Natural Language & Linguistic Theory

Imperatives under coordination Abstract Imperatives in conjoined sentences have presented a puzzle for theories which associate directive force with all imperatives. For example, in a conjunction like Ignore your homework and you’ll fail the class, the first, imperative conjunct may describe an undesirable action, which is incompatible with normal imperative directive force. Despite this apparent counterexample, this paper presents new empirical evidence of directive force in all conjoined imperatives. Even cases with undesirable imperative actions still direct the addressee to perform a related action (such as not ignoring their homework). Under this new analysis, directive force sometimes applies to the entire Imperative-and-Declarative conjunction, rather than narrowly to the first, imperative clause. Robust diagnostics are deployed to delineate the precise class of conditional Imperative-and-Declarative conjunctions, distinguishing such cases from those whose first clauses do not actually include an imperative. Additional diagnostics separate conjunctions whose imperative force applies narrowly to the first conjunct from those where it applies to the entire conjunction. Finally, the analysis of this construction motivates a simplified theory of imperatives more generally.

Case and number suppletion in pronouns Abstract Suppletion for case and number in pronominal paradigms shows robust patterns across a large, cross-linguistic survey. These patterns are largely, but not entirely, parallel to patterns described in Bobaljik (2012) for suppletion for adjectival degree. Like adjectival degree suppletion along the dimension positive < comparative < superlative, if some element undergoes suppletion for a category X, that element will also undergo suppletion for any category more marked than X on independently established markedness hierarchies for case and number. We argue that the structural account of adjectival suppletive patterns in Bobaljik (2012) extends to pronominal suppletion, on the assumption that case (Caha 2009) and number (Harbour 2011) hierarchies are structurally encoded. In the course of the investigation, we provide evidence against the common view that suppletion obeys a condition of structural (Bobaljik 2012) and/or linear (Embick 2010) adjacency (cf. Merchant 2015; Moskal and Smith 2016), and argue that the full range of facts requires instead a domain-based approach to locality (cf. Moskal 2015b). In the realm of number, suppletion of pronouns behaves as expected, but a handful of examples for suppletion in nouns show a pattern that is initially unexpected, but which is, however, consistent with the overall view if the Number head is also internally structurally complex. Moreover, variation in suppletive patterns for number converges with independent evidence for variation in the internal complexity and markedness of number across languages.

On the relation between speech perception and loanword adaptation Abstract Loanword adaptation has been claimed to provide a unique window onto the relation between speech perception and the phonological grammar. This paper focuses on whether the ‘illusory vowel’ effect—in which the presence/absence of a vowel is poorly discriminated within an illicit cluster—is sufficient to explain why vowel epenthesis is the preferred repair for medial clusters in Korean loanword adaptation. A cross-linguistic discrimination experiment revealed a causative role of the stop release burst (or other audible frication noise) in the perception of an illusory vowel; in some cases, perception alone explains vowel epenthesis in loanword adaptation. A follow-up, identification experiment showed that Koreans’ perceptual similarity judgements do not match up with the adaptation pattern for stop-nasal clusters (e.g. pakna), although they do for fricative-stop and stop-stop clusters (e.g. paska, pakta). This finding is problematic for a purely perceptual account of loanword adaptation. The paper sketches a Bayesian account of Korean speech perception that integrates top-down phonotactic likelihood and bottom-up acoustic match and is able to explain the experimental results. It closes with some speculation on the role of the Preservation Principle versus perception in loanword adaptation.

Verb-phrase ellipsis and complex predicates in Hindi-Urdu Abstract Complex predicates are found in diverse languages and feature multiple predicates that map to a monoclausal syntactic structure. They represent a fascinating instance of the systematic combination of syntactically and semantically independent elements to function as a unit. While complex predicates in Hindi-Urdu have received significant attention (Hook 1974; Mohanan 1994; Butt 1995), not yet addressed are the ways in which these constructions interact with verb phrase ellipsis (VPE), which has famously revealed much about the structure of the verbal domain. In head-final languages like Hindi-Urdu, the nature of the morphologically and lexically complex verb is difficult to probe; any head movement would typically be string-vacuous. The results of the investigation of VPE in complex predicates in this article suggest Hindi-Urdu features syntactic head movement of the components of the complex predicate to a functional head outside the vP. I build on Butt and Ramchand’s (2005) approach to Hindi-Urdu complex predicates featuring decomposed verbal structure to develop an account of the verbal domain that captures the syntactic connectedness between components of the complex predicate. This article engages with a set of highly topical questions concerning the status of head movement as a unified phenomenon (Hartman 2011; Lacara 2016; McCloskey 2016; Gribanova and Harizanov 2016; i.a.) and develops V-stranding VPE (McCloskey 1991; Goldberg 2005; Gribanova 2013a, 2013b; Sailor 2018) as a critical tool for investigating verb-final languages under this research program. Ultimately at stake is a contribution to the far larger project of elucidating the nature of head movement in head-final languages.

