, attributing its role in absolutes to other mechanisms.

What does the acquisition of the determiner phrase features reveal about bilingualism and L2 acquisition? Some introductory remarks

From a formal linguistic perspective, our understanding of how child and adult bilinguals acquire grammar has to date been mainly based on investigations of clause structure and the morphosyntax within the verbal domain. The development of nominals, however, has so far not been investigated at the same level and degree of detail. In particular, comparatively little attention has been placed on the study of the acquisition of nominal structure and of the morphosyntax of nouns, modifying adjectives and their determiners. As a result, no consensus exists concerning the nature of the dif- ficulty in acquiring some or all determiner phrase (DP) features specifically (e.g. the role of L1 features for additive bilingualism or the degree of cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous bilin- gualism and more). One aim of this Special Issue is to begin to fill this research gap by presenting research on closely related aspects of the structure and morphosyntax of DPs.Adhering to the generative grammar perspective (Chomsky, 1995) of language acquisition, the articles in this special issue discuss the acquisition and processing of various DP properties in sev- eral languages (e.g. in three Romance languages (i.e. French, Italian and Spanish), German and Basque) in different adult and child bilingual contexts. The focus of this Special Issue is on three closely related aspects of the structure and morphosyntax of nominal DPs, namely, gender features agreement, specificity and genericity constraints for interpretation of full and bare nominal clauses following proposals on the topic (Chierchia, 1998; Dayal, 2004; Longobardi, 2001; Schmitt & Munn, 2002) where the D element seems to be responsible for the different possibilities in seman- tic interpretation.This Special Issue consists of four state-of-the-art research articles followed by a concise dis- cussant piece for each by a well-known researcher in the field. In addition, one concise concluding remark article has been written by a renowned scholar in the field, addressing all or part of the issues raised by the individual contributors in the volume and, more importantly, highlighting how the issue as a whole adds to formal acquisition theory in second-language acquisition (SLA) and bilingualism. The present volume is a product of a colloquium on the adult and bilingual acquisi- tion as part of the International Symposium on Bilingualism 7 (ISB7) edition held in Utrecht (The Netherlands) in 2009.Overview of the contributions to this volumeThe first two articles deal with child bilingualism. In particular, the study by Eichler, Jansen and Muller evaluates gender acquisition within DPs adopting Abney's (1987) analysis comparing 2 monolingual German children and 17 bilingual children acquiring either a Romance language (i.e. French, Spanish, Italian) and German or two Romance languages simultaneously at different ages. The authors further compared the two languages within the bilingual children to one another with respect to the acquisition of gender. The influence of different variables on gender acquisition is also under scrutiny: namely, language dominance, transparency of gender marking and/or reliabil- ity of gender cues in the respective languages are hypothesized to influence the speed or delay of its acquisition. According to their main findings, bilingual children can gain the gender systems in both languages just as monolinguals do and bilingualism per se does not have a delaying effect contrary to what previous studies have claimed. In the case of the bilingual as well as in monolin- gual children, the acquisition of gender in German seems to be most problematic. French, on the other hand, embodies only slightly more problems than the other two Romance languages (i.e. Spanish and Italian), with the two-gender systems in both Spanish and Italian being acquired with ease. Eichler, Jansen and Muller came to the conclusions that, in both German and French, adult phonological gender rules are typified by their rather low validity. …

Wh-agreement in Ojibwe relative clauses: Evidence for CP Structure

AbstractThis article discusses the morphological and syntactic structure of relative clauses in Ojibwe (Algonquian), in particular their status aswh-constructions. Relatives in this language are full clauses that bear special morphology, show evidence of A′-movement of awh-operator, and consequently exhibitwh-agreement also found in interrogatives and certain types of focus constructions. Ojibwe shows the possibility ofwh-agreement realized on T (in addition to C andvfor other languages), as it appears on tense prefixes. We account for the realization ofwh-agreement on T in Ojibwe via the mechanism of feature inheritance. We propose that while declarative matrix clauses are canonical in that C introducesφ-features in Ojibwe, the role of C in embedded orwh-contexts is to introduceδ-features (discourse features), such as [uwh], rather thanφ-features. Theseδ-features can be introduced by C, but are transferred down to T where they spell out aswh-agreement.

