Syntactic Head Research Articles

No looking back: the effects of visual cues on the lexical boost in structural priming

ABSTRACT Four structural priming experiments investigated the lexical boost effect in structural priming. In two experiments, we tested whether repeating the subject in prepositional object or double object ditransitive structures boosted structural priming. In two other experiments, we manipulated the repetition of the verb. Repetition of the subject noun affected structural priming, but only when the prime remained visible while participants produced the target sentence. In contrast, repetition of the verb boosted priming regardless of whether participants could see the prime and target simultaneously. We conclude that the subject noun repetition effect is more strategic in nature than the verb boost effect. Structures are automatically associated with the verb, their syntactic head, whereas repetition of the subject noun only affects priming if the presentation method makes the repetition highly explicit.

Editors’ Note Re: “Syntactic Head Movement in Japanese: Evidence from Verb-Echo Answers and Negative Scope Reversal” by Yosuke Sato and Masako Maeda, Linguistic Inquiry 52:2, 359–376, https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00380.

October 25 2021 Editors’ Note Re: “Syntactic Head Movement in Japanese: Evidence from Verb-Echo Answers and Negative Scope Reversal” by Yosuke Sato and Masako Maeda, Linguistic Inquiry 52:2, 359–376, https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00380. Samuel Jay Keyser, Samuel Jay Keyser Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Eric Reuland Eric Reuland Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Samuel Jay Keyser Eric Reuland Online Issn: 1530-9150 Print Issn: 0024-3892 © 2021 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2021MIT Press Linguistic Inquiry (2021) 52 (4): ii. https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_e_00445 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Search Site Citation Samuel Jay Keyser, Eric Reuland; Editors’ Note Re: “Syntactic Head Movement in Japanese: Evidence from Verb-Echo Answers and Negative Scope Reversal” by Yosuke Sato and Masako Maeda, Linguistic Inquiry 52:2, 359–376, https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00380.. Linguistic Inquiry 2021; 52 (4): ii. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_e_00445 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAll JournalsLinguistic Inquiry Search Advanced Search Due to an unfortunate oversight by the authors, this contribution does not give proper credit to Sato and Hayashi 2018, which presents the original argument for the conclusion that Japanese has overt V-to-T-to-C movement. The present contribution is a published version of Sato and Maeda 2017 as referred to in Sato and Hayashi 2018, and provides an elaboration of the issue discussed in section 5 of that contribution with particular reference to the interaction between scope and ellipsis in the context of verb-echo answers and its important implications for the architectural locus of syntactic head movement in Japanese. Consequently, the following item should be added to the references, and should be cited as the original source for the argument that Japanese has overt V-to-T-to-C movement: © 2021 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2021MIT Press You do not currently have access to this content.

Do dependency lengths explain constraints on crossing dependencies?

Abstract In syntactic dependency trees, when arcs are drawn from syntactic heads to dependents, they rarely cross. Constraints on these crossing dependencies are critical for determining the syntactic properties of human language, because they define the position of natural language in formal language hierarchies. We study whether the apparent constraints on crossing syntactic dependencies in natural language might be explained by constraints on dependency lengths (the linear distance between heads and dependents). We compare real dependency trees from treebanks of 52 languages against baselines of random trees which are matched with the real trees in terms of their dependency lengths. We find that these baseline trees have many more crossing dependencies than real trees, indicating that a constraint on dependency lengths alone cannot explain the empirical rarity of crossing dependencies. However, we find evidence that a combined constraint on dependency length and the rate of crossing dependencies might be able to explain two of the most-studied formal restrictions on dependency trees: gap degree and well-nestedness.

Syntactic Head Movement in Japanese: Evidence from Verb-Echo Answers and Negative Scope Reversal

We investigate the syntax of verb-echo answers in Japanese. We first present two arguments showing that this answer form is best analyzed through overt V-to-T-to-C movement, followed by TP-ellipsis. We further show that verb-echo answers exhibit a scope reversal effect: the otherwise robust wide scope reading of focus-marked phrases with respect to negation is reversed in this construction, a pattern that holds across all grammatical positions. This ubiquitous scope reversal pattern indicates that certain instances of head movement in Japanese are syntactic, contrary to the view (Chomsky 2000, 2001) that head move-ment is to be relegated to the postsyntactic, phonological component.

