Subjects, Topics, and Anchoring to the Context

The article discusses the connection between the syntactic and semantic properties of weak, strong, and referential DP subjects. In particular, I argue that nominal expressions possess a situation argument and that their interpretation and their distribution follow from the presuppositional requirements that the determiner imposes on the individual argument and situation argument of its complement nominal. These presuppositional requirements, I then argue, are embodied by local relations of the subject to a distinct head in the C domain, Fin(0) in the system of Rizzi 1997, where specific referential values of discourse antecedents are accessible

Visualizing the Template of a Chaotic Attractor

Chaotic attractors are solutions of deterministic processes, of which the topology can be described by templates. We consider templates of chaotic attractors bounded by a genus-1 torus described by a linking matrix. This article introduces a novel and unique tool to validate a linking matrix, to optimize the compactness of the corresponding template and to draw this template. The article provides a detailed description of the different validation steps and the extraction of an order of crossings from the linking matrix leading to a template of minimal height. Finally, the drawing process of the template corresponding to the matrix is saved in a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 26th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2018

In need of mediation: The relation between syntax and information structure

This paper defends the view that syntax does not directly interact with information structure. Rather, information structure affects prosody, and only the latter has an interface with syntax. We illustrate this point by discussing scrambling, focus preposing, and topicalization. The position entertained here implies that syntax is not very informative when one wants to narrow down the interpretation of terms such as “focus”, “topic”, etc

Infinitive Wh-relatives in romance : consequences for the truncation-versus-intervention debate

Romance clitic left dislocation is widespread across all kinds of nonroot contexts, but it is forbidden in infinitive wh-relatives. This article investigates the extent and nature of this restriction and the consequences it raises for the truncation and intervention analyses of the left periphery of embedded sentences. We will show that current proposals cannot account for the whole gamut of data. In consequence, we will propose that infinitive wh-relatives display a maximally syncretic left periphery, whereas infinitive wh-interrogatives have a full-fledged left periphery, crucially involving ForceP, because they are selected by a higher predicate. This crucial difference between infinitive relatives and interrogatives will also be shown to be consistent with the existence of specialized complementizers for the former but not the latte

Discourse, sentence grammar and the left periphery of the clause

The term left periphery refers to that area on the left of the subject, in the syntactic representation of a clause, where the relationships with the context are encoded. In this work I propose a syntactic analysis that goes beyond mere sentence grammar and integrates prosodic and discourse features as well. On the one hand, this move accounts for some observations previously not fully understood, such as the anomalous syntactic properties of Clitic Left Dislocation and Hanging Topic, their differences with respect to Focus and their similarities with parentheticals. On the other, it aims at providing a theory of grammar able to encode the relationships between sentence grammar, context and bigger units such as discourses