Surface Structure Constraints Research Articles

A distinctness approach to clitic combinations in Romance

AbstractThis paper analyses the combinatorial restrictions that operate in clitic clusters in certain Eastern Iberian varieties (Aragonese, Spanish, and Catalan). In particular, I focus on the combination of third person clitics. As it is well known, in some Romance varieties the combination of a third person accusative clitic and a third person dative clitic is banned (the so-called∗le lorestriction, Bonet, Eulàlia. 1991.Morphology after syntax: Pronominal clitics in Romance. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Dissertation; Cuervo, María Cristina. 2013. Spanish clitic clusters: Three of a perfect pair.Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics2. 191–220; Nevins, Andrew. 2007. The representation of third person and its consequences for person-case effects.Natural Language & Linguistic Theory25(2). 273–313; Ordóñez, Francisco. 2002. Some clitic combinations in the syntax of Romance.Catalan Journal of Linguistics1. 201–224, Ordóñez, Francisco. 2012. Clitics in Spanish. In José I. Hualde, Antxon Olarrea & Erin O’Rouke (eds.),The handbook of Spanish Linguistics, 423–453. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell; Perlmutter, David. 1971.Deep and surface structure constraints in syntax. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston). In order to license this troublesome combination, languages resort to different ‘repair strategies’ modifying the structure of one of the merged clitics. In the literature on clitic combinations, there have been two main proposals of analysis: morphological and syntactical. In this paper, I put forward an analysis based on the Distinctness Condition (Hiraiwa, Ken. 2010. The syntactic OCP. In Yukio Otsu (ed.),The proceedings of the 11th Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics, 35–56. Hituzi: Tokyo; Neeleman, Ad & Hans van de Koot. 2005. Syntactic haplology. In Martin Everaert & Henk van Riemsdijk (eds.),The Blackwell companion to syntax, 685–710. Wiley-Blackwell; Perlmutter, David. 1971.Deep and surface structure constraints in syntax. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston; Richards, Norvin. 2010.Uttering trees, vol. 56. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Van Riemsdijk, Henk. 1998. Categorial feature magnetism: The endocentricity and distribution of projections.The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics2(1). 1–48; Yip, Moira. 1998. Identity avoxidance in phonology and morphology. In Steven G. Lapointe, Diane K. Brentari & Patrick M. Farell (eds.),Mophology and its relation to phonology and syntax, 216–246. Stanford, CA: CSLI). Specifically, I argue that the restrictions that constraint clitic combinations are due to the impossibility to linearize two identical syntactic objects, such as <XP, XP> (Chomsky, Noam. 2013. Problems of projection.Lingua130. 33–49; Chomsky, Noam. 2015. Problems of projection. In Elisa Di Domenico, Cornelia Hamann & Simona Matteini (eds.), Structures, strategies and beyond: Studies in honour of Adriana Belletti, 1–16. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Moro, Andrea. 2000.Dynamic antisymmetry (No. 38). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Richards, Norvin. 2010.Uttering trees, vol. 56. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). From this perspective, cross-linguistic variation is the result of different ‘repair strategies’ languages deploy to make <XP, XP> objects linearizable (Richards, Norvin. 2010.Uttering trees, vol. 56. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Faetar null subjects: a variationist study of a heritage language in contact

Abstract Faetar is an under-documented variety descended from Francoprovençal and spoken in two isolated Apulian villages in southern Italy as well as in the emigrant diaspora, especially in the Greater Toronto Area. Speakers use two series of subject pronouns (strong and weak pronouns), producing sentences with zero, one or two overt subject pronouns. The status of the overt forms as subject pronouns, emphatic pronouns, left- or right-dislocated pronouns, clitics, or affixes is not clear. Contrary to the predictions of the Null Subject Parameter hypothesis (Perlmutter 1971, Deep and surface structure constraints in syntax. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston; Chomsky 1981, Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris), these grammars have subject pronoun paradigms that are variable and conditioned by a number of linguistic factors (including person, tense, information status and subject type). This article delineates which aspects vary diachronically, spatially, or between individuals – a necessary prerequisite to constructing a theoretical model that accounts for this variation. By comparing the patterns of use in France, Italy, and Toronto, and using sources that span nearly a century, we see that despite the very small size of its speech community, Faetar shows little sign of accommodating to English’s virtually categorical presence of subject pronouns, nor to Italian’s high null subject (hereafter Ø-subject) rate, nor to the conditioning effects found in those languages.