Corrective but coordinates clauses not always but sometimes

The semantic contrast between counterexpectational and corrective but has long interested linguists (see Anscombre and Ducrot 1977 and much subsequent work). Recently, Vicente (2010) has proposed that the two types of but also differ in their syntax. While counterexpectational but coordinates constituents from a variety of different categories, corrective but always coordinates full clauses. These clausal coordination structures are then subject to reduction by ellipsis to derive their surface form. I argue that this clause-only coordination hypothesis is incorrect. Corrective but, like other coordinators, is able to combine both clausal and subclausal constituents. Only a crosscategorial syntax for corrective but accounts for the full range of contexts in which it occurs. Furthermore, when ellipsis does apply, it often must apply to subclausal coordination structures for its identity constraint to be satisfied.

The evolution of three pragmatic markers

The article traces the development of three pragmatic markers with a hedging function, as it were, so to speak and if you like, back to their origins in the fourteenth century, the mid-seventeenth century and the early nineteenth century, respectively. They all probably started out as full clauses, as adverbial clauses (as it were, if you like) or as complement clause (so to speak), but underwent different degrees of restructuring and shortening. While as it were has lost its whole complement section and has fossilised an older conjunction use, if you like just froze in a fairly usual elliptical form and so to speak may not have changed its form at all. In the case of if you like and so to speak the influence of parallel parenthetical forms seems to have been important. The changes in question are seen as instances of pragmaticalisation and partly also lexicalisation, although they share many features with grammaticalisation.

Halfway There: An Empirical Analysis of How State Courts Have Failed Fully to Apply the Two-Part Test of Semtek

Preclusion is a useful tool to ensure final judgments and speed up litigation. Parties rely on preclusion law to make litigation decisions. Preclusion law affects the vigor in which parties will litigate, settlement decisions, delay tactics, and joinder choices. However preclusion law is not uniform throughout the country. Different state and federal courts apply different rules for determining a preclusive effect on issues such as mutability, alternative holdings, finality, same claims, rulings on the merits, and compulsory counterclaims. Understanding which preclusion law applies helps parties make informed litigation decisions. Keeping preclusion law consistent ensures that courts are given the full faith and credit intended by the Constitution. State courts are bound under both the Full Faith and Credit Clause and Statute to apply the preclusion law of the first forum when the first forum is another state court. Therefore, a correct following of Full Faith and Credit means applying the preclusion law of the first state. Around the turn of the 20th Century, the Supreme Court extended states’ obligation to follow the preclusion law of the first forum when it is a federal court. Under the Full Faith and Credit Clause and Statute, forum courts should faithfully apply the preclusion law of the first forum.Professor Howard Erichson’s 1998 article, Interjurisdictional Preclusion, showed that state courts often apply interjurisdictional preclusion incorrectly. Erichson empirically examined how state courts handled interjurisdictional preclusion problems. He did this by studying preclusion cases between 1991 and 1996 where the first forum was a federal court and the second was a state court. He found that state courts usually applied their own preclusion law and rarely gave any notice to the federal rules of preclusion. Out of the 286 preclusion cases found, state courts only cited to the federal law 22% of the time. Fortunately, the Semtek decision in 2001 brought clarity on interjurisdictional preclusion for state courts. Semtek gave a rule that the Full Faith and Credit Clause and Statute, as interpreted by the Supreme Court left unclear. It announced, as a matter of federal common law, the rule for state courts when addressing the preclusive effect of a federal court sitting in diversity. When the first forum is a federal court sitting in diversity, “the federally prescribed rule of decision, the law that would be applied by state courts in the State in which the federal diversity court sits.” I refer to this as the first part of the Semtek test. The state law should be applied unless “the state law is incompatible with federal interests.” I refer to this as the second part of the Semtek test. The Semtek opinion created a complicated two-part test for certain issues in interjurisdictional preclusion. This comment will analyze how state courts are implementing the Semtek opinion and compare the data with the Erichson study of state courts before Semtek. I conducted a study that looked for all state court cases since the Semtek decision that dealt with a Semtek issue arising from a prior adjudication in federal court. My research found that state courts are applying the first part of the Semtek rule about 53% of the time, which is over double the 22% rate found in Erichson’s study. These cases often correctly apply the first part of the Semtek test by looking to the state in which the federal diversity court sat for preclusion law. Despite this increased compliance, state courts only mention the second part of the Semtek test, considering compatibility with federal interests, 6% of the time. This comment then discusses the rates of states correctly applying the two-part Semtek test over time. This comment will conclude with a discussion of the implication of those findings and potential solutions.

