Sentential Word Order and the Syntax of Question Particles

Polar question particles in languages with VO word order pose a problem for the otherwise robust Final-Over-Final Constraint, which rules out a head-final phrase immediately dominating a head-initial phrase (Holmberg 2000). This paper offers a description of these particles and the constraint, and offers data supporting the hypothesis that these final particles are different from their initial counterparts in a fundamental way

The syntax of polarity emphasis

A crosslinguistic survey of the expression of polarity emphasis reveals that some such expressions are subject to the distributional constraints typical of main clause phenomena, while others are not. The former have received a fairly homogeneous syntactic analysis, implicating specific left peripheral projections. The non-restricted variety, however, is not analysed uniformly with some phenomena receiving a fully syntactic account and others being accounted for in terms of semantics and pragmatics. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

West Flemish verb-based discourse markers and the articulation of the Speech Act layer

This paper focuses on the West Flemish discourse markers located at the edge of the clause. After a brief survey of the distribution of discourse markers in WF, the paper proposes a syntactic analysis of the discourse markers ne and we. Based on the distribution of these discourse markers, of vocatives and of dislocated DPs, an articulated speech act layer is elaborated which corroborates the proposals in Hill (). It is postulated that there is a syntactic relation between particles used as discourse markers and vocatives. The paper offers further support for the grammaticalization of pragmatic features at the interface between syntax and discourse and for the hypothesis that the relevant computation at the interface is of the same nature as that in Narrow Syntax

Clitics in Sasak, eastern Indonesia

This paper is a discussion of the distribution of clitics in Sasak, an Austronesian(Western Malayo-Polynesian) language spoken by approximately two million people on the island of Lombok, eastern Indonesia. It outlines the types of clitics found Sasak and shows that there are interesting interactions between clitic placement and focus constructions that result in the violation of a number of canonical word orders in Sasak. The author argues that these violations can be seen as arising from competition for linear positions within the sentence; this can be accounted for within an optimality-theoretic syntax framework (Bresnan, 2000, Grimshaw, 1999) which describes sentence structures in terms of violable ranked constraints, the interaction of which accounts for observed structures as being the most optimal result of constraint competition

Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation (DSLDI 2015)

The goal of the DSLDI workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in sharing ideas on how DSLs should be designed, implemented, supported by tools, and applied in realistic application contexts. We are both interested in discovering how already known domains such as graph processing or machine learning can be best supported by DSLs, but also in exploring new domains that could be targeted by DSLs. More generally, we are interested in building a community that can drive forward the development of modern DSLs. These informal post-proceedings contain the submitted talk abstracts to the 3rd DSLDI workshop (DSLDI'15), and a summary of the panel discussion on Language Composition