Parametric variation in clitic constructions

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1981.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES.Vita.Bibliography: leaves 357-362.by Hagit Borer.Ph.D

The construction of viewpoint aspect: the imperfective revisited

This paper argues for a constructionist approach to viewpoint Aspect by exploring the idea that it does not exert any altering force on the situation-aspect properties of predicates. The proposal is developed by analyzing the syntax and semantics of the imperfective, which has been attributed a coercer role in the literature as a de-telicizer and de-stativizer in the progressive, and as a de-eventivizer in the so-called ability (or attitudinal) and habitual readings. This paper proposes a unified semantics for the imperfective, preserving the properties of eventualities throughout the derivation. The paper argues that the semantics of viewpoint aspect is encoded in a series of functional heads containing interval-ordering predicates and quantifiers. This richer structure allows us to account for a greater amount of phenomena, such as the perfective nature of the individual instantiations of the event within a habitual construction or the nonculminating reading of perfective accomplishments in Spanish. This paper hypothesizes that nonculminating accomplishments have an underlying structure corresponding to the perfective progressive. As a consequence, the progressive becomes disentangled from imperfectivity and is given a novel analysis. The proposed syntax is argued to have a corresponding explicit morphology in languages such as Spanish and a nondifferentiating one in languages such as English; however, the syntax-semantics underlying both of these languages is argued to be the same

Unagreement is an illusion

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11049-015-9311-yThis paper proposes an analysis of unagreement, a phenomenon involving an apparent mismatch between a definite third person plural subject and first or second person plural subject agreement observed in various null subject languages (e.g. Spanish, Modern Greek and Bulgarian), but notoriously absent in others (e.g. Italian, European Portuguese). A cross-linguistic correlation between unagreement and the structure of adnominal pronoun constructions suggests that the availability of unagreement depends on whether person and definiteness are hosted by separate heads (in languages like Greek) or bundled on a single head (i.e. pronominal determiners in languages like Italian). Null spell-out of the head hosting person features high in the extended nominal projection of the subject leads to unagreement. The lack of unagreement in languages with pronominal determiners results from the interaction of their syntactic structure with the properties of the vocabulary items realising the head encoding both person and definiteness. The analysis provides a principled explanation for the cross-linguistic distribution of unagreement and suggests a unified framework for deriving unagreement, adnominal pronoun constructions, personal pronouns and pro

Affected Experiencers

Numerous languages permit an NP that is not selected by the verb to be added to a clause, with several different possible interpretations. We divide such non-selected arguments into possessor, benefactive, attitude holder, and affected experiencer categories, on the basis of syntactic and semantic differences between them. We propose a formal analysis of the affected experiencer construction. In our account, a syntactic head Aff(ect) introduces the experiencer argument, and adds a conventional implicature to the effect that any event of the type denoted by its syntactic sister is the source of the experiencer’s psychological experience. Hence, our proposal involves two tiers of meaning: the at-issue meaning of the sentence, and some not-at-issue meaning (an implicature). A syntactic head can introduce material on both tiers. Additionally, we allow two parameters of variation: (i) the height of the attachment of Aff, and (ii) how much of the semantics is at-issue and how much is an implicature. We show that these two parameters account for the attested variation across our sample of languages, as well as the significant commonalities among them. Our analysis also accounts for significant differences between affected experiencers and the other types of non-selected arguments, and we also note a generalization to the effect that purely not-at-issue non-selected arguments can only be weak or clitic pronouns