Nominal and clausal grounding of Korean verbal nouns

This article examines how Korean verbal nouns are construed as either a noun or a verb in a given context. By adopting Langacker's Cognitive Grammar (CG) and its technical apparatus, I argue that the two types of case patterns arise due to different construals of the same content. More specifically, when a verbal noun is construed as a thing (noun), it needs to be nominally grounded to be a full nominal. The genitive-case pattern in verbal noun constructions is motivated by the need for this grounding. By contrast, when the same verbal noun is construed as a process (verb), it needs to be clausally grounded by tense to be a full clause. For the purpose of grounding, the schematic verb ha(y)- ‘do’ must combine with verbal nouns to lend its processual characteristic to them, since verbal nouns profile a nonprocessual complex relationship. The verbal case pattern arises due to this processual nature of the temporalized verbal nouns. I further argue that a verbal noun in a double accusative construction is indirectly grounded by an implicitly invoked reference point, which is realized as an accusative-marked nominal.

Norwegian Object Shift as IP-internal topicalization

<p>In this paper we discuss the phenomenon of Object Shift in Norwegian, and we show that this operation is more complex and discourse related than what has traditionally been assumed. We argue that Object Shift cannot be accounted for in a purely prosodic approach. Rather, we demonstrate that a common denominator for all objects undergoing Object Shift is that they are topics. We thus propose that Object Shift should be analysed as (IP-internal) topicalization. Furthermore, we discuss in detail the peculiar behaviour of the topical pronominal object <em>det</em> ‘it’ in cases where its referent is not an individuated, gender-agreeing noun, but rather a non-individuated referent, like a full clause, a VP or a type DP. In such cases, this pronoun typically refrains from Object Shift. We discuss the contrast between these types of objects and shifting objects in light of the topic hierarchy presented in Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl (2007) and show that pronominal objects that undergo Object Shift have the characteristics of<em> familiar topics</em>, while <em>det</em> ‘it’ in the nonshifting contexts have the characteristics of <em>aboutness topics</em>. Consequently, we propose that Object Shift only applies to pronominal objects that constitute familiar topics.</p>

Having Faith in Full Faith & Credit: Finstuen, Adar, and the Quest for Interstate Same-Sex Parental Recognition

In 2011, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rendered a decision in Adar v. Smith which allowed Louisiana to refuse to recognize and accept a New York adoption decree on the grounds that the adoptive parents — a gay couple — would not have been able to legally adopt in Louisiana. The Fifth Circuit’s decision directly conflicts with a 2007 decision by the Tenth Circuit, Finstuen v. Crutcher, which held that the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the U.S. Constitution mandates that states recognize and evenhandedly apply their own law to sister-state adoption decrees, even if such decrees would be invalid in that state or frustrate that state’s public policy. This note examines the circuit split and advocates that the Supreme Court adopt the Tenth Circuit’s rationale. Doing so would give effect to the Full Faith and Credit Clause’s purpose and ensure that same-sex families receive the same interstate adoptive rights and protections as heterosexual families. This note contextualizes the circuit split in light of the struggles that same-sex parents face when trying to assert their parental rights and considers the implications of this split for same-sex families.

A note on ‘Raising to Object’ in small clauses and full clauses

This paper argues that both Korean and English have “Raising to Object” in ECM constructions and that in both languages the raising is obligatory out of small clauses and optional out of full clauses. Abstractly, the two languages are quite similar in this regard. However, there remain obvious differences between the two languages: In Korean, but not English, raising is possible out of a finite clause; in English, but not Korean, accusative Case marking can take place without raising. We suggest that these differences follow from the nature of the Case properties of Infl in the two languages, apparently a relatively simple parameter.

