Agree, Agreement, Merge, Phases
This paper surveys the distribution of formal and semantic agreement in German, using three types... more This paper surveys the distribution of formal and semantic agreement in German, using three types of trigger nouns (gender mismatch nouns, pluralia tantum nouns, and polite pronouns) in four syntactic contexts (attributive, predicate/T, pronouns, and nominal ellipsis). The distribution of agreement is shown to be dependent on the properties of the controller and the target, as well as the type of agreement dependency. The paper provides new evidence for the existence of two types of nominal ellipsis, and establishes a context in which predicative agreement can be tested in German. The findings lead to a refined Agreement Hierarchy, and a dual feature system is proposed which derives the basic tendencies of the Agreement Hierarchy and leaves room for language-specific deviations.
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Standard Arabic licenses raising structures with three types of verbs known collectively as verbs... more Standard Arabic licenses raising structures with three types of verbs known collectively as verbs of appropinquation. Raising structures with these verbs are unique in that they permit different subject positions and an agreement pattern that is not found otherwise in the language. Matching the different word orders to positions that have been proposed for raising constructions in languages like English, we show that a striking similarity holds and that raising in Standard Arabic provides new support for the existence of opacity domains (phases) in raising contexts. The chapter analyzes these raising configurations, along with the different word orders and agreement patterns they allow, by proposing a cyclic spell-out approach in which a particular PF choice at an early cycle (phase) creates certain opacity effects for the agreement options at later cycles.
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One of the many enduring themes of Chomsky's (1965) Aspects is the question of selection (broadly... more One of the many enduring themes of Chomsky's (1965) Aspects is the question of selection (broadly construed) and the distinction among syntactic and semantic properties (features) of linguistic expressions. In this brief contribution, we aim to reaffirm the role that syntactic selection plays in the domain of clausal embedding; that is, where verbs select for a complement of a particular syntactic type and a semantically (or pragmatically) equivalent utterance is sharply ungrammatical. Our specific focus is to synthesize a body of literature on the phenomenon of ‘optional’ (non-echo) wh-in-situ in wh-movement languages, arguing ultimately that syntactically, the phenomenon as such may not exist. What appears to be wh-in-situ in these languages may carry interrogative force as a speech act, but from a syntactic perspective is a declarative clause with a wh-expression in focus—a question with declarative syntax. The key evidence for this claim comes from selection/subcategorization, specifically the generalization that if a language has wh-movement (to Spec,CP), then wh-movement is obligatory in indirect (i.e., selected) questions. The relevant facts have been noted for individual languages, including English, but we offer here a meta-study, contending that this generalization holds systematically across all languages we have been able to examine, despite a wealth of variation along other dimensions. We discuss consequences of this generalization for accounts of wh-in-situ in questions with declarative syntax, and wh-movement in general, and provide a feature based analysis to derive these questions.
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To appear in Proceedings of NELS 43
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Wurmbrand, Susi. 2014. The Merge Condition: A syntactic approach to selection. To appear in Minimalism and Beyond: Radicalizing the interfaces, ed. by Peter Kosta, Lilia Schürcks, Steven Franks, and Teodora Radev-Bork, 139-177. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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Coyote Papers Working Papers in Linguistics Linguistic Theory at the University of Arizona, 2012
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Taal en Tongval 64.1:129-156, 2012
This paper investigates a series of Germanic verb constructions, which appear to involve the ‘wro... more This paper investigates a series of Germanic verb constructions, which appear to involve the ‘wrong’ morphology on one or more of the verbs involved: Norwegian parasitic participles, Frisian upward and downward parasitic participles, and the German Skandal construction. I provide an explicit syntactic account unifying the phenomena and deriving the differences from independent differences among the languages. These apparently odd constructions are shown to be subject to specific distributional restrictions which are fully in line with standard grammatical principles of the languages under consideration. The account is based on a top-down definition of Agree, namely the claim that an unvalued feature is valued by the closest c-commanding element with the appropriate valued feature. I demonstrate that this view allows for a uniform treatment of the morphological and syntactic properties of these constructions, which, so far, have been assumed to be unrelated. Lastly, I argue that different word orders in verb clusters can be derived either by syntactic movement (in which case locality conditions have to be obeyed and new Agree(ment) relations are formed) or by PF-linearization of sister nodes (in which case no locality effects are observed and no new Agree(ment) relations are established).
