Feature geometry and predictions of locality

Sag, Ivan A.

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577743.003.0010

Cited by 64 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 112 publications

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“…an 'object gap' in the case of an object relative clause). 10 According to the doctrine of syntactic locality, the only dependency relationship that a syntactic rule can describe is that which holds between a mother and its daughter node(s) or between two syntactic sisters, e.g., a lexical head and its complement(s) or a head and its specifier (Sag 2010b). Locality is a foundational assumption of context-free phrase-structure grammar: phrase-structure rules (e.g.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why subject relatives prevail: Constraints versus constructional licensing

Duffield

Michaelis

2011

Lang. cogn.

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Relative clauses containing subject relative-pronouns (e.g. that go to Utah all the time,) are the prevalent type both across languages (Keenan and Comrie 1977) and in conversation, accounting for 65% of relative clauses in the American National Corpus (Reali and Christiansen 2007) and 67% of relative clauses in the corpus examined for this study, the Switchboard corpus. This fact appears attributable to parsing preferences, as per Hawkins (1999, 2004), Gibson (1998) and Gibson et al. (2005): subject extractions are the most local filler-gap dependency and therefore impose the lowest burden on short-term memory. This explanation, however, not only lacks strong psycholinguistic support but also fails to explain a major pattern in Switchboard: subject relatives are not preferred across the board but only as modifiers of postverbal (object and oblique) nominals. We propose that the preference for subject relatives is an effect not of general-purpose interpretive or encoding constraints but rather of constructional licensing: the subject relative belongs to an entrenched syntactic routine, the Presentational Relative construction, e.g. I have friends that clip articles (McCawley 1981; Lambrecht 1987, 1988, 2002). We investigate this hypothesis by examining the formal, semantic and pragmatic properties of relative-clause modifiers of postverbal nominals in the Switchboard corpus.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why subject relatives prevail: Constraints versus constructional licensing

Duffield

Michaelis

2011

Lang. cogn.

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“…It seems that the syntactic tree allows noticing at a glance the hierarchical structure of the phrase. Structural reliance deals with the hierarchical structure, generally discovered in a syntactic investigation using tree diagrams (Sag, 2010a(Sag, , 2010b.…”

Section: Review Of Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

The Syntactic Structure of Awgni Noun Phrases

Agajie¹

2020

LiNGUA J.

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The objective of this study is to examine the syntactic structure of Awgni Noun Phrases. The assumption of Labeling Algorithm {XP, H} is holding on, and a descriptive research design was employed to explore the intended objective. Data for this research were enriched by interviewing 12 native speakers of Awgni specializing in the proposed language. Through expert samplings, 20 Noun Phrases were selected and illustrated. Results showed that the Noun Phrases in Awgni could be formed out of the head Nouns all along through other lexical categories reminiscent of the Noun Phrases, Adjective Phrases, Verb Phrases, Determiner Phrases, and Adverb Phrases. These grammatical items were serving as dependents to the head Nouns. The head Nouns in Awgni are for all time right-headed. These heads are the only obligatory constituents, while the Phrasal categories are optional elements which could be either modifiers or complements to the head Nouns. In this regard, Labeling Algorithm explicitly chooses the contiguous Noun heads that are the label of the complete Syntactic Objects (SOs) anticipated for all Noun Phrase structures.

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“…Finally, Müller (2008) discusses depictive secondary predicates in German and English, which refer to elements inside phrasal projections. A number of challenges to locality are discussed by Sag in a series of papers (Sag 2007(Sag , 2010(Sag , 2012. For the purpose of this paper, one example will suffice.…”

Section: Locality Of Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Raising, inversion and agreement in modern Hebrew

Melnik

2015

J. Ling.

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This paper focuses on the interaction between raising, subject–verb inversion and agreement in Modern Hebrew. It identifies, alongside ‘standard’ (i.e., English-like) subject-to-subject raising, two additional patterns where the embedded subject appears post-verbally. In one, the raising predicate exhibits long-distance agreement with the embedded subject, while in the other, a colloquial variant, it is marked with impersonal (3sm) agreement. The choice between the three raising constructions in the language is shown to be solely dependent on properties of the embedded clause. The data are discussed and analyzed against a background of typological and theoretical work on raising. The analysis, cast in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), builds on research on raising, selectional locality, agreement, subjecthood and information structure, as well as verb-initial constructions in Modern Hebrew.

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Feature geometry and predictions of locality

Cited by 64 publications

References 112 publications

Why subject relatives prevail: Constraints versus constructional licensing

Why subject relatives prevail: Constraints versus constructional licensing

The Syntactic Structure of Awgni Noun Phrases

Raising, inversion and agreement in modern Hebrew

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