Licensing of Floating Nominal Modifiers and Unaccusativity in Japanese

Licensing of VP-internal floating nominal modifiers (FNMs), including numeral quantifiers, has been used as a diagnostic test for unaccusativity in Japanese, under the assumption that FNMs and their associates must be in a local syntactic relation at their base-generated positions. Thus, unaccusative subjects, which originate as internal arguments, readily license VP-internal FNMs, but unergative subjects, which are base-generated external arguments, often fail to license FNMs. However, the licensing of VP-internal FNMs also seems to depend on the type of event denoted by a given sentence, since unergative subjects can license VP-internal FNMs if the sentence denotes a telic event. In this paper, we confirm that the licensing of FNMs is subject to syntactic locality. In addition to the syntactic factors, the licensing of FNMs is sensitive to (i) the derivational complexity of the sentence and (ii) the lexical semantics of the modifiers themselves. When locality and the two additional factors are in harmony, sentences are perfectly acceptable, but when the factors pull in different directions, this leads to graded judgments and speaker variation. The main evidence for this claim comes from the results of two formal acceptability judgment experiments with a set of nominal modifiers such as nani-ka 'something' and dare-ka 'someone' (existential indeterminate pronouns). The results of these experiments show that the licensing of such expressions, just like the licensing of VP-internal FNQs, is affected by the derivational complexity of the sentence. However, existential indeterminate pronouns and FNQs respond to different lexical-semantic factors: the former are sensitive to the animacy of the host NPs, whereas FNQs are sensitive to the event type semantics.Linguistic

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This study investigates the acquisition of the unaccusative-unergative distinction in L2 Japanese by English learners. The aim is to establish whether learners of Japanese are sensitive to the lexicalsemantic characteristics of verbs in similar ways as learners of Romance languages who were found to follow the Split Intransitivity Hierarch

Second language acquisition of the features of dou in Mandarin Chinese, by L1-English and L1-Japanese speakers

This thesis reports a study on the acquisition of the features of the quantifier dou, in particular the feature [+Dist] in Mandarin Chinese, by L1-English and L1-Japanese learners. Dou, which is usually on paralleled with all, essentially differentiates from all on both semantic and syntactic properties. These differences partially reflect on the meanings and interpretations of sentences at the syntax-semantics interface. In the light of Features Reassembly Hypothesis, the successful acquisition of dou requires the remapping or reconfiguration of the feature bundles that have already been assembled in the L1 grammar into a new formal configuration in the target language. To explore how L1 English-L2 Mandarin and L1 Japanese-L2 Mandarin learners establish the initial mapping between L1 and L2 forms and how the features are being reassembled, two experimental tasks were conducted: a sentence-picture matching task and a picture-based acceptability judgment task. A total of 51 native English speakers and 18 native Japanese speakers, learning Mandarin as their second language, participated in this study. Their interpretations of dou-quantified subject/numeral-quantified object sentences with mixed predicates and dou-quantified subject/wh-object interrogatives were examined through the two tasks, respectively. The results indicate that in the stage of mapping, most L2 Mandarin learners chose the universals and their relevant features as the starting point (i.e. [+universal] and [+universal, ∨]). Learners with lower proficiency encountered difficulties in overcoming the influence of L1 transfer, whereas those with higher proficiency, who underwent the stage of reassembly, were capable of assigning dou a [+Dist] feature, as the equivalents in their native languages. Additionally, the poverty of the stimulus problem at the interpretive interface can be overcome with the Universal Grammar access

Formal approaches to number in Slavic and beyond (Volume 5)

The goal of this collective monograph is to explore the relationship between the cognitive notion of number and various grammatical devices expressing this concept in natural language with a special focus on Slavic. The book aims at investigating different morphosyntactic and semantic categories including plurality and number-marking, individuation and countability, cumulativity, distributivity and collectivity, numerals, numeral modifiers and classifiers, as well as other quantifiers. It gathers 19 contributions tackling the main themes from different theoretical and methodological perspectives in order to contribute to our understanding of cross-linguistic patterns both in Slavic and non-Slavic languages

In search of syntactic symmetry : on the parallels between clausal and nominal hierarchical structure.

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The Sinitic Nominal Phrase Structure: A Minimalist Perspective

This dissertation is a comparative study of the morphosyntax of the constituents referred to as noun phrases in traditional grammar. In line with Abney’s (1987) Determiner Phrase (DP) Hypothesis, this study investigates the syntactic structures of Sinitic nominal phrases by means of a thorough study of lexical elements, such as numerals, classifiers, possessives, adjectives, and nouns, and functional elements, such as plural/collective markers, force particles, and modification markers. It is argued that the syntactic structure of the nominal phrase is universal regardless of the presence of lexical items which realise the heads of the functional projections. This study further proposes a unified account of the articulated structure of nominal phrases, as a full-fledged DP, to explain the syntactic phenomena in both classifier and non-classifier languages. More specifically, a Probe-Goal feature-valuing model is proposed to account for parametric variation among Sinitic and other languages within the framework of Chomsky’s (2000, 2001, 2004) Phase-based Minimalist Programme. Furthermore, given the assumption of the Split-DP Hypothesis, this study proposes that the DP in Sinitic languages is also not a unitary projection but an articulated array of functional projections, including DforceP, DfocusP, DtopicP and DdefiniteP. As their counterparts in the clausal domain, these functional projections encode discourse-related properties, such as illocutionary force, topic, and focus. As far as modification structures are concerned, this study argues that the bare modifier is base-generated in the Spec of a functional or lexical projection, whereas the marked modifier is adjoined to the left of the nominal phrase by the operation Adjunction.1. Studying Abroad Scholarship, Ministry of Education, Republic of China (Taiwan) 2. Outstanding Theses and Dissertations on Hakka Studies, Hakka Affairs Council, Republic of China (Taiwan

A Study in the Syntax of the Luwian Language

he Ancient Anatolian corpora represent the earliest documented examples of the Indo-European languages. In this book, an analysis of the syntactic structure of the Luwian phrases, clauses and sentences is attempted, basing on a phrase-structural approach that entails a mild application of the theoretical framework of generative grammar. While obvious limits exist as regards the use of theory-driven models to the study and description of ancient corpus-languages, this books aims at demonstrating and illustrating the main configurational features of the Luwian syntax