{"title":"Supplements without Bidimensionalism","authors":"Philippe Schlenker","doi":"10.1162/ling_a_00442","DOIUrl":"10.1162/ling_a_00442","url":null,"abstract":"In seminal work, Potts (2005) claimed that the behavior of “supplements”—appositive relative clauses (ARCs) and nominals—offers a powerful argument in favor of a multidimensional semantics, one in which certain expressions fail to interact scopally with various operators because their meaning is located in a new semantic dimension. Focusing on ARCs, with data from English, French, and German (Poschmann 2018), I explore an alternative to Potts’s bidimensional account in which (a) appositives may be syntactically attached with matrix scope, despite their appearance in embedded positions, as in McCawley 1981; (b) contra McCawley, they may also be syntactically attached within the scope of other operators, in which case they semantically interact with them; (c) they are semantically conjoined with the rest of the sentence, but (d) they give rise to nontrivial projection facts when they do not have matrix scope. In effect, the proposed analysis accounts for most of the complexity of these data by positing a more articulated syntax and pragmatics, while eschewing the use of a new dimension of meaning.","PeriodicalId":48044,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Inquiry","volume":"54 2","pages":"251-297"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41393595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Impersonal Use of German 1st Person Singular Ich","authors":"Sarah Zobel","doi":"10.1162/ling_a_00446","DOIUrl":"10.1162/ling_a_00446","url":null,"abstract":"This article replies to Ackema and Neeleman’s (2018) claim that 1st person singular pronouns are grammatically blocked from having impersonal uses. In connection with this claim, they argue that the impersonal use of German 1st person singular ich described in Zobel 2014 does not exist. I show that Ackema and Neeleman’s alternative analysis of the German data analyzed in Zobel 2014 is flawed, and that new considerations inspired by their proposal further support the claim that German ich has an impersonal use. This result has ramifications not only for Ackema and Neeleman’s account of the morphosyntax and semantics of (impersonally usable) personal pronouns, but also for anyone researching the morphosyntax and semantics of pronominal expressions and how these interact.","PeriodicalId":48044,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Inquiry","volume":"54 2","pages":"378-394"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43711494","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rapa Nui: A Case for Correspondence in Reduplication","authors":"Yifan Yang","doi":"10.1162/ling_a_00444","DOIUrl":"10.1162/ling_a_00444","url":null,"abstract":"This squib argues for the role of correspondence in reduplication by examining the vowel length alternations in Rapa Nui reduplication. The analysis shows that vowel shortening in the base after reduplication is due to the enforcement of vowel length identity through Base-Reduplicant correspondence, while the motivation of vowel shortening is problematic for theories without surface-to-surface correspondence. The findings suggest that reduplication-phonology interactions cannot be handled solely by serialism or cyclicity, and a parallel Optimality Theory evaluation with BR correspondence is supported.","PeriodicalId":48044,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Inquiry","volume":"54 2","pages":"395-412"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47224566","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Case as an Anaphor Agreement Effect: Evidence from Inuktitut","authors":"Michelle Yuan","doi":"10.1162/ling_a_00443","DOIUrl":"10.1162/ling_a_00443","url":null,"abstract":"The anaphor agreement effect (AAE) is the crosslinguistic inability for anaphors to covary with φ-agreement (Rizzi 1990, Woolford 1999); languages use various strategies that conspire to circumvent this effect. In this squib, I identify and confirm a prediction arising from two previous observations by Woolford (1999) concerning the scope of the AAE, based on new evidence from Inuktitut (Eastern Canadian Inuit). I propose that anaphors in Inuktitut are lexically specified as projecting additional syntactic structure, spelled out as oblique case morphology; because φ-Agree in Inuktitut may only target ERG and ABS arguments, encountering an anaphor inevitably leads to failed Agree in the sense of Preminger 2011, 2014. I moreover argue that this exact AAE pattern is previously unattested, yet is predicted to arise given the range of existing strategies. Finally, this squib provides evidence against previous detransitivization-based approaches to reflexivity in Inuktitut (e.g., Bok-Bennema 1991).","PeriodicalId":48044,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Inquiry","volume":"54 2","pages":"413-428"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46372466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Category Mismatches in Coordination Vindicated","authors":"Agnieszka Patejuk;Adam Przepiórkowski","doi":"10.1162/ling_a_00438","DOIUrl":"10.1162/ling_a_00438","url":null,"abstract":"Bruening and Al Khalaf (2020) deny the possibility of coordination of unlike categories. They use three mechanisms to reanalyze such coordination as involving same categories: conjunction reduction, super-categories, and empty heads. We show that their proposal leaves many cases of unlike category coordination unaccounted for, and we point out various methodological, technical, and empirical problems that it faces. We conclude