Inverse marking and Multiple Agree in Algonquin Abstract This paper shows that inverse marking and portmanteau agreement are in complementary distribution in Algonquin: inverse marking is possible only in contexts where portmanteau agreement is not. This correlation holds despite intralanguage variation in both phenomena. The paper proposes that the two phenomena pattern together because both are determined by the outcome of the Agree operation on Infl. When Infl enters a Multiple Agree relation with both arguments, the realization of portmanteau agreement morphology is possible. When Infl agrees only with the object, it duplicates the result of an earlier object agreement operation on Voice. The presence of identical features on Infl and Voice triggers an impoverishment operation that deletes the features of Voice, resulting in its spellout as an underspecified elsewhere form—which is the exponent that we know descriptively as the inverse marker. This analysis explains why inverse marking and portmanteau agreement never co-occur in Algonquin: the two phenomena are determined by alternative outcomes of the Agree operation on Infl. The analysis also enables a simple account of the intralanguage variation in the patterning of the two phenomena, which is shown to follow from variation in the specification of the probe on Infl.

The explicative genitive and close apposition Abstract The genitive in languages like Czech, German, Japanese or Latin is notoriously multiply ambiguous. Some senses (partitive, possessive, relational, objective) are more or less well-studied, but one, in particular, is understudied: the explicative genitive (also called the genitive of apposition or of definition). I discuss this genitive across several languages and argue that it encodes the inverse of the function that the definite article is standardly taken to encode. Like the definite article, the explicative genitive (also: the EG) is polymorphic, taking arguments of a wide range of logical types. I further argue that many cases of apposition involve the EG meaning, more specifically, that so-called close apposition should be modeled in terms of a covert EG.

Absolutive Promotion and the Condition on Clitic Hosts in Choctaw Abstract This article develops of an analysis of the clitic co-occurrence restrictions found on transitive unaccusative verbs in Choctaw, and how they are (or are not) repaired. It turns out that the repair strategy of Absolutive Promotion, by which a typically-absolutive argument becomes ergative, is sensitive to standard syntactic notions of intervention and locality, implying that it involves a syntactic Agree relation. Regarding the clitic co-occurrence restrictions, I show that they can be captured with the Condition on Clitic Hosts—a condition that syntactic heads can host at most one clitic, adapted from the condition of the same name developed by Arregi and Nevins (2012) for Basque. By detailed comparison with Basque, we see that the Condition on Clitic Hosts and Absolutive Promotion are found in both languages. However, they do not have entirely the same effect: Absolutive Promotion in Choctaw can repair a different set of structures from those it can repair in Basque, and clitics are hosted on a different set of heads in Choctaw from where they are hosted in Basque.

Upward P-cliticization, accent shift, and extraction out of PP Abstract The paper explores how syntax influences the mapping of clitics to the prosodic structure in a dialect of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) that allows accent shift from nouns and adjectives to proclitics. I show that clitics preceding hosts of different morphological and syntactic complexity in the output of the syntax map to prosody differently. I establish a new correlation between the accent shift and the syntactic mobility of the host. Specifically, in a number of cases with adjectival hosts, accent can shift from the adjective to the proclitic preceding it only if the adjective is able to separate from the noun it modifies. I argue that prepositions in BCS cliticize to their host in the syntax in an upward fashion. I extend this analysis to a number of cases where non-constituents appear to be undergoing syntactic movement in BCS. The proposed analysis of cliticization also has important ramifications for the theory of phases and Abels’s (2003a) generalization that complements of phasal heads cannot move. I show that it explains away several cases where phasal complements appear to be moving out of phases in contexts with clitics, removing several potential problems for the phase-based system.

Amahuaca ergative as agreement with multiple heads Abstract The mechanisms underlying ergative case assignment have long been debated, with inherent and dependent theories of ergative case emerging as two of the most prominent views. This paper presents novel data from the Panoan language Amahuaca, in which ergative case is sensitive to the position of the transitive subject. The interaction of movement and morphological case assignment in Amahuaca cannot easily be captured by current inherent or dependent case theories. Instead, I argue that a view of ergative case as exponing agreement with multiple functional heads (specifically v and T) is able to account for the Amahuaca data, while incorporating key insights from both inherent and dependent case theories of ergativity. I further demonstrate that this approach that takes case to be the exponence of multiple features is able to be extended to account for elements of the language’s case-sensitive switch-reference system as well as its focus-sensitive nominative marking. The Amahuaca data thus suggest that ergative case can be viewed as a feature bundle, rather than a single case feature, and that morphological ergative marking arises as the exponence of structural relationships between multiple heads and a nominal.

Two paths to polysynthesis Abstract West Circassian displays prominent polysynthetic morphology both in the verbal and nominal domains and both syntactic categories are subject to the same morphological ordering constraints. I argue that despite these similarities, nominal and verbal wordforms in West Circassian are in fact constructed via two distinct word formation processes: while the verbal root and any accompanying functional morphology are pronounced as a single phonological word by virtue of forming a single complex syntactic head via head displacement, the nominal head and its modifiers are pronounced as a single word due to rules of syntax-to-prosody mapping. Such a division of labor provides an account for why only nouns, and not verbs, exhibit productive noun incorporation in the language: West Circassian noun incorporation is prosodic, rather than syntactic. The evidence for the existence of these two avenues of word formation comes from a systematic violation of morpheme ordering observed in verbal nominalizations. In terms of broader theoretical impact, the proposed analysis provides insight into what factors shape a polysynthetic language: while it is tempting to reduce polysynthetic morphology to either simple head displacement or just a consequence of mapping complex syntactic structure to a single phonological word without any head displacement, the West Circassian data show that neither of these mechanisms can be dispensed with.