On Left and Right Dislocation: A Dynamic Perspective

The paper argues that by modelling the incremental and left-right process of interpretation as a process of growth of logical form (representing logical forms as trees), an integrated typology of left-dislocation and right-dislocation phenomena becomes available, bringing out not merely the similarities between these types of phenomena, but also their asymmetry. The data covered include hanging topic left dislocation, clitic left dislocation, left dislocation, pronoun doubling, expletives, extraposition, and right node raising, with each set of data analysed in terms of general principles of tree growth. In the light of the success in providing a characterisation of the asymmetry between left and right periphery phenomena, a result not achieved in more wellknown formalisms, the paper concludes that grammar formalisms should model the dynamics of language processing in time.Articl

Talk Shows and Language Attitudes: A Sociolinguistic Investigation of Language Attitudes Towards Taiwan Mandarin Among Chinese Mainlanders

This dissertation looks at the effects of media exposure and language ideologies on Mandarin speakers’ acceptability judgments. Although there is a long-standing tradition against citing media exposure as a source of language variation, I show that 1) media exposure to a non-local perceptually salient variant can make people more likely to rate non-local linguistic features as grammatically acceptable, and 2) media exposure shapes people’s language attitudes—a new alignment of attitudes is emerging among the millennials on the mainland. Data were collected through an online survey consisting of grammaticality judgments, matched-guise tasks, open-ended attitudinal questions, and demographic questions. The data show that the social prestige of Taiwan Mandarin (TM) may be waning, which can be ascribed in part to 1) social and economic changes on the mainland, and 2) the change of TM itself. Deviating from Mainland Standard Mandarin, TM is perceived by many millennials on the mainland as gentle, pretentious and emasculated, which embodies the dynamics of language ideologies: they vary both diachronically and synchronically

Right dislocation in Turkish

This paper investigates a scrambling operation called Right Dislocation (RD) in Turkish. Despite the limited understanding of RD in Turkish, previous studies have converged on the conclusion that (i) RD in Turkish involves rightward movement (Kural 1997, Kornfilt 2005), and (ii) post-verbal constituents (PVCs) consistently undergo reconstruction (with the exception of scope, as suggested by Kural (1997)), indicating that PVCs occupy an A’-position. This paper presents instances where PVCs are interpreted in their surface position, casting doubt on the presumed A’-properties. Additionally, it demonstrates that RD of higher arguments (e.g., subjects or indirect objects) seems to create new binding and scope relations with respect to lower arguments (e.g., direct and indirect objects). To address these issues, this paper proposes a structure that is governed by the interaction between discourse, pragmatics, and syntax. It argues that RD is a by-product of focus movement which is found in cleft-like constructions, and RD is preceded by the scrambling of lower arguments to discourse-functional projections such as FocusP and TopicP. Similarly, the RD of lower arguments is preceded by their short scrambling to the specifier of vP, driven by the Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC). By aligning syntax with dis- course through a one-to-one mapping, in conjunction with independently motivated principles like the Scope principle, LF-approach to Condition C, and the Anywhere Condition of Condition A and pronominal binding, the proposed framework provides a consistent explanation for RD in Turkish, attributing all A-properties to the short scrambling of arguments

Issues on topics

The present volume contains papers that bear mainly on issues concerning the topic concept. This concept is of course very broad and diverse. Also, different views are expressed in this volume. Some authors concentrate on the status of topics and non-topics in so-called topic prominent languages (i.e. Chinese), others focus on the syntactic behavior of topical constituents in specific European languages (German, Greek, Romance languages). The last contribution tries to bring together the concept of discourse topic (a non-syntactic notion) and the concept of sentence topic, i.e. that type of topic that all the preceding papers are concerned with