Predicate fronting in Yiddish and conditions on multiple copy Spell-Out

Predicate fronting with doubling (also known as the predicate cleft) has long been a challenge for theories of syntax that do not predict the pronunciation of multiple occurrences. Previous analyses that derive the construction via syntactic movement, including those attributing verb doubling to the formation of parallel chains (e.g., Aboh 2006; Kandybowicz 2008), are incompatible with remnant movement (Müller 1998), which does not give rise to doubling. This article presents data from the predicate fronting construction in Yiddish, in which verbs always double but complements never do. I argue that these seemingly contradictory pronunciation facts can be reconciled even if one assumes that phrasal movement and head movement are both syntactic. More specifically, the pronunciation of occurrences in Yiddish (doubled or not) follows from the general conditions on Spell-Out (or Transferpf) defined by Collins and Stabler (2016), modified only to accommodate syntactic head movement. Post-syntactic PF repairs are thus not required to account for the facts of the Yiddish predicate fronting construction. If such repairs are needed to generate doubling phenomena in other languages, they should be explicitly defined so as to modify or override the predictions of default Spell-Out conditions.

Loci of agreement and deviations from the Mirror Principle in Hungarian verbs

In this revised account of Hungarian verbal agreement, I propose that the language’s locus of subject agreement is not T, unlike in current Minimalist analyses, but Pred (or Asp), just above direct object agreement in v. Furthermore, the surface linear order of affixes (stem – tense/mood – object agreement – subject agreement) does not conform to the hierarchical order of syntactic heads (V < v < Pred < T/M), thus violating the Mirror Principle, because local dislocation in postsyntactic morphology adjusts the initial linearization of the heads.

Double evidential morphology in Turkish

Turkish and Bulgarian both have “double evidential” constructions, which seem to contain reiterated evidential morphemes. This paper, focusing on Turkish data, shows that despite the morphological similarity between the indirect evidential -mIş and the “second” -mIş, double evidentials are not an instance of reduplication. Instead, I propose based on morphological evidence (separability of suffixes, morphological spell-out of related Turkic languages) and semantic evidence (the “second” -mIş introduces a new indexical, the Evaluator) that the second -mIş is the spell-out of a distinct syntactic head, which I call Dubitative.

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.

Mixed evidence for crosslinguistic dependency length minimization

Abstract We investigate whether and to what extent the principle of Dependency Length Minimization (DLM) predicts crosslinguistic syntactic ordering preferences. More specifically, we ask: (i) is there a typological tendency for shorter constituents to appear closer to their syntactic heads in constructions with flexible constituent orderings? (ii) how does the extent of DLM in these constructions vary for languages with different structural characteristics? Our study uses prepositional and postpositional phrase (PP) typology as a testbed. Leveraging multilingual corpora for 34 languages, we focus on sentences with verb phrases that have exactly two PP dependents on the same side of the head verb, the ordering of which under certain conditions contains flexibility. Overall we show a pronounced preference for shorter PPs to be closer to the head verb, establishing the first large-scale quantitative evidence that DLM exists in crosslinguistic syntactic alternations. Furthermore, we present evidence that while the efficacy of DLM depends on the specific ordering structures of different language types, across languages there appears to be a much stronger preference for DLM when the two PPs appear postverbally, compared to no or a much weaker tendency for shorter dependencies when the two PPs occur preverbally. This contrast is the most visible in mixed-type languages with head-initial PPs that can appear both after or before the head verb. Within the limited number of rigid OV languages in our dataset, which have head-final PPs before the head verb, we observe no robust tendency for DLM, in contrast to the patterns in languages with head-initial PPs after the head verb. This contradicts previous findings of a longer-before-short preference in preverbal orders of head-final languages.

An interview with Guglielmo Cinque

Guglielmo Cinque is an emeritus professor at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. He is one of the leading figures in generative syntax, and the most prominent representative of generative syntactic typology. He is one of the founders of the cartographic enterprise.His publications include Typological Studies. Word Order and Relative Clauses (2013, Routledge), The Syntax of Adjectives. A Comparative Study (2010, MIT Press), Restructuring and Functional Heads. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures (2006, OUP), Adverbs and Functional Heads. A Cross-Linguistic Perspective (1999, OUP), Italian Syntax and Universal Grammar (1995, CUP), Types of Ā-dependencies (1990, MIT Press). He has published extensively on every aspect of Italian syntax and syntax in general.

