NP would like to meet GF: A Welsh Adjectival Construction

In this article we examine a Welsh adjectival construction which superficially looks simple but on closer examination proves to be somewhat challenging. The construction contains an NP constituent whose GF status is far from clear. We consider various analyses of this NP, as SUBJ, OBJ, and ADJ, and suggest that on balance the evidence favours the OBJ analysis. Beyond the purely parochial Welsh or Celtic interest, it may provide a useful case study of how difficult it is to determine the correct identification of grammatical functions beyond core cases

The properties of anticausatives crosslinguistically

The causative/anticausative alternation has been the topic of much typological and theoretical discussion in the linguistic literature. This alternation is characterized by verbs with transitive and intransitive uses, such that the transitive use of a verb V means roughly "cause to Vintransitive" (see Levin 1993). The discussion revolves around two issues: the first one concerns the similarities and differences between the anticausative and the passive, and the second one concerns the derivational relationship, if any, between the transitive and intransitive variant. With respect to the second issue, a number of approaches have been developed. Judging the approach conceptually unsatisfactory, according to which each variant is assigned an independent lexical entry, it was concluded that the two variants have to be derivationally related. The question then is which one of the two is basic and where this derivation takes place in the grammar. Our contribution to this discussion is to argue against derivational approaches to the causative / anticausative alternation. We focus on the distribution of PPs related to external arguments (agent, causer, instrument, causing event) in passives and anticausatives of English, German and Greek and the set of verbs undergoing the causative/anticausative alternation in these languages. We argue that the crosslinguistic differences in these two domains provide evidence against both causativization and detransitivization analyses of the causative / anticausative alternation. We offer an approach to this alternation which builds on a syntactic decomposition of change of state verbs into a Voice and a CAUS component. Crosslinguistic variation in passives and anticausatives depends on properties of Voice and its combinations with CAUS and various types of roots

Floating Agreement in American Spanish Leista Dialects

In this paper I link floating features in clitic clusters with two third-person participants to a split object marking system, indicative of a language change in progress. Both clitics are undergoing concurrent reanalysis processes affecting them differe

Capturing and Parsing the Mixed Properties of Light Verb Constructions in a Typed Feature Structure Grammar

One of the most widely used constructions in Korean is the so-called light verb construction (LVC) involving an active-denoting verbal noun (VN) together with the light verb ha-ta ‘do’. This paper first discusses the argument composition of the LVC, mixed properties of VNs which have provided a challenge to syntactic analyses with a strict version of X-bar theory. The paper shows the mechanism of multiple classification of category types with systematic inheritance can provide an effective way of capturing these mixed properties. The paper then restates the argument composition properties of the LVC and reenforces them with a constraint-based analysis. This paper also offers answers to the the puzzling syntactic variations in the LVC. Following these empirical and theoretical discussions is a short report on the implementation of the analysis within the LKB (Linguistics Knowledge Building) system

Ways of licensing Hungarian external possessors

This paper examines the status of Hungarian dative noun phrases interpreted as external possessors of a sister constituent. It challenges the widely accepted view put forth by Szabolcsi (1983; 1992, etc.) that external possessors are uniformly assigned a theta role by the possessum, and they are uniformly raised from its maximal projection via A-bar movement. It argues instead that external possessors can also be base-generated outside the projection of the possessum, binding its internal possessor, and can receive an ‘affected’ theta role from the verb. The paper distinguishes three different types of external possession, showing that they have different licensing conditions, and different agreement properties. (i) The external possessor can be generated externally, and be assigned an ‘affected’ theta role by the verb. The referential identity of the dative marked affected participant and the pro-dropped internal possessor is due to a binding relation between them. (ii) The external possessor can be licensed by information structure/logical structure: a case marked possessor can assume a topic, focus, or quantifier role on its own, and can be raised into the corresponding A-bar position independently, without its possessum. (iii) The external possessor can also be licensed by the semantic incorporation of its possessum. External possessors binding a pro and external possessors binding a trace in the projection of the possessum elicit different agreement on the possessum. The choice of agreement in the different types of external possession constructions has been tested with 40 native speakers, and the results have been used as evidence in their structural analyses