On the Subject

For some time now, generative grammarians have been committed to reducing the role of the phrase structure rules in the grammar in favor of general principles. It has been observed that there is considerable redundancy in a grammar containing both phrase structure rules and subcategorization frames for lexical items or classes of lexical items. An attractive solution is to abandon the former in favor of the latter, together with a Projection Principle according to which the argument structure of lexical items is projected into the syntax. The single most serious problem with this approach is the apparent necessity for clauses, at least in English and many other languages, to have subjects - a requirement that is independent of the argument structure of the lexical items in the clause. The Extended Projection Principle reflects this problem very directly: although Chomsky claims that [the] Projection Principle and the requirement that clauses have subjects are conceptually quite closely related [Chomsky 82, p.10], it is not at all clear what the nature of the conceptual relation is

A remark on Béjar & Kahnemuyipour 2017:Specificational subjects do have phi-features

In a number of languages, agreement in specificational copular sentences can or must be with the second of the two nominals, even when it is the first that occupies the canonical subject position. Béjar & Kahnemuyipour (2017) show that Persian and Eastern Armenian are two such languages. They then argue that ‘NP2 agreement’ occurs because the nominal in subject position (NP1) is not accessible to an external probe. It follows that actual agreement with NP1 should never be possible: the alternative to NP2 agreement should be ‘default’ agreement. We show that this prediction is false. In addition to showing that English has NP1, not default, agreement, we present new data from Icelandic, a language with rich agreement morphology, including cases that involve ‘plurale tantum’ nominals as NP1. These allow us to control for any confound from the fact that typically in a specificational sentence with two nominals differing in number, it is NP2 that is plural. We show that even in this case, the alternative to agreement with NP2 is agreement with NP1, not a default. Hence, we conclude that whatever the correct analysis of specificational sentences turns out to be, it must not predict obligatory failure of NP1 agreement

Remarks on Causatives and Passive

The investigation of causative constructions has been a topic of enduring interest among linguists, generative and non-generative alike. For one thing, the variability and sheer complexity of the relevant empirical domain, even within a group of closely related languages such as Romance, poses considerable and often daunting descriptive challenges. On the other hand, comparative work by linguists of various theoretical persuasions (Aissen 1974, Aissen 1979, Baker 1985, Comrie 1976, Marantz 1984, Zubizarreta 1982, Zubizarreta 1985, among many others) has shown that certain properties of causatives recur with striking regularity among unrelated and typologically otherwise diverse languages, in the absence of areal contact. This holds out the hope that the bewildering variety of data that we are faced with when we consider causative constructions can be understood with reference to a relatively small number of causative types. At first glance, the most salient distinction is that between syntactic and morphological causative formation. As is well known, in some languages the causative is expressed by means of syntactic complementation, as in the English example in (I), whereas in others it involves morphological affixation, as in the Japanese equivalent of (1) given in (2)

On the internal and external syntax of adverbial clauses in Faroese:Causal and temporal clauses

Recent and current research into the syntax of adverbial clauses has been investigating their external syntax (in particular where they attach to their host clause), their internal syntax (in particular whether or not they exhibit certain “root phenomena,” including V2), and how these two aspects may be connected. This paper investigates how some of these issues play out in causal and temporal adverbial clauses in Faroese. We draw on existing work on causal clauses in Icelandic, and demonstrate that Faroese also exhibits a correlation between attachment site, type of causal interpretation, and the possibility of argument fronting within the adverbial clause. We then turn to temporal clauses to investigate the hypothesis that the constraints on argument fronting are due toA′-movement within the adverbial clause. We show that there is positive evidence for the existence of such A′-movement only in a subset of temporal clauses (extending observations that have been made for other languages), posing a challenge for the intervention account of this restriction in adverbial clauses