VP anaphora and verb-second order in Danish

Mikkelsen, Line

doi:10.1017/s0022226715000055

Cited by 35 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…We will adopt the model in Wexler (2013), in which sentences in which both the subject and the predicate are discourse-old are grammatically Tense Phrases (TP's) rather than Complementizer Phrases (CP's) as argued by Mikkelsen (2015) for Danish. Thus, a subject in such a sentence is the specifier of a root, which may be omitted (Rizzi, 2006) because there is no higher projection that allows its spell-out.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grammar Is Differentially Impaired in Subgroups of Autism Spectrum Disorders: Evidence from an Investigation of Tense Marking and Morphosyntax

2017

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Deficits in the production of verbal inflection (tense marking, or finiteness) are part of the Optional Infinitive (OI) stage of typical grammatical development. They are also a hallmark of language impairment: they have been used as biomarkers in guiding genetic studies of Specific Language Impairment (SLI), and have also been observed in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). To determine the detailed nature of finiteness abilities in subgroups of ASD [autism with impaired language (ALI) vs. autism with normal language (ALN)], we compared tense marking abilities in 46 children with ALI and 37 children with ALN with that of two groups of nonverbal mental age (MA) and verbal MA-matched typically developing (TD) controls, the first such study described in the literature. Our participants' performance on two elicited production tasks, probing third-person-singular -s and past tense -ed, from the Rice/Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (TEGI, Rice and Wexler, 2001), revealed extensive deficits in the ALI group: their ability to correctly mark tense was significantly worse than their much younger TD controls', and significantly worse than that of the ALN group. In contrast, the ALN group performed similarly to their TD controls. We found good knowledge of the meaning of tense, and of case and agreement, in both ASD groups. Similarly, both ASD groups showed distributions of null or overt subjects with nonfinite and finite verbs in line with those found in young TD children. A key difference, however, was that the ALI group used (rather than simply omitted) the wrong tense in some sentences, a feature not reported in the OI stage for TD or SLI children. Our results confirm a clear distinction in the morphosyntactic abilities of the two subgroups of children with ASD: the language system responsible for finiteness in the ALN group seems to be functioning comparably to that of the TD children, whereas the ALI group, despite showing knowledge of case and agreement, seems to experience an extensive grammatical deficit with respect to finiteness which does not seem to improve with age. Crucially, our ALI group seems to have worse grammatical abilities even than those reported for SLI.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grammar Is Differentially Impaired in Subgroups of Autism Spectrum Disorders: Evidence from an Investigation of Tense Marking and Morphosyntax

2017

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“…As summarized by Mikkelsen (2015), clause-initial position is multifunctional, meaning that XP in (73) may be one of several types of topics, a wh-phrase, or a focused phrase. Mikkelsen (2015) focuses on the VP-anaphor det:…”

Section: Danish Clause-initial Positionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet how exactly should a notion like prominence be implemented in a syntactic analysis? Rather than assuming a de novo [prominence] feature, we assume that it is grammaticalized syntactically via an underspecified [δ] (discourse) feature that can be satisfied by phrases of any information structure designation or-even more generally-by any phrase that is sufficiently discourse-differentiated (in the sense developed in the discussion of Mikkelsen 2015). We assume a rudimentary feature hierarchy of discourse-features in syntax, in which all information structure features (e.g.…”

Section: Speculative Proposal: the Features Of Prominencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our analysis draws heavily on the notion of discourse differentiation from Mikkelsen (2015), though it differs from her account in some important ways. Recall that Mikkelsen claims that Danish grammar makes a consistent distinction between clause-initial XPs that are information structure differentiated and those that are not.…”

Section: Speculative Proposal: the Features Of Prominencementioning

confidence: 99%

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V1 in Kipsigis: Head movement and discourse-based scrambling

Bossi

Diercks

2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Kipsigis (Nilo-Saharan, Kenya) is a verb-initial language that exhibits a VSO/VOS alternation, in which the felicity of postverbal word orders is dependent on information structure. Specifically, the lexical item occupying the immediately postverbal position is discourse-prominent. We propose that V1 in Kipsigis results from head movement of the verb to a functional projection between TP and CP and that discourse-prominent material raises to Spec,TP. Movement to the immediately postverbal prominence position is a joint EPP/prominence effect (motivated by [D] and [uδ] features, respectively). We demonstrate that this prominence movement cannot be reduced to familiar notions like topic and focus, arguing that prominent phrases are highlighted or salient.

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“…The difference in acceptability between the illicit V2 transgressions in (1) and the acceptable V2 transgressions in (9) seems to relate to the nature of the subject of the V2 root clause. In (1), the subject of the V2 clause is neutral: in terms of information structure, it is 'undistinguished' in the sense of Mikkelsen (2015) and Wexler (2013). In 9, on the other hand, the subject is distinguished in terms of information structure: it has a contrastive focus in (9a), it is a wh-phrase in (9b).…”

Section: Central Adverbial Clauses and Subject-initial V2mentioning

confidence: 99%

Main clause external constituents and the derivation of subject-initial verb second

Haegeman¹,

Greco²

2018

Nederlandse Taalkunde

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This paper discusses V3-patterns with a sentence-initial adverbial clause in Standard Dutch (StD) and West-Flemish (WF), which appear to violate the V2 restriction which normally regulates word order in these languages. V3-patterns occur in both languages; they can be interpreted as complying with the V2 constraint provided they are analyzed as the result of merging a regular root clause with V2 order with an extra-sentential adverbial clause. The paper shows that the distribution of V3-patterns is slightly wider in WF than in StD: StD requires that the root clause which combines with the extra-sentential constituent either exhibits subject-verb inversion (XP-V-S) or, in the case of subject initial V2 clauses, that the subject has a distinguished information-structural status such as contrastive focus/topic; WF allows V3-structures more freely, regardless of whether they display subject-verb inversion and regardless of the informational-structural status of the subject. The analysis takes as its point of departure the earlier claim that V2-languages can be symmetric in the sense that the finite verb always leaves the TP domain and occupies the highest head position in the root clause, the complementizer position C in the traditional generative analysis, or asymmetric in the sense that the position of the finite verb varies in that it occupies the C-position when the root clause exhibits subject-verb inversion or a lower TP internal tense position (T) in root clauses without inversion. The hypothesis is that V3-patterns with a sentence-initial adverbial clause are only possible if the initial adverbial clause attains a local relation with the finite verb, and that this requires the finite verb to be in the (higher) C-position. By assuming that StD is an asymmetric V2-language while WF is a symmetric V2-language the variation with respect to the distribution of V3-patterns in these languages can be captured.

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VP anaphora and verb-second order in Danish

Cited by 35 publications

References 71 publications

Grammar Is Differentially Impaired in Subgroups of Autism Spectrum Disorders: Evidence from an Investigation of Tense Marking and Morphosyntax

Grammar Is Differentially Impaired in Subgroups of Autism Spectrum Disorders: Evidence from an Investigation of Tense Marking and Morphosyntax

V1 in Kipsigis: Head movement and discourse-based scrambling

Main clause external constituents and the derivation of subject-initial verb second

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