The distribution of main and embedded structures: V2 and non-V2 orders in North Germanic

North Germanic has Verb Second (V2) word order in main but not embedded clauses. Although as a first approximation V2 is a phenomenon characteristic of root clauses, it has long been known that it occurs also in a restricted set of embedded clauses in many, if not all, of the North Germanic languages. Moreover, a wide variety of Norwegian dialects allow deviations from the standard V2 word order in main clause interrogatives. The asymmetric Verb Second pattern thus seemingly breaks down in different ways. This thesis presents new data from large-scale elicited production experiments targeting the placement of the finite verb in both main and embedded clauses. The distribution of deviations from the standard word order pattern, and the constraints on the environments where these are produced are of primary concern. In addition, results from a Norwegian production experiment where speech was elicited in two ways -- using standardised written language and using spoken dialect as the elicitation source, show that most speakers directly activate morphophonological forms from the local dialect when encountering standardised orthographic forms. This suggests that speakers do not treat the written and spoken language as different grammars. Furthermore, we find syntactic variation which does not track the morphophonological variation, suggesting that a code/register-switching alone cannot explain syntactic optionality. Overall, the results of the various studies within this thesis show that variation in the position of the verb, is found not only between languages, but within languages and within speakers. I therefore conclude that verb placement in North Germanic is not fully grammaticised. As an alternative, this thesis proposes a uniform syntactic structure for main and embedded clauses in North Germanic. In this structure, verb position is non-categorical though correlated with assertion semantics (embedded clauses) and prosody and lexicon (Norwegian main clauses)

Advances in the Analysis of Spanish Exclamatives

'Advances in the Analysis of Spanish Exclamatives' is the first book entirely devoted to Spanish exclamatives, a special sentence type often overlooked by contemporary linguists and neglected in standard grammatical descriptions. The seven essays in this volume, each by a leading specialist on the topic, scrutinize the syntax, as well as the semantic and pragmatic aspects, of exclamations on theoretical grounds. The book begins by summarizing, commenting on, and evaluating previous descriptive and theoretical contributions on Spanish exclamatives. This introductory overview also contains a detailed classification of Spanish exclamative grammatical types, along with an analysis of their main properties

Az adverbiumok mondattani és jelentéstani kérdései = The syntax and syntax-semantics interface of adverbial modification

A határozószók és a határozók alaktani, mondattani és funkcionális kérdéseit vizsgáltuk a generatív nyelvelmélet keretében, főként magyar anyag alapján. Olyan leírásra törekedtünk, melyből a különféle határozófajták mondattani viselkedése, hatóköre, valamint hangsúlyozása egyaránt következik. A különféle határozótípusok PP-ként való elemzésének lehetőségét bizonyítottuk. A határozók mondatbeli elhelyezése tekintetében a specifikálói pozíció (Cinque 1999) ellen és az adjunkciós elemzés (Ernst 2002) mellett érveltünk. Megmutattuk, hogy a határozók szórendjének levezetéséhez bal- és jobboldali adjunkció feltételezése egyaránt szükséges. A különféle határozófajták szórendi helyét mondattani, jelentéstani és prozódiai tényezők összjátékával magyaráztuk. A jelentéstani tényezők között pl. a határozók inkorporálhatóságát korlátozó típusmegszorítást, a negatív határozók kötelező fókuszálását előidéző skaláris megszorítást, egyes határozófajták és igefajták komplex eseményszerkezetének inkompatibilitását vizsgáltuk. Az ige mögötti határozók szórendjét befolyásoló prozódiai tényező például a növekvő összetevők törvénye. Megfigyeltük az intonációskifejezés- újraelemzés kiváltódásának feltételeit és jelentéstani következményeit is. A helyhatározói igekötők egy típusát a mozgatási láncok sajátos fonológiai megvalósulásaként (a fonológiailag redukált kópia inkorporációjaként) elemeztük. A tárgykörben mintegy 60 tanulmányt publikáltunk. Adverbs and Adverbial Adjuncts at the Interfaces (489 old.) c. könyvünket kiadja a Mouton de Gruyter (Berlin). | This project has aimed to clarify (on the basis of mainly Hungarian data) basic issues concerning the category "adverb", the function "adverbial", and the grammar of adverbial modification. We have argued for the PP analysis of adverbials, and have claimed that they enter the derivation via left- and right-adjunction. Their merge-in position is determined by the interplay of syntactic, semantic, and prosodic factors. The semantically motivated constraints discussed also include a type restriction affecting adverbials semantically incorporated into the verbal predicate, an obligatory focus position for scalar adverbs representing negative values of bidirectional scales, cooccurrence restrictions between verbs and adverbials involving incompatible subevents, etc. The order and interpretation of adverbials in the postverbal domain is shown to be affected by such phonologically motivated constraints as the Law of Growing Constituents, and by intonation-phrase restructuring. The shape of the light-headed chain arising in the course of locative PP incorporation is determined by morpho-phonological requirements. The types of adverbs and adverbials analyzed include locatives, temporals, comitatives, epistemic adverbs, adverbs of degree, manner, counting, and frequency, quantificational adverbs, and adverbial participles. We have published about 60 studies; our book Adverbs and Adverbial Adjuncts at the Interfaces (pp. 489) is published in the series Interface Explorations of Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin

Pharasiot Greek : word order and clause structure

Pharasiot Greek is a Modern Greek dialect that was spoken in what is today central Turkey until 1923, when the population exchange between Greece and Turkey was enacted as a supplementary protocol to the Treaty of Lausanne. As of 2018, there are about 25 heritage speakers of the dialect in Northern Greece. This dissertation first offers a sketch grammar of the modern-day dialect based on data collected from the speakers between 2013-2016. Second, it offers an in-depth study of the basic structure of declarative main clauses in Pharasiot Greek, with particular emphasis on the functional sequence in the left periphery of the clause. The theoretical discussions are couched in the framework of generative grammar of Chomskyan tradition, further enriched with the cartographic approach to the clausal left periphery. Besides providing possibly the last sketch grammar of the dialect before its extinction, the dissertation also supports the central tenet of the cartographic approach, i.e., that syntactic representations are complex objects consisting of a sequence of hierarchically organised functional elements and it provides empirical evidence from Pharasiot Greek for a number of ordering restrictions in the left periphery

Oriented Adverbs : Issues in the Lexical Semantics of Event Adverbs

In event semantics, manner adverbs are analysed as 'predicates of events'. However, many such event predicates have variants that apply to individuals instead of events; e.g. : 'to answer the question stupidly' vs. 'a stupid person'. The thesis investigates the question of how these pervasive and systematic alternations can be explained, and in doing so aims at supplementing the neo-Davidsonian theory of adverbial modification with a lexical-semantic account of the modifiers. One and the same underlying adjective usually gives rise to a whole range of different adverbial uses. The exact range of variants is found to be conditioned by the lexical-semantic class of the adjective. Hence, a second topic dealt with in detail is the identification and semantic analysis of a number of 'borderline' adverb types which are different from manner adverbs but still raise the question of whether they might be event-related. After an introduction that motivates the general approach, chapter 2 discusses various theoretical issues concerning the lexical status of adverbs. Chapter 3 introduces the class of resultative adverbs and argues that they constitute a kind of event-related modifier that arises via lexical shift from a predicate of individuals. Chapter 4 discusses individual-level adjectives like 'stupid' and their adverbial uses, namely manner and agentive (or subject-oriented) adverbs. A major finding is that the manner variant is lexically derived from the agentive one. Chapter 5 investigates adjectives of psychological states like 'sad' and their adverbial uses: manner and transparent adverbs. It is shown that, lexically, transparent adverbs are predicates of individuals that are related to events only in the course of composition, thus exhibiting close similarities to depictives. Finally, chapter 6 summarises the findings.In event semantics, manner adverbs are analysed as 'predicates of events'. However, many such event predicates have variants that apply to individuals instead of events; e.g. : 'to answer the question stupidly' vs. 'a stupid person'. The thesis investigates the question of how these pervasive and systematic alternations can be explained, and in doing so aims at supplementing the neo-Davidsonian theory of adverbial modification with a lexical-semantic account of the modifiers. One and the same underlying adjective usually gives rise to a whole range of different adverbial uses. The exact range of variants is found to be conditioned by the lexical-semantic class of the adjective. Hence, a second topic dealt with in detail is the identification and semantic analysis of a number of 'borderline' adverb types which are different from manner adverbs but still raise the question of whether they might be event-related. After an introduction that motivates the general approach, chapter 2 discusses various theoretical issues concerning the lexical status of adverbs. Chapter 3 introduces the class of resultative adverbs and argues that they constitute a kind of event-related modifier that arises via lexical shift from a predicate of individuals. Chapter 4 discusses individual-level adjectives like 'stupid' and their adverbial uses, namely manner and agentive (or subject-oriented) adverbs. A major finding is that the manner variant is lexically derived from the agentive one. Chapter 5 investigates adjectives of psychological states like 'sad' and their adverbial uses: manner and transparent adverbs. It is shown that, lexically, transparent adverbs are predicates of individuals that are related to events only in the course of composition, thus exhibiting close similarities to depictives. Finally, chapter 6 summarises the findings

Order and structure in syntax I

This book reconsiders the role of order and structure in syntax, focusing on fundamental issues such as word order and grammatical functions. The first group of papers in the collection asks what word order can tell us about syntactic structure, using evidence from V2, object shift, word order gaps and different kinds of movement. The second group of papers all address the issue of subjecthood in some way, and examine how certain subject properties vary across languages: expression of subjects, expletive subjects, quirky and locative subjects. All of the papers address in some way the tension between modelling what can vary across languages whilst improving our understanding of what might be universal to human language