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This paper provides an in-depth investigation of infinitival constructions in Tagalog. It is show... more This paper provides an in-depth investigation of infinitival constructions in Tagalog. It is shown that previous restructuring approaches raise several questions regarding both the properties of infinitives in Tagalog and the situation of Tagalog infinitives within restructuring cross-linguistically. Instead, the paper proposes an alternative movement analysis according to which Tagalog allows for the option of backward raising and backward control. Since movement constitutes a central part of the analysis, the paper also provides a detailed account of locality and the general conditions on extraction in Tagalog which derives the distribution of movement from infinitives in three dialects of Tagalog. The account is built on the concept of phase-extension triggered by verb movement and offers a new way to derive the voice marking system of Tagalog and the extraction restrictions related to voice marking. To account for various extraction asymmetries found in Tagalog infinitives, a PF evaluation approach to locality and other syntactic violations is adopted, which, in addition to covering differences between raising and control, movement of full NPs and clitics, and other extraction phenomena in Tagalog also provides a way to implement movement restrictions such as improper movement, competition among different elements at the phase edge, and various intervention effects.
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Restructuring, verb clusters
Todorović, Neda and Susi Wurmbrand. Finiteness across domains. Submitted to: Current developments... more Todorović, Neda and Susi Wurmbrand. Finiteness across domains. Submitted to: Current developments in Slavic Linguistics—Twenty years after, ed. by Teodora Radeva-Bork and Peter Kosta: Peter Lang.
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Many important studies of restructuring/clause union have been provided in various generative fra... more Many important studies of restructuring/clause union have been provided in various generative frameworks. Due to the variability of contexts that allow restructuring (both within and across languages), most studies are restricted to specific languages and the conclusions reached in those works (e.g., about the size of restructuring infinitives or the mechanisms creating restructuring effects) are often contradictory. This paper compares restructuring in 24 (typologically diverse) languages and shows that despite the initial diversity, certain generalizations emerge that allow us to separate language-specific points of variation from the contribution of UG that restricts this variation in predictable ways. The cross-linguistic distribution of three restructuring properties (long object movement, clitic climbing, inter-clausal scrambling) shows that two types of restructuring need to be distinguished: voice restructuring, which determines whether a language does or does not allow long object movement, and size restructuring, which regulates the distribution of clitic climbing and scrambling. The paper concentrates on size restructuring, which is hypothesized to be available universally. Concretely, I propose that the cross-linguistic diversity of size restructuring is derived via i) a freezing approach to scrambling and clitic movement, ii) a clausal architecture defined over three major clausal domains (Grohmann 2003) rather than a cartographic array of projections; and lastly iii) variable (but in part predictable) positioning of the target projection of scrambling and clitic movement in those domains. The main conclusion reached in this paper is that rather than a single restructuring ‘parameter’ there are specific points of variation that conspire to create different degrees of restructuring.
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Wurmbrand, Susi. 2014. Restructuring across the world. In Complex Visibles Out There. Proceedings... more Wurmbrand, Susi. 2014. Restructuring across the world. In Complex Visibles Out There. Proceedings of the Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium 2014: Language Use and Linguistic Structure, ed. by Ludmila Veselovská and Markéta Janebová, 275-294. Olomouc: Palacký University.
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This paper provides an in-depth characterization of the general organization and featural make-up... more This paper provides an in-depth characterization of the general organization and featural make-up of the voice domain. Using restructuring as a probe into the composition of the voice domain, several properties are revealed which provide new or additional support for a number of voice-related assumptions. First, the distribution of restructuring supports a split voice domain consisting of VoiceP and vP, following much recent work. Second, cross-linguistic morphological differences in the realization of voice properties are accounted for in a cyclic spell-out approach with vocabulary insertion applying incrementally. Third, we argue that the phasal projection of the voice domain is the top projection of the entire voice domain, whichever projection that is, and that the voice domain always constitutes a phase (i.e., also in ‘weak’ voice contexts such as passive). Lastly, we propose that the heads of the voice domain come with two sets of features, v/Voice-features and ϕ-features, where the former encode differences such as active and passive, as well as specific flavors of the argument or event introducing heads (AGENT, CAUSER, and others), and the latter identify a DP (the DP valuing the ϕ-features) as an argument of the particular voice head. We propose detailed structures for passive and restructuring, including morphological spell-out rules for the heads of the voice domain in several languages (Acehnese, Chamorro, Isbukun Bunun, German, Japanese, Mayrinax Atayal, Norwegian, and Takibakha Bunun).
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Shimamura, Koji and Susi Wurmbrand. 2014. Two types of restructuring in Japanese—Evidence from sc... more Shimamura, Koji and Susi Wurmbrand. 2014. Two types of restructuring in Japanese—Evidence from scope and binding. In Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics: Proceedings of FAJL 7, 203-214. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
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This is a significantly revised version of Wurmbrand (2006). To appear in: The Blackwell Companio... more This is a significantly revised version of Wurmbrand (2006). To appear in: The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, 2nd edition, ed. by Martin Everaert and Henk van Riemsdijk. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
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This article proposes a new approach to restructuring which unites complex head approaches with a... more This article proposes a new approach to restructuring which unites complex head approaches with a bare VP complementation approach. With the former, I argue that restructuring involves incorporation, however, in contrast to complex head (V—V) approaches, I argue that only the voice head of a restructuring complement undergoes incorporation. With the VP complementation approach, I assume that a restructuring complement contains a syntactically and semantically independent VP. In contrast to the bare VP complementation approach, however, I propose that restructuring complements also involve a voice head (but no embedded subject). Motivation for a voice head in restructuring comes from the subject interpretation of the embedded predicate, German stem allomorphy, and voice marking in several Austronesian languages. This hybrid account has the advantage that argument structure ‘sharing’ only applies to the subject of a restructuring configuration, whereas the remaining argument and event structure properties of the matrix and embedded VPs remain separate, which is supported by cross-linguistic properties pointing to the morphological, syntactic, and semantic independence of the two VPs. The account proposed achieves a larger empirical coverage than previous accounts and also improves in several respects on the theoretical details of previous analyses.