Ellipsis in split questions

Split questions such as What tree did John plant, an oak? contain a wh-question part and a tag. Drawing on Spanish, Basque and English data, this article argues that these two parts of a split question are independent clauses. The tag is in fact an elliptical non-wh-question, where ellipsis is licensed in the same way as in other sentence fragments. I provide detailed argumentation that the tag involves movement of a correlate of the wh-phrase, followed by ellipsis of the remnant, thus contributing to the growing body of evidence that sentence fragments (sluicing, fragment answers, etc.) are syntactically full clauses. The syntax proposed provides a simple account of the intonation patterns found in split questions and of their semantics. Furthermore, it is argued that the only existing alternative analysis of split questions cannot account for many of the properties of this construction.

Full Faith and Credit for Dummies

This article discusses the history of the Full Faith and Credit Clause, the original meaning of the clause, and the courts’ evolving interpretation of the clause. Within this discussion, the author explains the test for whether and how a state can constitutionally apply its own law to cases involving multi-state elements. This test and the Full Faith and Credit Clause are analyzed further through hypotheticals in the context of same-sex marriage. The article ends with an analysis of the effect of DOMA on these issues.

Subjects Inside Out

This paper argues that the notion of subject is purely syntactic, defined as an agreeing SPEC of a fonctional category. It is related to a theta-position inside a lexical projection by movement. It is furthermore argues that this particular conception applies not only to full clauses, but to all instances of predication, including secondary predication. This movement theory is contrasted with the indexing theory of predication. A new argument in favor of the movement theory is developed on the basis of floated quantifiers. Potentially problematic structures such as resultatives and nominalizations are shown not to be problematic for (small) clausal analysis of secondary predication.

The messiness of language socialization in reading groups: Participation in and resistance to the values of essayist literacy

This paper focuses on the process of literacy socialization in several 5th grade reading groups. Through close analysis of spoken interaction, which centers on a heavily illustrated, non-fiction text, the paper proposes that these reading groups can be seen as complex sites of socialization to the values associated with essayist literacy (i.e., the type of written language often associated with school literacy and characterized by an impersonal, “de-contextualized” presentation of factual information). Through a qualitative focus on the interaction of novice, expert, and text, children in the data are shown to participate in spoken displays that highlight the impersonal, factual content of the written text. These displays of the sort of language associated with essayist literacy are achieved primarily through read-aloud episodes and follow-up question–answer sequences in which the teacher and student co-construct text-based propositions. However, a competing perspective emerges when interaction focuses on the illustrations. In such sequences, the children seem eager to engage in a more contextualized and personal use of language. In the illustration-oriented interaction, they not only employ more explicitly context-dependent linguistic forms; they also produce more full clauses, engage in more interaction outside of traditional tripartite (IRE) classroom interaction, and display higher levels of affective engagement. This interaction is also marked by a complex interplay of contextualized and decontextualized language, sometimes within the same utterance or turn, pointing to a multifaceted relationship between the two. The paper proposes that although the values associated with essayist literacy are dominant, the participants’ apparent interactional resistance to these values points to a complex socialization context of competing underlying orientations. It also argues for the need to clarify and reconsider the widespread emphasis on decontextualization in instructional contexts.

Multilingual Mix in Hong Kong Advertising, Pre- and Post-1997

The paper examines the historical change in linguistic practice of Hong Kong advertising through the decolonization period and attempts to make sense of it from a local-and-global point of view beyond the conventional national-functionalist perspective. It is found that the prominent patterns of language mixing in the advertising of Hong Kong are not only ‘Standard Written Chinese mixed with English’, but also ‘Standard Written Chinese mixed with both English and Cantonese’. The embedded elements of both English and Cantonese in the Chinese advertisements can take the form of a word, a phrase and/or a full clause and can serve both informational and involving functions. Finally, it is argued that multilingual mix in Hong Kong advertising is a phenomenon constantly emerging in the multicultural process of globalization and that being able to mix different languages or varieties of languages for effective communication should be an aspect of linguistic competence highly valued in the age of globalization and localization.

Short negative replies in Spanish

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