Language‐Mixing in Children's Speech: Dutch Language Use in Turkish Discourse

Data on Dutch‐Turkish language‐mixing behavior of Turkish children growing up in The Netherlands are presented and analysed. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which the descriptive models developed in research on language‐mixing are generalizable. It was found that the functional characteristics of the children's language‐mixing are compatible with earlier results. Structural analysis of the data, however, yielded results that shed considerable doubt on the universal applicability of surface structure constraint rules for sentence‐internal language‐mixing.

On the order of clitics in Italian

The clitic sequences of Italian present various difficulties to the universal account of clitic ordering in the form of a single positively stated surface structure constraint posited in Perlmutter (1971). On the basis of the Italian data, which reinforce previous doubts about such an analysis, it will be necessary to adopt the following devices to remedy the inadequacies of the SSC approach: a negative constraint, a post-SSC reordering rule, and the admission of non-superficial syntactic and phonological information in determining clitic order. While such modifications affect the original degree of motivation of the SSC approach, they offer additional strength to the claim of superficial arbitrariness of clitic ordering imposed at the surface by a (variety of) linearization device(s).

Modern Greek clitic pronouns and the ‘surface structure constraints’ hypothesis

In his (1970) article ‘Surface structure constraints in syntax’ Perimutter has argued that the restrictions on the combination of the weak atonic forms of the object pronouns in Spanish and restrictions on their order cannot be accounted for naturally either in the deep structure, by constraints on the phrase structure rules, or by constraints on the rules which introduce these pronouns.1 He concludes that a transformational generative grammar must be supplemented by positive output constraints which act as a filter accepting only sequences which match the filter and rejecting the rest as ungrammatical.

Deep and Surface Structure Constraints in Syntax

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Modern Languages and Linguistics. Thesis. 1968. Ph.D.

Targets and Paradigmatic Borrowing in Romantsch

Recent work in generative grammar has demonstrated the relationship between surface structure constraints and transformational rules. In some cases, various unrelated rules have been found to interact, and, in so doing, to satisfy a given constraint, characterized as a target. Evidence is presented that Vallader, a Romantsch dialect, has a phonological target, realized by a number of rules, some peculiar to that dialect. In addition, Vallader shares a syntactic deletion rule with the other Romantsch dialects. In order to satisfy both of these conditions at once, Vallader has resorted to paradigmatic borrowing for one form of the present indicative. 1. Almost all languages seem to permit varying degrees of systematic syntactic ambiguity. The fact that speakers do, in fact, recognize such ambiguities provided one of the earliest and most cogent arguments for the psychological reality of 'deep structure' and for a system of transformational operations that related deep structures to the actual surface structures that we hear and speak. For some time now, transformational analysis has been preoccupied with the exploration, and the justification, of increasingly abstract syntactic structures, which approach semantic representation in direct proportion to their degree of

A Surface Structure Constraint on Negation in Spanish

This paper argues that there is a surface structure condition in Spanish which allows only one negative particle no to appear as a constituent of each simplex sentence in surface structure. As a result, the number of grammatical negations has no correlation with the number of S-nodes originally found in deep structure in those trees which have lost S-nodes in the course of their derivation. This hypothesis is supported by structures which have undergone Equi-NP Deletion, by sentences with quantifiers, with adjectives, and with certain adverbs, by certain comparative sentences, and by so-called simple sentences.1