Two Ways to the Right : A Hybrid approach to Right-dislocation in Korean

This paper investigates the syntax and semantics of right dislocation constructions (RDCs) in Korean, with special focus on asymmetries between postverbal arguments and postverbal adjuncts. I argue that RDCs are sub-divided into two types: argument RDCs vs. adjunct RDCs. I propose that postverbal arguments undergo focus movement to the root C in a mono-clausal structure, whereas postverbal adjuncts are base-generated at the end of the utterance, and the head of the adjunct may undergo sideward movement onto the host clause. I show that under the current proposal, we can explain a variety of unique properties of RDCs in Korean, which include: root effects, scope, variability in island effects, Negative Polarity Item (NPI) licensing, wh-licensing, and the presence or absence of LBC and CED effects. My proposal also captures otherwise surprising similarities between argument RDCs and specificational focus constructions and a parallelism between adjunct RDCs and parasitic gap constructions

On the correlation between A-type scrambling and lack of Weak Crossover effects

This paper explores certain properties of word orders in Polish clauses with monotransitive verbs where the object is moved to the clause initial position across the subject. We briefly present two current accounts of such word orders in Russian (Baylin 2003 and Slioussar 2005, 2006) and conclude that both seem to capture certain properties of inverted constructions, though the genuine picture, at least for Polish, is still more complex. Most importantly, while OVS constructions unambiguously show that the movement of the object forms an A-type chain, OSV constructions are less straightforward, as the chain formed by the object can show both A-type and A-bar type properties. We propose a derivational account of this ambiguity and subsequently attempt to find a positive correlation between A-type properties of the fronting of the object and lack, or at least a strong suppression, of WCO effects in Polish

Ellipsis in the vP domain in Mandarin and Xhosa

This thesis provides a unified analysis of ellipsis in the vP domain in two typologically different languages, Mandarin and Xhosa from a generative perspective. It starts with the V-stranding Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) assumption and shows that Mandarin and Xhosa do not have V-stranding VPE. The evidence for this is that in both languages, the constituents that remain in vP obligatorily are not allowed to be deleted, whereas the ones that can/must move out of vP can be deleted. The deleted constituents display the characteristics of PF-deletion, i.e. they have an internal syntactic structure. Based on the parallel between movement and ellipsis of the vP-internal constituents, I propose the Ellipsis EPP Hypothesis to account for ellipsis in the vP domain. The Hypothesis predicts that there is an Ellipsis Phrase at the left periphery of vP. The EP bears an Ellipsis-EPP (EEPP) feature, which must be satisfied. Maximal phrases in the c-command domain of EP are all potential candidates for satisfying the EEPP feature by moving to [Spec, EP]. However, only the phrases that are allowed to move out of vP can move to [Spec, EP] as EP is located above vP. Moreover, the movement to [Spec, EP] is subject to the syntactic and semantic restrictions in structure-building in that ellipsis is one operation in the course of structure-building and the derivation will continue after ellipsis takes place. The EEPP feature renders an XP in the specifier phonetically empty and syntactically frozen; therefore, a constituent will be deleted as soon as it moves to [Spec, EP]. The Hypothesis is schematically represented below. The Ellipsis EPP Hypothesis adequately accounts for the ellipsis of various vP-internal constituents - NPs, DPs, infinitive complements and CP complements - in both Mandarin and Xhosa. At the same time, it reveals the reasons why vP is precluded from being elided in these two languages. In Mandarin vP moves to [Spec, AspPi] to check the uninterpretable [asp] feature and in Xhosa vP moves to [Spec, FocP] to realize the focus; consequently, vP may not move to [Spec, EP] for ellipsis

Information structure in linguistic theory and in speech production : validation of a cross-linguistic data set

The aim of this paper is to validate a dataset collected by means of production experiments which are part of the Questionnaire on Information Structure. The experiments generate a range of information structure contexts that have been observed in the literature to induce specific constructions. This paper compares the speech production results from a subset of these experiments with specific claims about the reflexes of information structure in four different languages. The results allow us to evaluate and in most cases validate the efficacy of our elicitation paradigms, to identify potentially fruitful avenues of future research, and to highlight issues involved in interpreting speech production data of this kind