Rigidity versus Relativity in Adverbial Syntax: Evidence from Tagalog

Kaufman, Daniel

doi:10.1515/9783110922974.151

Cited by 25 publications

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“…If there is any unified analysis at all covering phrasal adverbials and adverbial verbs, it can therefore only be the functional specifier model (with Formosan languages using the head positions instead of the specifiers). However, as far as we can see, the ordering problems outlined by Ernst (2002Ernst ( , 2007 and Kaufman (2006) carry over to Seediq. This is taken as evidence against the universal ordering principles proposed by Cinque, but also shows that there is no reason to assume two radically different analyses for the two types of languages: rather, the null hypothesis must be that the universal structure consists of a series of adverbial levels above vP, along the lines suggested by Cinque, but that the hierarchical ordering between these is determined semantically, more or less like in Ernst's proposal.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…In particular, the universal rigid ordering which Cinque proposes, based on as many as 40 universally available functional categories, has attracted substantial criticism, since the ordering, attributed to structural constraints by Cinque, reflects a semantic hierarchy which can be independently motivated (cf. Ernst, 2002;Kaufman, 2006) and which Cinque himself to a certain extent also accepts (Cinque, 1999:135). This suggests that there is a great degree of redundancy in the model, which is uneconomical.…”

Section: Problems With Rigid Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This suggests that there is a great degree of redundancy in the model, which is uneconomical. 11 Finally, despite the power of the system devised, it turns out that the model is in some cases not powerful enough, in that it cannot account for the full range of variation actually occurring, as pointed out by Bobaljik (1999), Ernst (2002Ernst ( , 2007 and Kaufman (2006), among others.…”

Section: Problems With Rigid Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The model proposed by Cinque (1999) suggests that adverb ordering is the result of a universal hierarchy of labelled X'-structures located above vP in the backbone of the clause, each level housing a discrete category of adverbial types, while the model instead defended by among others Ernst (2002Ernst ( , 2007, Kaufman (2006), instead suggests that adverbs are adjoined to the backbone of the clause and that their relative ordering is the result of the operation of semantic factors including the semantic selectional restrictions of the lexical items involved, as well as scopal considerations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Evidence from Formosan for a unified theory of adverb ordering

Holmer

2012

Lingua

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 86%

Section: Problems With Rigid Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Problems With Rigid Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Evidence from Formosan for a unified theory of adverb ordering

Holmer

2012

Lingua

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“…But it seems that they are not all of this type. Kaufman himself has done an impressive study of the various kinds of adverbs that exist in Tagalog, arguing that certain theories developed for adverbs in European languages apply to Tagalog as well (Kaufman 2006). Two potentially relevant examples he cites are: (7) a. P-um-asok nang madalas sa opisina si Ben.…”

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confidence: 99%

On some ways to test Tagalog nominalism from a crosslinguistic perspective

Baker¹

2009

Theoretical Linguistics

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Daniel Kaufman's core proposal is that much of what is typologically special about Tagalog syntax is rooted in the language having nouns but not verbs as its core lexical categories. He sees this at two levels. First, bare roots in Tagalog are nominal rather than verbal; for example, bili on its own means 'price bought for' rather than 'buy'. Second, he claims that fully inflected "verbs" in Tagalog are also really nouns; they are nouns that refer to the various participants in an event, as formations like employer and employee do in English. Thus, a form like b-um-ili should be literally glossed as 'buyer', while b-in-ili should be glossed as 'bought-thing'. From this hypothesis, Kaufman derives certain other distinctive features of Tagalog syntax-notably the fact that only subjects/topics can be extracted in this language, from the fact that NPs (unlike VPs) are often islands to extraction in languages of the world. This is an intriguing, somewhat radical, and potentially elegant proposal. As Kaufman himself points out, it falls squarely within a broader class of proposals, which have been investigated off and on for many years within different descriptive traditions. These proposals share the idea that one source of the differences among languages is differences in their stocks of lexical categories.Such proposals need to face a certain built-in challenge in order to be sustained. They need to be developed within a crosslinguistically valid theory of the lexical categories in order to be meaningful. For example, saying that English has a noun/verb distinction and Tagalog does not seems to presuppose that there is a universally valid sense of noun and verb that is in principle applicable to both languages. This is especially true of Kaufman's version, because he says not merely that the noun-verb distinction is neutralized in Tagalog, but that it is neutralized in favor of the nominal categories: the language has words comparable to nouns in English, not words comparable to verbs in English, nor words that have the grammatical properties of both. I commend Kaufman for developing his view in this way. I think that if there are interesting and meaningful parameters in this domain, they must be of this type. But one cannot make an argument that Tagalog has nouns but not verbs purely internal to Tagalog. Within Tagalog one might manage to show that there are no significant differences in the grammatical possibilities of different lexical roots, and one could identify what grammatical properties those words had. But it takes some crosslinguistic work beyond this-explicit of implicit-to show that that category is a noun, rather than a verb or some novel category.Kaufman clearly recognizes the logic of this point, when he writes (p. 24) "The main contribution of the present work is to bring to light several nontrivial connections between Tagalog morphosyntax and ostensibly universal features of nominal morphosyntax." And yet he says relatively little about what exactly these ostensibly universal features of nominal m...

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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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Rigidity versus Relativity in Adverbial Syntax: Evidence from Tagalog

Cited by 25 publications

References 0 publications

Evidence from Formosan for a unified theory of adverb ordering

Evidence from Formosan for a unified theory of adverb ordering

On some ways to test Tagalog nominalism from a crosslinguistic perspective

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

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