Adverbial clauses and adverbial concord

This paper speculates that the merge site of an adverbial clause, i.e. its external syntax, is determined by its derivational history, i.e. its internal syntax. Starting from the distinction between central adverbial clauses and peripheral adverbial clauses, it is first shown that the degree of integration of an adverbial clause correlates with its internal syntax, i.e. the availability of left peripheral functional material. The correlation can be informally stated as follows "the more structure is manifested in the adverbial clause, the higher it is merged". This paper develops a derivational account for this correlation. The proposal adopts the movement derivation of adverbial clauses, according to which, like relative clauses, adverbial clauses are derived by movement of a specialized IP-related operator (aspectual, temporal, modal, etc) to the left periphery. The paper explores observations drawn from the traditional literature on Japanese grammar (Minami 1974; Noda 1989; 2002) to the effect that the amount of TP-internal functional structure in an adverbial clause also correlates with the presence of specialized functional particles in the matrix clause with which the clause merges. Specifically, we explore Japanese data discussed in Endo (2011; 2012). It is proposed that the merger of an adverbial clause with the associated main clause is determined by the label of the adverbial clause, itself the result of the movement derivation

Melody as Prosody: Toward a Usage-Based Theory of Music

MELODY AS PROSODY: TOWARD A USAGE-BASED THEORY OF MUSIC Thomas M. Pooley Gary A. Tomlinson Rationalist modes of inquiry have dominated the cognitive science of music over the past several decades. This dissertation contests many rationalist assumptions, including its core tenets of nativism, modularity, and computationism, by drawing on a wide range of evidence from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and cognitive music theory, as well as original data from a case study of Zulu song prosody. An alternative biocultural approach to the study of music and mind is outlined that takes account of musical diversity by attending to shared cognitive mechanisms. Grammar emerges through use, and cognitive categories are learned and constructed in particular social contexts. This usage-based theory of music shows how domain-general cognitive mechanisms for patterning-finding and intention-reading are crucial to acquisition, and how Gestalt principles are invoked in perception. Unlike generative and other rationalist approaches that focus on a series of idealizations, and the cognitive `competences\u27 codified in texts and musical scores, the usage-based approach investigates actual performances in everyday contexts by using instrumental measures of process. The study focuses on song melody because it is a property of all known musics. Melody is used for communicative purposes in both song and speech. Vocalized pitch patterning conveys a wide range of affective, propositional, and syntactic information through prosodic features that are shared by the two domains. The study of melody as prosody shows how gradient pitch features are crucial to the design and communicative functions of song melodies. The prosodic features shared by song and speech include: speech tone, intonation, and pitch-accent. A case study of ten Zulu memulo songs shows that pitch is not used in the discrete or contrastive fashion proposed by many cognitive music theorists and most (generative) phonologists. Instead there are a range of pitch categories that include pitch targets, glides, and contours. These analyses also show that song melody has a multi-dimensional pitch structure, and that it is a dynamic adaptive system that is irreducible in its complexity

Deconstructing the Subject Condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation

Chomsky (1973) attributes the island status of nominal subjects to the Subject Condition, a constraint specific to subjects. English and Spanish are interesting languages for the comparative study of extraction from subjects, because subjects in English are predominantly preverbal, whereas in Spanish they can be either preverbal or postverbal. In this paper we argue that the islandhood of subject DPs in both English and Spanish is not categorical. The degradation associated with extraction from subjects must be attributed to the interplay of a range of more general constraints which are not specific to subjects. We argue that the interaction of these constraints has a cumulative effect whereby the more constraints that are violated, the higher the degree of degradation that results. We also argue that some speakers have a greater tolerance for constraint violations than others, which would account for widespread inter-speaker judgment variability

Sociolinguistics as a powerful tool to follow the course of a parametric change

This paper presents a new contrastive analysis of the expression of referential pronominal subjects in European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP), based on two recent samples, recorded in Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro, in 2009-2010, according to the same social stratification. The results reinforce EP’s status of a “consistent” Null Subject Language (NSL) (Roberts and Holmberg, 2010) and allow to follow the change in course in BP by offering answers to the empirical problems posed by Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968), particularly those related to the constraints and to the embedding of the change. Inherently human referents have been the most remarkable feature in the process, since 2nd person overt subjects lead the change and reveal an almost complete stage. The slower course of the change with 3rd person referents confirms the role of animacy in the process: [+human/+animate] subjects are preferably overt, whereas [-animate] subjects show more resistance in spite of a significant rise in the rate of overt pronouns when compared to a sample of the same speech community recorded in 1992. A multivariate analysis of 3rd person in both varieties points out the same structural relevant factors constraining overt/null subjects: the structural pattern (function of the antecedent), the cluster of semantic features of the referent (animacy and specificity) and the structure of the Complementizer Phrase (CP). The comparison allows to claim that the multivariate analysis is a powerful instrument to understand the internal factors controlling [+/- prodrop] systems. Even though rates of overt subjects are significantly higher in BP, already outnumbering null subjects in every structural environment (contrary to what is found for EP), Relative Weights obtained reveal the same effects in both varieties. Moreover, the analysis reveals some important evidence of the embedding of the change, in the present case, supporting the hypothesis of the resetting of the Parameter value by BP – from a NSL to a non-NSL