Empty categories, case, and configurationality

Jelinek, Eloise

doi:10.1007/bf00233713

Cited by 364 publications

(157 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…10 Surface nonconfigurationality then arises because phonetically realized NPs in these languages do not necessarily-indeed in some cases must not-surface in their normal argument positions at S-structure/Spell-Out. This gives rise to the free word order of nonconfigurational languages, as well as some of their other seemingpeculiarities (Jelinek 1984). How this works out in detail probably varies a good deal from language to language.…”

Section: A Note On Nonconfigurationalitymentioning

confidence: 98%

Thematic Roles and Syntactic Structure

Baker¹

1997

Kluwer International Handbooks of Linguistics

430

121

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Section: A Note On Nonconfigurationalitymentioning

confidence: 98%

Thematic Roles and Syntactic Structure

Baker¹

1997

Kluwer International Handbooks of Linguistics

430

121

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“…Section 5 discusses two approaches that do not do so: the flat structure approach and the Pronominal Argument Hypothesis (Jelinek 1984;Baker 1996). Analyses that place some attributes of word order at the syntax-phonology interface are presented in Section 6.…”

Section: Main Analyses Of V1mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Carnie proposes that verbal predicates project only to the head level in Irish, while nominal predicates project to the head level or the phrase level. Jelinek's (1984) Pronominal Argument Hypothesis (PAH) fosters another approach to V1 languages that does not assume VP constituency (see also Baker 1996). The PAH argues that, for some languages, agreement markers are a verb's actual arguments, and lexical nominals are unselected modifiers that are co-indexed with those arguments.…”

Section: V1 and Flat Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Pronominal argument analyses have been articulated for V1 languages (e.g., Alderete 1998 andAranovich 2013 for Fijian;Miller 1988 andKroeger 1993 for Tagalog;Jelinek 1984Jelinek , 2000 for Straits Salish). In the case of Fijian, the (partial) pronominal argument analysis has the positive outcome of providing an explanation for the otherwisesurprising asymmetry between pronouns and proper nouns as compared to common nouns: common nouns, modificational in nature, can be incorporated and dislocated, but pronouns, true arguments of the verb, must surface inside the VP.…”

Section: V1 and The Pronominal Argument Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

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Verb‐Initial Word Orders, Primarily in Austronesian and Mayan Languages

Clemens¹,

Polinsky²

2017

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition

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This chapter presents several approaches to the syntax of verb‐initial (V1) languages with a special emphasis on Mayan and Austronesian languages. Some V1 languages are strictly VSO, others are VOS, and a significant number combine both orders. This chapter focuses on data from VSO/VOS languages and the factors that underlie these alternations. A number of V1 languages can be more adequately characterized as predicate‐initial, with V1 representing just a subset of possible clause‐initial predicates. The chapter presents a number of structural properties that are or may be associated with V1 and discusses possible implicational relations between such properties and V1. While there are certain common characteristics observed across V1 languages, it is also clear that there are several distinct subtypes of V1. These subtypes call for different syntactic analyses; main approaches include the derivation of V1 via phrasal movement (VP‐raising) and via head‐movement (verb‐raising). Other syntactic approaches to the derivation of V1 include the parametrization of specifier direction within a single language, non‐configurational syntax, and subject lowering. In addition to these purely syntactic analyses, several recent approaches place the derivation of V1 outside syntax or at the syntax–PF interface. Careful, in‐depth analyses of individual languages are required to test the different approaches to V1; in quite a few cases such analyses are still lacking.

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“…Nonetheless, extraction of A arguments is impossible irrespective of the person features of the object. There are at least two possibilities for accounting for this: we can assume that 3rd person objects involve a null pronominal in the specifier of vP, and the full DP is adjoined higher in an adjunct position, as in pronominal argument languages (Jelinek 1984). A second possibility is that the full DP object forms a chain headed in Spec,vP, but only the lower copy is pronounced, perhaps due to a phonological restriction.…”

Section: mentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of case in A-bar extraction asymmetries

Coon¹,

Pedro²,

Preminger³

2014

128

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Many morphologically ergative languages display asymmetries in the extraction of core arguments: while absolutive arguments (transitive objects and intransitive subjects) extract freely, ergative arguments (transitive subjects) cannot. This falls under the label "syntactic ergativity" (see, e.g. Dixon 1972Dixon , 1994Manning 1996; Polinsky to appear(b)). These extraction asymmetries are found in many languages of the Mayan family, where in order to extract transitive subjects (for focus, questions, or relativization), a special construction known as the "Agent Focus" (AF) must be used. These AF constructions have been described as syntactically and semantically transitive because they contain two non-oblique DP arguments, but morphologically intransitive because the verb appears with only a single agreement marker and takes an intransitive status suffix (Aissen 1999; Stiebels 2006). In this paper we offer a proposal for (i) why some morphologically ergative languages exhibit extraction asymmetries, while others do not; and (ii) how the AF construction in Q'anjob'al circumvents this problem. We adopt recent accounts which argue that ergative languages vary in the locus of absolutive case assignment (Aldridge 2004(Aldridge , 2008aLegate 2002Legate , 2008, and propose that this variation is present within the Mayan family. Based primarily on comparative data from Q'anjob'al and Chol, we argue that the inability to extract ergative arguments does not reflect a problem with properties of the ergative subject itself, but rather reflects locality properties of absolutive case assignment in the clause. We show how the AF morpheme -on circumvents this problem in Q'anjob'al by assigning case to internal arguments.

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Empty categories, case, and configurationality

Cited by 364 publications

References 13 publications

Thematic Roles and Syntactic Structure

Thematic Roles and Syntactic Structure

Verb‐Initial Word Orders, Primarily in Austronesian and Mayan Languages

The role of case in A-bar extraction asymmetries

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