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Other (tense, QR, case, control, disjunction)
This paper proposes that clause-boundedness effects observed for quantifier raising (QR) are only... more This paper proposes that clause-boundedness effects observed for quantifier raising (QR) are only apparent, and that QR obeys the same syntactic locality restrictions as other A’-movement operations. Instead the difficulty associated with constructing non-clause-bound inverse scope interpretations is attributed to increased processing costs arising for covert (but not overt) movement, which is calculated based on the complexity of the structure, specifically the number of syntactic domains crossed. Based on the results of several experimental studies, speakers’ acceptance of QR from different types of clausal complements is shown to be gradient, yielding a scale of difficulty which tracks syntactic complexity defined over a clausal sub-domains. An ac-count is proposed that derives the acceptability patterns of QR from different types of infinitives and finite clauses, as well as certain differences between QR in QP»QP contexts and QR in antecedent-contained deletion contexts.
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Linguistic Inquiry, 2014
This paper investigates the temporal and aspectual composition of infinitival complementation str... more This paper investigates the temporal and aspectual composition of infinitival complementation structures in English. It is shown that previous classifications of tense in infinitives are insufficient in that they not cover the entire spectrum of infinitival constructions in English. Using the distribution of non-generic, non-stative, episodic interpretations as a main characteristic, infinitival constructions are shown to fall into three classes: future irrealis infinitives, which allow episodic interpretations with bare VPs, simultaneous infinitives, which do not allow episodic interpretations, and simultaneous infinitives, which allow episodic interpretations depending on the matrix tense. I argue that the three classes of infinitives are derived from the following properties: future infinitives are tenseless but involve a syntactically present future modal woll; simultaneous propositional attitude infinitives impose the NOW of the propositional attitude holder as the reference time of the infinitive; and certain simultaneous infinitives form a single temporal domain with the matrix clause in that their references time corresponds to the reference time of the matrix predicate. The analysis proposed has consequences for the composition of tense and aspect, the syntax of infinitives, as well as the way selection is determined.
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Linguistic Inquiry, 2008
Postal, Paul M. 1998. Three investigations of extraction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rackowski, An... more Postal, Paul M. 1998. Three investigations of extraction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rackowski, Andrea. 2002. The structure of Tagalog: Specificity, voice, and the distribution of arguments. Doctoral dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, MA. Rackowski, Andrea, and Norvin ...
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Bobaljik, Jonathan and Susi Wurmbrand. 2013. Suspension across domains. In Distributed Morphology Today: Morphemes for Morris Halle, ed. by Ora Matushansky and Alec Marantz, 185-198. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wurmbrand, Susi. 2013. QR and selection: Covert evidence for phasehood. In Proceedings of the North Eastern Linguistics Society Annual Meeting 42 (NELS 42), ed. by Stefan Keine and Shayne Sloggett, 277-290. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, GLSA.
Bobaljik, Jonathan and Susi Wurmbrand. 2012. Word order and scope: Transparent interfaces and the 3/4 signature. Linguistic Inquiry 43.3: 371-421.
Wurmbrand, Susi. 2010. Reconstructing the A/A’-distinction in reconstruction. In Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 16.1: Proceedings of the 33rd annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium, ed. by Jon Scott Stevens, Article 27, 245-254. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Wurmbrand, Susi. 2008. Word order and scope in German. In Groninger Arbeiten zur germanistischen Linguistik 46, 89-110.
Bobaljik, Jonathan and Susi Wurmbrand. 1999. Modals, raising, and A-reconstruction. Handout of a talk given at Leiden University.
happily!’ Since the primary aim of linguists is not to criticize but to record and analyze linguistic changes, we will try to summarize different usages of the adverb gern(e) to see how this new use of gerne in imperatives arises.
For the purpose of this squib we distinguish four broad uses which we discuss in turn. In its first use (G1), gerne acts as an adverb modifying a (typically) habitual eventuality. Gerne in this use is often accompanied by always or not/never, and conveys that the subject enjoys (gerne) or doesn’t enjoy (nicht gerne) the activity. Gerne always relates to the
subject and is used with all persons, tenses and verb valencies (but see below for episodic interpretations in the past).