Languages without Determiner Quantification

Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Semantic Typology and Semantic Universals (1993

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

On defining categories: aux and predicate in colloquial Egyptian Arabic

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Predicate as a Universal Syntactic Category

Published as Coyote Papers: Working Papers in Linguistics from A-Z, Studies on Arabic, Basque, English, Japanese, Navajo and PapagoRelating categories across languages is the crucial question in the study of language universals.) It will be argued here that the syntactic categories (primary sentential constituents) of a language are not projections of lexical categories, and that identifying categories across languages as equivalent, as Steele (1981) has for instantiations of the category AUX, does not rest upon a language internal correspondence between these syntactic categories and particular lexical categories. A set of language independent definitions of the syntactic categories SUBJECT, AUX, PREDICATE and ADVERBIAL in terms of the functional properties (role in function/argument structure) of sentential constituents is proposed, and the instantiation of these categories in the unrelated languages Egyptian Arabic and English is shown. This set of category definitions suffices for an economical account of sentence structure in these configurational languages, and the definitions are shown to be useful in cross-language comparisons. The claim is made here that PREDICATE is a universal syntactic category: that is, all (complete) sentences of all languages necessarily have some constituent that we may label PREDICATE. This is not true of the other syntactic categories to be identified here, nor is it true of any lexical category, including verb.The Coyote Papers are made available by the Arizona Linguistics Circle at the University of Arizona and the University of Arizona Libraries. Contact [email protected] with questions about these materials

Case and Configurationality

Published as Coyote Papers: Working Papers in Linguistics from A-Z, Exploring Language: Linguistic Heresies from the DesertThe Coyote Papers are made available by the Arizona Linguistics Circle at the University of Arizona and the University of Arizona Libraries. Contact [email protected] with questions about these materials

A Violação da Condição em Kadiwéu Condition C Violation in Kadiwéu

Apesar de o kadiwéu apresentar as mesmas características tipológicas das línguas analisadas por Baker (1995), este trabalho mostra que o parâmetro da polissíntese proposto por Baker, de acordo com o qual as línguas polissintéticas seriam línguas de argumentos pronominais, não se sustenta para esta língua. Este artigo oferece, então, uma análise alternativa à teoria dos argumentos pronominais para o kadiwéu sustentando que sintagmas nominais são argumentos verbais nesta língua polissintética, como em qualquer outra língua melhor conhecida. Nesta perspectiva, uma das característica principais das línguas polissintéticas, a suposta violação da Condição C (e.g. <>i quer que João i ame Maria, <>i quebrou a faca do João i), deriva de movimento sintático decorrente da natureza do sistema-v do kadiwéu. Este texto, assim, questiona a existência de um parâmetro da polissíntese e desenvolve um insight de Fukui & Speas (1996) que prevê que a sintaxe de uma dada língua decorre das categorias funcionais presentes no léxico desta língua.<br>Although kadiwéu presents the same typological facts as the languages analyzed by Baker (1995), this work shows that Baker's polysynthesis parameter , according to which polysynthetic languages are pronominal argument languages, cannot be applied to this language. This paper offers, then, an alternative analysis to the pronominal argument theory for kadiwéu by arguing that nominal phrases are the verbal arguments in this polysynthetic language, like in any other better known language. On this view, one of the main properties of the polysynthetic languages, the so-called Condition C violation (e.g. <>i wants John i to love Mary, <> i broke John i's knife), follows from syntactic movement due to the nature of the Kadiwéu v-system. That is, this paper questions the existence of a polysynthesis parameter and develops Fukui & Speas (1996) insight that the syntax of a given language follows from the functional categories present in this language's lexicon