Abstract.  The Person Case Constraint is frequently concomitant with Case Syncretism. We provide a syntax‐driven account of both phenomena that relies on the dual role that φ‐features play in selecting and in Case‐licensing argument DPs. The account differs from other syntactic approaches to the PCC in the role it affords the applicative head in the Case system and in the attention it pays to the syntactic structures that feed morphology and therefore induce syncretism.

Although it is widely agreed that learning the syntax of natural languages involves acquiring structure-dependent rules, recent work on acquisition has nevertheless attempted to characterize the outcome of learning primarily in terms of statistical generalizations about surface distributional information. In this paper we investigate whether surface statistical knowledge or structural knowledge of English is used to infer properties of a novel language under conditions of impoverished input. We expose learners to artificial-language patterns that are equally consistent with two possible underlying grammars-one more similar to English in terms of the linear ordering of words, the other more similar on abstract structural grounds. We show that learners' grammatical inferences overwhelmingly favor structural similarity over preservation of superficial order. Importantly, the relevant shared structure can be characterized in terms of a universal preference for isomorphism in the mapping from meanings to utterances. Whereas previous empirical support for this universal has been based entirely on data from cross-linguistic language samples, our results suggest it may reflect a deep property of the human cognitive system-a property that, together with other structure-sensitive principles, constrains the acquisition of linguistic knowledge. A central goal of linguistics is to provide a formal characterization of human knowledge of language. It has long been argued that this knowledge crucially involves rules that refer to abstract structure rather than surface word order (1-3). One classic example is the relationship between English declarative and interrogative sentences. Although in many cases a rule forming the interrogative from the declarative could simply change the surface position of the auxiliary verb, the full range of English facts can only be captured by a rule making reference to the structural position of the auxiliary. For example, to generate the correct interrogative for complex declaratives such as "The man who is a fool is amusing" and "The man is a fool who is amusing," a rule referring to the superficial surface position of the auxiliary-for instance, leftmost or rightmost-will not do. Rather, the rule must pick out the auxiliary in the main clause. Because these complex cases are relatively rare, language learners could initially entertain a surface-based rule before converging on the structure-based alternative. Interestingly, though, children acquiring English do not seem to do this, suggesting that structurebased generalizations are preferred from the very start (4).The idea that explaining the syntax of natural languages requires abstract structure-and that learners posit structure-based generalizations early in the acquisition process-has been challenged from multiple angles. For example, simple recurrent networks trained on English input can replicate correct interrogative ordering patterns, suggesting that surface-based generalizations may be sufficient to characterize linguistic knowledge (...

In this article, we argue that, under current conceptions of the architecture of the grammar, apparentwh-dependencies can, in principle, arise from either a movement or a base-generation strategy, where Agree establishes the syntactic connection in the latter case. The crucial diagnostics are not locality effects, but identity effects. We implement the base-generation analysis using a small set of semantically interpretable features, together with a simple universal syntax-semantics correspondence. We show that parametric variation arises because of the different ways the features are bundled on functional heads. We further argue that it is the bundling of two features on a single lexical item, together with the correspondence that requires them to be interpreted apart, that is responsible for the displacement property of human languages.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a plausibility argument for a new way of thinking about intra-personal morphosyntactic variation. The idea is embedded within the framework of the Minimalist Program, and makes use of notions of feature interpretability and feature checking. Specifically, I argue that underspecification of uninterpretable features in a matching relation with interpretable features allows us to model categoricality and variability within a single system. Unlike many current approaches to intra-personal variation (which involve multiple grammars or building stochastic weightings into the grammar itself), the system attempts to predict (rather than capture) frequencies of variants. It does this by combining an evaluation metric for the acquisition of uninterpretable features with the standard properties of features and syntactic operations in the Minimalist framework. The argument is made through a case study of was/were variation in a Scottish dialect.

In this article, we argue that a structural distinction between predicational and equative copular clauses is illusory. All semantic predicational relationships are constructed asymmetrically via a syntactic predicational head; differences reduce to whether this head bears an event variable or not. This allows us to maintain a restrictive view of the syntax-semantics interface in the face of apparently recalcitrant data from Scottish Gaelic.