Overt speakers in syntax

Abstract

This paper focuses on a type of direct address in Sason Arabic that fails to behave like a regular vocative phrase. In particular, unlike regular vocative phrases, this form of address spells out both the speaker and the addressee, and it is conditioned by the speaker’s expression of affection towards the addressee. A DP and its adjacent invariable clitic (i.e., a frozen 3rd person singular form of a possessive pronoun) are the constituents of this form of direct address, and either of them can equally spell out the speaker or the addressee; hence, the label mutable direct address (MDA) for this construction. Coordination, constituency, pluralization and substitution tests indicate that the derivation of MDAs does not involve the left periphery of DPs (as vocative phrases do) but the left periphery of clauses. In this respect, we adopt the cartographic representation of speech act phrases (SAP) (e.g., as in Haegeman & Hill 2013) and argue that MDAs instantiate a possible variation within SAP structures. That is, while a regular SAP field is split (over speaker and hearer heads), the SAP underlying MDAs remerges the two heads, so the speech act functional features are bundled and associated with a single SA head. Thus, MDAs provide new evidence for the extent of derivational variations that may arise on the basis of the feature inventory currently accepted for SAP domains.

Introducing arguments beyond the thematic domain

“…This suggests that there is a type of Appl in the left periphery which is distinct from Pylkkänen's high and low Appls in the thematic domain (see also Tsai 2018). According to Speas & Tenny (2003), the addressee receives a p(ragmatic)-role which is similar to a theta/semantic-role (see also Akkus ¸& Hill 2021;Chomsky 2021;Haddican & Etxeberria 2022). This opens the possibility that the addressee can be assigned a semantic-role and licensed case like any applied argument in syntax.…”

Embedded allocutivity in Basque

“…First, both forms express sets of not‐at‐issue meaning in that they (i) present propositional content that is separate from the central at‐issue content expressed by the sentence (Potts 2005, Portner 2007, Eckardt 2014, Gutzmann 2019, McCready 2019) and (ii), in particular, serve to mark the relationship between the speaker and addressee (Slocum 2016, Akkuş & Hill 2021).…”

“…Recent literature has witnessed considerable growth in formal descriptions of allocutivity crosslinguistically. An emerging focus in this literature is how the syntax of allocutive marking relates to the syntax of other syntactic phenomena taken to motivate person features in the C domain, including indexical shift (McFadden 2020, Alok & Baker 2018, Sundaresan 2018, Alok 2020, Alok 2021) and direct‐address expressions (Slocum 2016, Portner et al 2019, Akkuş & Hill 2021). This article reports evidence from innovative southern Basque dialects, which sheds light on two sets of issues in this literature.…”

“…A second set of issues we consider concerns the relationship between allocutive marking and the syntax of direct‐address expressions (Slocum 2016, Portner et al 2019, Akkuş & Hill 2021). In particular, several facts from innovative southern Basque dialects support a unified syntactic treatment of these two sets of forms.…”