Deriving clitic cluster formation through movement: A dialectal case study from Spanish

Abstract In light of recent work on syntactic head movement and clitic movement in Phase Theory, this paper argues for a feature-based, head-movement account of argumental object clitics in Spanish. The novelty of the proposal outlined in this paper is the extension of a movement approach to indirect object (IO) clitics, which are commonly regarded in the literature as base-generated verb-agreement morphemes. It is shown that IO clitics, like their DO counterparts, engage in probe/goal relations to value and delete uninterpretable Case features, and, upon Agree, cliticize via head movement. Chomsky’s operation of inheritance (2008) figures in this account, as it helps explain the derived order of clitics in IO-DO clusters in Spanish. This study is the first of its kind in offering a unified movement proposal for both types of argumental object clitics, while at the same time maintaining the simplest ‘Minimalist’ assumption that both are pronouns of the category DP. Finally, the syntactic analysis proposed for the derivation of argumental clusters is applied to derive dialectally-attested strings composed of three members in which the foremost form is a non-argumental SE clitic.

A learning bias for word order harmony: Evidence from speakers of non-harmonic languages

Word order harmony describes the tendency, found across the world's languages, to consistently order syntactic heads relative to dependents. It is one of the most well-known and well-studied typological universals. Almost since it was first noted by Greenberg (1963), there has been disagreement about what role, if any, the cognitive system plays in driving harmony. Recently, a series of studies using artificial language learning experiments reported that harmonic noun phrase word orders were preferred over non-harmonic orders by English-speaking adults and children (Culbertson et al., 2012; Culbertson & Newport, 2015, 2017). However, this evidence is potentially confounded by the fact that English is itself a harmonic language (Goldberg, 2013). Here we sought to extend the results from these studies by exploring whether learners who have substantial experience with a non-harmonic language still showed a bias for harmonic patterns during learning. We found that monolingual French- and Hebrew-speaking children, whose language has a non-harmonic noun phrase order (N Adj, Num N) nevertheless preferred harmonic patterns when learning an artificial language. We also found evidence for a harmony bias across several populations of adult learners, although this interacted in complex ways with their L2 experience. Our results suggest that transfer from the L1 cannot explain the preference for harmony found in previous studies. Moreover, they provide the strongest evidence yet that a cognitive bias for harmony is a plausible candidate for shaping linguistic typology.

Strictly Local Impoverishment: An Intervention Effect

Strictly Local Impoverishment: An Intervention Effect

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.

Head movement to specifier positions

Syntactic movement of phrases, modeled in terms of Internal Merge, has traditionally been distinguished on empirical grounds from syntactic movement of heads, modeled by other means. I demonstrate that, once the class of head movements implicated in word formation is excluded from consideration (assumed to be, for example, post-syntactic, following Harizanov & Gribanova 2019), the residue of head movements, which are purely syntactic in nature, and phrasal movement can receive a unified treatment. Both phrasal and syntactic head movement are implemented here as instances of Internal Merge (following, for example, Fukui & Takano 1998; Toyoshima 2001; Matushansky 2006; Vicente 2007; 2009). This treatment of syntactic head movement renders long-standing stipulations about structure building such as the Chain Uniformity Condition superfluous. It also makes sense of the properties of syntactic head movement, as demonstrated in a case study of participle fronting in Bulgarian, which targets a specifier position, violates the Head Movement Constraint, can cross finite clause boundaries, and can have discourse effects.

Rethinking templates: A syntactic analysis of verbal morphology in Emirati Arabic

This paper presents an analysis of the morphosyntax and lexical semantics of the system of verbal forms of Emirati Arabic (EA, the variety of Gulf Arabic spoken in the United Arab Emirates) in terms of syntactic decomposition of argument structure. We argue that verbal meaning is a function of at least two syntactic functional heads: Voice and little v; and a lexical head: the consonantal root. We will further show that the unified syntactic structure, resulting from the interaction of the semantics and argument structure of the root with little v and Voice, captures the regularities as well as the exceptions in the interpretation of the verb forms of EA.

