Nominal licensing in caseless languages

Sheehan, Michelle; Wal, Jenneke van der

doi:10.1017/s0022226718000178

Cited by 11 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 122 publications

(224 reference statements)

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“…When it comes to licensing of arguments beyond nominative Case, the data are less clear, as shown in the critical discussion of nine diagnostics in Sheehan and Van der Wal (2018). I discuss this point in a bit more detail here.…”

Section: Case Is Independent Of Agreementmentioning

confidence: 97%

A Featural Typology of Bantu Agreement

Wal

2022

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The Bantu languages are in some sense remarkably uniform (subject, verb, order (SVO) basic word order, noun classes, verbal morphology), but this extensive language family also show a wealth of morphosyntactic variation. Two core areas in which such variation is attested are subject and object agreement. The book explores the variation in Bantu subject and object marking on the basis of data from 75 Bantu languages, discovering striking patterns (the Relation between Asymmetry and Non-Doubling Object Marking (RANDOM), and the Asymmetry Wants Single Object Marking (AWSOM) correlation), and providing a novel syntactic analysis. This analysis takes into account not just phi agreement, but also nominal licensing and information structure. A Person feature, associated with animacy, definiteness, or givenness, is shown to be responsible for differential object agreement, while at the same time accounting for doubling vs. non-doubling object marking—a hybrid solution to an age-old debate in Bantu comparative morphosyntax. It is furthermore proposed that low functional heads can Case-license flexibly downwards or upwards, depending on the relative topicality of the two arguments involved. This accounts for the properties of symmetric object marking in ditransitives (for Appl), and subject inversion constructions (for v). By keeping Agree constant and systematically determining which featural parameters are responsible for the attested variation, the proposed analysis argues for an emergentist view of features and parameters (following Biberauer 2018, 2019), and against both Strong Uniformity and Strong Modularity.

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Section: Case Is Independent Of Agreementmentioning

confidence: 97%

A Featural Typology of Bantu Agreement

Wal

2022

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“…In addition, we follow previous literature in assuming that, even in morphologically casepoor languages, all nominals must be licensed by a functional head (see Sheehan & van derWal 2018), We adopt the classic assumption that this involves abstract Case features on nominals that must be checked by a functional head (Vergnaud 1977(Vergnaud /2008Chomsky 1980;1981;Lasnik 1992). This is often referred to as as (Vergnaud) licensing (Pesetsky 2013: 73).…”

Section: Mediated Agreementioning

confidence: 99%

Licensing and anaphora in Tenyidie

Murphy

Meyase

2022

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Tenyidie shows a typologically unusual pattern of φ-covarying agreement with anaphors, but not other arguments. We argue that this apparent agreement actually reveals the nature of anaphoric binding in the language, which involves an Agree relation between the anaphor and its antecedent mediated by a licensing head. The features on this mediating head are realized overtly in Tenyidie. This is not genuine φ-agreement, but rather a morphological reflex of the binding relation itself. We provide supporting evidence from a range of constructions and also show how this analysis accounts for restrictions on anaphora in double object constructions. Tenyidie therefore suggests that there is a close link between binding and Agree.

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“…Care will be needed in teasing apart abstract Case from morphological case. Abstract Case has usually been viewed as universal; however, Diercks (2012) and Sheehan and van der Wal (2018) argue that abstract Case is in fact not universal, and may be lacking entirely in some languages. Moreover, Case comes in at least three types: structural, inherent, and lexical (Woolford 2006).…”

Section: Casementioning

confidence: 99%

Complexity as L2-difficulty: Implications for syntactic change

Walkden

Breitbarth²

2019

Theoretical Linguistics

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Recent work has cast doubt on the idea that all languages are equally complex; however, the notion of syntactic complexity remains underexplored. Taking complexity to equate to difficulty of acquisition for late L2 acquirers, we propose an operationalization of syntactic complexity in terms of uninterpretable features. Trudgill’s sociolinguistic typology predicts that sociohistorical situations involving substantial late L2 acquisition should be conducive to simplification, i.e. loss of such features. We sketch a programme for investigating this prediction. In particular, we suggest that the loss of bipartite negation in the history of Low German and other languages indicates that it may be on the right track.

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Nominal licensing in caseless languages

Cited by 11 publications

References 122 publications

A Featural Typology of Bantu Agreement

A Featural Typology of Bantu Agreement

Licensing and anaphora in Tenyidie

Complexity as L2-difficulty: Implications for syntactic change

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