Published in The Linguistic Review
The primary goal of this article is to take advantage of some recent theoretical innovations in syntactic theorizing to propose a novel characterization of some of the basic word-order types isolated by typological research. In the minimalist framework, a necessary condition for a derivation to converge is that the structure it generates should be ...
Published in The Linguistic Review
We explore the possibility of assuming largely flat syntactic structures in Simpler Syntax, suggesting that these are plausible alternatives to conventional hierarchical structures. We consider the implications of flat structure for analyses of various linguistic phenomena in English, including heavy NP shift, extraposition, topicalization and cons...
Published in The Linguistic Review
The present study describes and analyzes the morphosyntactic expression of the Southern Zazaki Ezafe – a linking element in the nominal domain common among Iranian languages. This morpheme is used to link modifiers (i.e. adjectives and possessors) to their head nouns as follows: n-ez1 mod1-ez2 mod2-ez3 mod3. Southern Zazaki, like other languages of...
Published in The Linguistic Review
An intriguing phenomenon in Korean vocative constructions has not received comprehensive attention in the generative literature: in the vocatives, the morpheme -i undergoes drop, and its absence hinges on its immediate adjacency to the vocative marker -(y)a. This article contributes to the literature by demonstrating that this drop is an instance o...
Published in The Linguistic Review
This paper means to re-examine the source of incompleteness for a clause with a bare verb as predicate and no other markings in Mandarin. I propose that the reason comes from the need for categorial labels at the syntax-semantic interface to produce a clear interpretation. Since there are no grammatical affixes marking category V available in Manda...
Published in The Linguistic Review
In this paper I study Spanish sound emission verbs (sonar ‘to ring’) and degree achievements (enfriar ‘to cool’), which are intriguing insofar as they turn out to express gradable events, and argue that they are not gradable, although they can trigger quantity readings whereby there is a degree whose value changes throughout the event. Thus, my ana...
Published in The Linguistic Review
This paper addresses how the negative particle no interacts with Spanish deverbal nominalizations that denote an event. Firstly, it is pointed out that, when preceded by negation, these nominalizations only give rise to the inhibited eventuality reading, contrary to what happens with verbs, which give rise to both the inhibited eventuality reading ...
Published in The Linguistic Review
Chinese, a topic-prominent language, abounds with gapped and gapless topic constructions. Several explanations of how topics are derived have been proposed, which fall into three categories: the base-generation approach, the mixed approach and the movement approach. In this study, we conducted two experiments to examine the island sensitivity of to...
Published in The Linguistic Review
The article introduces an experimental study of glottal stops that are generated by h aspiré (H) in French (il [ʔ] hoche la tête). To date the phenomenon is merely mentioned in passing, and evidence only comes from native speaker intuitions and cursory personal observation. Participants pronounced verbs that either did (hocher) or did not (aimer) b...
Published in The Linguistic Review
This study challenges the widespread belief that Thai lacks word stress, demonstrating its pivotal role in morphophonology. Through a Maximum Entropy analysis, we investigated how specific segmental properties statistically influence speakers’ choices of word order in coordinate compounds. Results indicate a significant effect of phonological weigh...