Dative Arguments in Turkish: Caused Experiencers versus Applicatives

This paper investigates a type of construction in Turkish which is similar to Ingason's (2016) "caused experience" construction in Icelandic. The study draws a distinction between experiencers and applicatives through an investigation of novel data, and contends that these two arguments occupy distinct syntactic positions in the structure. The caused experiencers in Turkish are introduced by the syntactic head Aff(ect) of Bosse and Bruening (2011); Bosse et al. (2012), whereas applicatives are introduced by the Applicative head (Pylkkänen, 2008). The proposal also captures the at-issue meaning of the sentence as well as not-at-issue meaning (an implicature) of the sentence.

An investigation into the lexical boost with nonhead nouns

Abstract In five structural priming experiments, we investigated lexical boost effects in the production of ditransitive sentences. Although the residual activation model of Pickering and Branigan (1998) suggests that a lexical boost should only occur with the repetition of a syntactic licensing head in ditransitive prepositional object (PO)/double object (DO) structures, Scheepers, Raffray, and Myachykov (2017) recently found that it also occurs with the repetition of nouns that are not syntactic heads. We manipulated the repetition of the subject (Experiments 1–3), and the verb phrase (VP) internal arguments (i.e., either theme or recipient, Experiments 4–5) in PO/DO structures. In Experiment 2, the verb was also repeated between prime and target, while in the other experiments it was not. Three different tasks for eliciting the target were employed: picture description via the oral completion of a sentence fragment (Experiments 1–2, and 4), oral completion of a sentence fragment with no visual context (Experiment 3), and oral production of a sentence from a given array of words and no visual context (Experiment 5). Priming occurred in all experiments and was stronger when the verb was repeated (Experiment 2) than when it was not (Experiment 1). However, none of the experiments showed evidence that priming was stronger when either the subject or one of the VP-internal arguments was repeated. These findings support the view that structural information is associated with syntactic heads (i.e., the verb), but not with nonheads such as the subject noun and the VP-internal arguments (Pickering & Branigan, 1998).

Two paths to polysynthesis

West Circassian displays prominent polysynthetic morphology both in the verbal and nominal domains and both syntactic categories are subject to the same morphological ordering constraints. I argue that despite these similarities, nominal and verbal wordforms in West Circassian are in fact constructed via two distinct word formation processes: while the verbal root and any accompanying functional morphology are pronounced as a single phonological word by virtue of forming a single complex syntactic head via head displacement, the nominal head and its modifiers are pronounced as a single word due to rules of syntax-to-prosody mapping. Such a division of labor provides an account for why only nouns, and not verbs, exhibit productive noun incorporation in the language: West Circassian noun incorporation is prosodic, rather than syntactic. The evidence for the existence of these two avenues of word formation comes from a systematic violation of morpheme ordering observed in verbal nominalizations. In terms of broader theoretical impact, the proposed analysis provides insight into what factors shape a polysynthetic language: while it is tempting to reduce polysynthetic morphology to either simple head displacement or just a consequence of mapping complex syntactic structure to a single phonological word without any head displacement, the West Circassian data show that neither of these mechanisms can be dispensed with.

Topic Strategies and the Internal Structure of Nominal Arguments in Greek and Italian

In this article, we argue that a set of unexpected contrasts in the interpretation of clitic-left-dislocated indefinites in Greek and Italian derive from structural variation in the nominal syntax of the two languages. Greek resists nonreferential indefinites in clitic left-dislocation, resorting to the topicalization of an often bare noun for nonreferential topics. By contrast, clitic left-dislocation is employed in Italian for topics regardless of their definite/indefinite interpretation. We argue that this contrast is directly linked to the wide availability of bare nouns in Greek, which stems from a structural difference in the nominal syntax of the two languages. In particular, we hypothesize that Greek nominal arguments lack a D layer. Rather, they are Number Phrases. We situate this analysis in the context of Chierchia’s (1998) typology of nominals. We argue that, on a par with Italian nouns, Greek nouns are [−arg, +pred]. However, they do not employ a syntactic head (D) for type-shifting to e . Rather, they resort to covert type-shifting, a hypothesis that is necessary to account for the distribution and interpretations of bare nouns in Greek, vis-à-vis other [−arg, +pred] languages like Italian and French.