When is a Verb not a Verb?

Changes are proposed to the categorial status traditionally accorded to Aux-related and verbal elements in the clause, and the new taxonomy is applied in implementing the old insight that be should be analyzed as the default, semantically empty verb. The central issue is when a verb-like element does (not) count as categorially a V for distributional purposes. The major proposals are: 1) to remove be and have from the category Aux and treat them as Vs; 2) to separate out participles from genuine tensed and bare verbs; 3) to group do with modals, rather than with have and be, into a category Mood that also includes a null indicative morpheme. This scheme is used to account for the entire distribution of the forms of be just by treating it as V with no properties. Be fulfills two requirements that cannot always be met by contentful verbs: first, it satisfies the syntactico-semantic need for Tense to c-command a clause-mate V (the “V Requirement”); second, it satisfies the morphosyntactic need for participial affixes ( -ing, -en) to have hosts. It is shown how the former requirement derives the exceptionally high position of finite be by base-generating it above negation etc., rather than raising it across. VP-ellipsis data provide independent support for this treatment. Finally, some tentative suggestions are offered for how the V Requirement might be derived from deeper principles, while still allowing for the fact that it is apparently not fully enforced in languages with null copulas

Grammaticality judgments and linguistic methodology

Throughout much of the history of linguistics, grammaticality judgments – intuitions about the well-formedness of sentences – have constituted most of the empirical base against which theoretical hypothesis have been tested. Although such judgments often rest on subtle intuitions, there is no systematic methodology for eliciting them, and their apparent instability and unreliability have led many to conclude that they should be abandoned as a source of data. Carson T. Schütze presents here a detailed critical overview of the vast literature on the nature and utility of grammaticality judgments and other linguistic intuitions, and the ways they have been used in linguistic research. He shows how variation in the judgment process can arise from factors such as biological, cognitive, and social differences among subjects, the particular elicitation method used, and extraneous features of the materials being judged. He then assesses the status of judgments as reliable indicators of a speaker's grammar. Integrating substantive and methodological findings, Schütze proposes a model in which grammaticality judgments result from interaction of linguistic competence with general cognitive processes. He argues that this model provides the underpinning for empirical arguments to show that once extragrammatical variance is factored out, universal grammar succumbs to a simpler, more elegant analysis than judgment data initially lead us to expect. Finally, Schütze offers numerous practical suggestions on how to collect better and more useful data. The result is a work of vital importance that will be required reading for linguists, cognitive psychologists, and philosophers of language alike. "Native speakers' judgments of the acceptability of linguistic examples have always formed a major part of the data of linguistics, but linguists generally either have elicited such data in a haphazard fashion and accepted the results uncritically or have rejected acceptability judgments altogether and equally uncritically. Schütze's book is a welcome relief from the failure of linguists to deal responsibly with what can be either the most fertile or the most misleading source of information about languages." —James D. McCawley, University of Chicago "Schütze has written an extraordinarily useful and timely book. In it, he provides a clear and readable review of past studies of the methodology of generative syntax. But this is not merely a survey: it is also a call for more careful and objective scientific methods in syntax, including a set of practical methodological suggestions for working syntacticians. If heeded, they will greatly strengthen the empirical base of linguistic theory." —Tom Wasow, Stanford Universit

INFL in child and adult language : agreement, case and licensing

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (p. 280-292).by Carson Theodore Robert Schütze.Ph.D

Objectless locative prepositions in British English

In British English, sentences like This film has monsters in are possible without the pronoun it. Descriptively, we refine landscape of the phenomenon, identifying restrictions on the distribution and interpretation of OLPs, including dialectal variation within British English, and observing an A-bar movement restriction on monsters. Analytically, we argue against an A-movement analysis (Griffiths & Sailor), and ponder alternatives from a cross-linguistic perspective

Transparent free relatives with "who": Support for a unified analysis

This paper provides novel data, including from acceptability ratings, supporting a unified analysis of Transparent Free Relatives (TFRs) as variants of Standard Free Relatives (SFRs), rather than entirely different beasts. Two arguments are presented. First, who-TFRs exist, contrary to the view in the literature that TFRs can only be formed with what. Second, who-TFRs degrade following the same illunderstood pattern as who-SFRs. These outcomes cohere better with accounts of TFRs that treat them as similar to SFRs, versus accounts that treat them as virtually unrelated

The Non-omission of Nonfinite Be

It has long been known that children learning English optionally omit finite forms of the verb be (both copula and auxiliary). What makes be omissions possible? A classic answer is that be is semantically empty, hence a good choice to omit under performance-related pressures. What would this hypothesis lead us to expect about the infinitive form of be? In terms of semantic vacuity, nonfinite be is an even better choice for omission than finite be , since it does not carry tense or agreement information—most such deletions would be completely recoverable. Thus, the semantic vacuity hypothesis would lead us to expect omission of nonfinite be to be at least as frequent as omission of finite be . This is contrasted with the suggestion that be omission be incorporated into the Root/Optional Infinitive phenomenon. The latter finiteness hypothesis makes different predictions from the semantic vacuity hypothesis with respect to the relative rate of nonfinite be omission. The finding is that, in each relevant transcript, omission of finite be is attested, use of nonfinite be is attested, but there are no instances of omission of nonfinite be , contra the prediction of the semantic vacuity hypothesis. I develop an analysis within the Agreement/Tense Omission Model of the underspecification of Infl (cf. Schütze 1997). I claim that finite forms of be in (adult and child) English are fused V+I heads, in the sense of Halle & Marantz’s (1993) Distributed Morphology. Their locus for vocabulary insertion has values for person/number, tense, and lexical category. The fused vocabulary items cannot be inserted in a syntactic structure in which INFL features have been underspecified. Overt be arises only when both AgrS and Tense are fully specified. Null be , i.e. Ø, the default member of the paradigm, arises from underspecification of Tense and/or underspecification of AgrS