Licensing NPIs and licensing silence: Have/be yet to in English

Harves, Stephanie; Myler, Neil

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2014.05.012

Cited by 6 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Note that this explanation is not possible in accounts that posit V-to-T raising for aux-have sentences (Bybel & Johnson 2014), in monoclausal accounts like Kelly (2012), or in Harves & Myler (2014b), which, like ours, proposes that there is a silent verb in the aux-have derivation, but unlike ours, proposes that it is a silent version of the verb fail.…”

Section: Further Supportmentioning

confidence: 51%

“…While (3a) only forces the conclusion that there are two ways of deriving HYT sentences (something already argued for by Harves & Myler 2014b), (3b) suggests that this difference must be relatively minor, and (3c) suggests that the do-support variant must, in some sense, be the more marked variant of the two. It is possible that there are individual speakers who have only the do-support structure of HYT in their grammars; but we do not feel that our data allow us to safely conclude this.…”

Section: Main Vs Aux-havementioning

confidence: 93%

“…Kelly (2012) argues that HYT involves auxiliary-have (henceforth aux-have) and sentential negation. Harves & Myler (2014b) also argue that HYT involves aux-have (for most speakers), but that it involves no sentential negation. Finally, Bybel & Johnson (2014) argue that HYT involves main verb have and sentential negation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…In this section we spell out our analysis and show how it accounts for the results presented in the previous subsection. We follow Harves & Myler (2014b) and Bybel & Johnson (2014) in proposing a biclausal structure for HYT sentences. In the matrix clause, the main verb, shown as HYT and the properties of the wh-question itself, or to some other idiosyncratic property of the individual item we tested.…”

Section: Analysis Of the Main Clausementioning

confidence: 99%

“…While part of the disagreement comes from differences in underlying theoretical assumptions, some of it comes from differences in the judgments offered by the authors. To give one example, both Harves & Myler (2014b) and Bybel & Johnson (2014) assume (following Klima 1964) that sentences like those in (2) can diagnose the presence or absence of sentential negation, with the grammaticality of (2a) diagnosing the presence of sentential negation, and the grammaticality of (2b), its absence. The pairs of authors provide opposing grammaticality judgments, and accordingly come to opposite conclusions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Microvariation in thehave yet toconstruction

Tyler

Wood

2019

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The have yet to construction, exemplified by sentences such as John has yet to visit his grandmother, is widespread across dialects of English. However, recent studies have revealed that behind this apparent unity, there is significant variation in the syntactic properties of the have yet to construction. Speakers vary with respect to (i) the status of have as an auxiliary or main verb, (ii) the status of negation tests, and (iii) the status of a variety of related yet to constructions. The goal of this paper is to sort out the microsyntax of have yet to across speakers, in the face of contradictory empirical claims and mutually incompatible proposals in the existing literature. We develop an analysis based in part on two wide-scale surveys we have conducted. With respect to have, we show that speakers who can treat it as a main verb can also treat it as an auxiliary, but not necessarily vice-versa. We propose that the variation in this case has to do with where the perfect features are introduced in the clause. With respect to negation, we find that speakers do not treat all the negation tests the same, forcing us to contend with the question of how these tests work. We propose that for most speakers, only the embedded clause is syntactically negative. Negation tests split according to whether they must target the matrix clause, or whether they can target an embedded clause as well. In some cases, the tests reveal the same sentence to be both affirmative and negative, as we expect: the matrix clause is syntactically affirmative, but the embedded clause, which hosts the lexical content, is syntactically negative.

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Section: Further Supportmentioning

confidence: 51%

Section: Main Vs Aux-havementioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Analysis Of the Main Clausementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Microvariation in thehave yet toconstruction

Tyler

Wood

2019

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Silence

Kurzon¹

2015

Handbook of Pragmatics

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Microvariation in verbalrather

Wood

2024

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This paper uses survey results to analyze patterns of judgments across different versions of the non-standard verbal use of the word rather, which can take participial morphology, as in rathered. Across numerous possible instantiations of the construction, there appear to be in fact a quite limited number of grammars, which are generated by an implicational hierarchy of functional heads, along with the availability of a silent verb have. The overall picture supports several broader conclusions. First, bare-infinitive–selecting verbs are nearly “closed class” because they have special syntactic properties that go beyond semantic or even syntactic selection: they must value the temporal verbal features of the embedded verb, or else provide a structural context for such valuation. Second, silent verbs can be licensed by head-moving to a modal head in the extended projection. This movement is freely available, but silence demands recoverability, which limits its application only to certain verbs, and certain uses/meanings of those verbs. Third, in addition to previously known configurations for building parasitic participle constructions, movement of a lower verb to a higher verb can extend the phase of the lower verb and lead to its silence. Fourth, the distribution of rather suggests that volitional meaning is not a primitive, but is constructed from smaller primitives. Finally, microvariation reveals a tight connection among logically distinct functional heads, suggesting that they are not acquired independently of each other, but interact in significant ways.

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Licensing NPIs and licensing silence: Have/be yet to in English

Cited by 6 publications

References 21 publications

Microvariation in thehave yet toconstruction

Microvariation in thehave yet toconstruction

Silence

Microvariation in verbalrather

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