About sharing

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 212-216).This thesis is about multidominance or sharing in syntax. The term sharing is used in a technical sense, to refer to a situation where a syntactic node has more than one mother. I assume that multidominance is allowed by the grammar. I argue that sharing configurations are more diverse than it has been proposed. I identify two kinds of sharing: bulk sharing and non-bulk sharing. A string of multidominated material may be shared as a single constituent, resulting in a bulk sharing structure or its subparts may be shared individually, which results in a non-bulk sharing configuration. I argue that all sharing structures are constrained by a single condition: Constraint On Sharing (COSH). COSH is a filter on derivations, which imposes an identity requirement on the sets of terminal nodes completely dominated by horizontal mothers of any shared node. Horizontal mothers are mothers that do not dominate each other. I propose that effects of COSH are reducible to conditions that must be satisfied for a structure to be linearizable. Empirical evidence for COSH and non-bulk sharing comes from Bi-Clausal Multiple Wh-questions (BMWs), which I investigate in English and Croatian.(cont.) In a BMW, two wh-phrases appear to be coordinated at the left periphery of the clause: "What and where did Bob cook?". I present arguments that these questions are bi-clausal, with one wh-phrase belonging to each CP conjunct. Next, I propose an analysis of BMWs that involves non-bulk sharing constrained by COSH. I argue that this analysis explains the puzzling properties that BMWs have in both languages. I show that while English has only BMWs, in Croatian there is also a construction that mimics a BMW in the surface string, but is actually a result of a very different derivation, one that involves only one clause with two wh-phrases. I refer to this structure as a Coordinated Multiple Question (CMW). I propose that the placement of second-position clitics in Croatian can disambiguate a BMW from a CMW.by Martina Gračanin Yuksek.Ph.D

Agreement and the structure of relative clauses

The paper proposes an account of asymmetries in agreement patterns that obtain in restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses headed by hybrid agreement nouns 'd(j)eca '‘children’, 'braća '‘brothers’, and 'gospoda '‘gentry’ in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS). We note that relative clauses headed by hybrid nouns display different possibilities of agreement morphology on the relative pronoun 'koji/a/e '‘which’, depending, on the one hand, on whether the relative clause is restrictive or non-restrictive and on the other, on the case of the relative pronoun. We argue that the observed differences are the result of a conspiracy of the following factors: (i) hybrid number-agreement nouns introduce a null plural pronoun unspecified for gender (Postal 1966; den Dikken 2001; Torrego and Laga 2015), (ii) all plural case forms of the relative pronoun except for nominative and accusative show full gender syncretism (Alsina and Arsenijević 2012b), and (iii) non-restrictive relative clauses involve a null definite pronoun and attach to the head noun higher than the restrictive relative clauses (Postal 1994; de Vries 2002; 2006). We maintain that the facts discussed in the paper argue against analyses which derive the differences between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses from their LF representations, rather than from their overt syntax

The Canonical Order of Russian Objects

According to the principles of economy, scrambled orders require an interpretive license. Removal of such a license should result in canonical orders, that is, orders I hypothesize to be determined by a thematic hierarchy. It is traditionally assumed that the interpretive license for scrambling is provided by information-structural interpretations such as focus and background. However, either direct object–indirect object or indirect object–direct object order is possible in Russian all-focus constructions, complicating the choice of order analyzed as canonical. I argue that Russian scrambling can be licensed by a variety of interpretations, focus/background encoding being but one of them. When the construal of objects is neutralized on the basis of all of the relevant interpretations, the direct object–indirect object order surfaces, strongly suggesting that this is the canonical order of Russian objects