that the so-called Law of the Coordination of Likes is a myth. Instead, all conjuncts must satisfy any external restrictions on the syntactic position they occupy. Such restrictions may be rigid, resulting in categorial sameness, but when they are underspecified or disjunctive, category “mismatches” may arise.","PeriodicalId":48044,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Inquiry","volume":"54 2","pages":"326-349"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48024490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Interrogative Left Periphery: How a Clause Becomes a Question","authors":"Veneeta Dayal","doi":"10.1162/ling_a_00507","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00507","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper considers phenomena related to embedded interrogatives that do not fit the canonical profile of subordinate clauses. It focuses on restrictions on such noncanonical cases of subordination, here referred to as quasi-subordination, and makes the following claims. There are three points in the interrogative left periphery for building question meaning. The lowest point is CP, where interrogatives are differentiated semantically from declaratives. All embedding verbs that can take interrogative complements, can take CP+WH. The highest point is SAP. When its head is specified SAASK, the question denoted by the interrogative becomes a request for information by the speaker, directed towards the addressee. This is the structure we find in matrix questions (and quotations). In between these two levels is what I call PerspectiveP. Its head PerspCQ introduces PRO, an individual for whom the interrogative CP+WH is a potentially active question. That is, PRO is the perspectival center, the one from whose point of view the interrogative can be a request for information (signaled by the specification CQ for centered question). When PRO is bound by the speaker argument in the Speech Act Phrase, we get a matrix question; when PRO is bound by the subject of a matrix predicate we get quasi-subordination. Quasi-subordination is a hybrid between true subordination (with respect to pronominal interpretation, for example) and nonsubordination (with respect to intonation, for example). Restrictions on quasi-subordination are claimed to be regulated, in addition to standard selectional restrictions, by semantic compatibility between the implied ignorance of the individual who is the perspectival center of the question and the meaning of the embedding clause. Empirical support for this view of the interrogative left periphery comes from a range of phenomena from unrelated languages. While the idea of an articulated left periphery goes back to Rizzi (1997), the details of the present proposal are new. The paper discusses several implications of this view of the interrogative left periphery, connecting the specific claims to similar proposals about other clause types and to developments in our understanding of how complement selection works.","PeriodicalId":48044,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Inquiry","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48499328","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Incongruent Enjambments: The Case of Classical French Verse","authors":"F. Dell, Romain Benini","doi":"10.1162/ling_a_00502","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00502","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In versified texts congruence is one facet of the concordance between the edges of metrical constituents and those of grammatical constituents. Congruence may be characterized roughly as the requirement that no element within a syntactic constituent be in a stronger metrical position than the final element in that constituent. If break strength is defined in terms applicable to any constituent structure tree, syntactic as well as metrical, incongruences are discrepancies between the relative strengths of two breaks in metrical structure and the relative strengths of their counterparts in syntactic structure. Although our primary source of data is classical French verse, the characterization of congruence we present is a rather abstract one that does not make reference to features that are specific to French poetic forms or to the grammatical structure of the French language. This should make this characterization applicable in other poetic traditions.","PeriodicalId":48044,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Inquiry","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45530054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Puzzle of Anaphoric Bare Nouns in Mandarin: A Counterpoint to Index!","authors":"Veneeta Dayal;Li Julie Jiang","doi":"10.1162/ling_a_00433","DOIUrl":"10.1162/ling_a_00433","url":null,"abstract":"Jenks (2018) argues that Mandarin bare NPs cannot be classified as definites simpliciter. Adopting the distinction between weak- and strong-article definites in Schwarz 2009, he proposes that Mandarin makes a lexical distinction between the two types of definites: bare nouns are weak definites, demonstratives are strong definites. He further proposes that their distribution is regulated by a principle called Index!. In this article, we first point out some problems with the empirical generalizations presented in Jenks’s description of Mandarin and then sketch an alternative approach to the distinction between Mandarin demonstratives and bare nouns. We end with some comments about the kind of further empirical work that needs to be done before definitive claims can be made about the competition between demonstratives and other types of definites.","PeriodicalId":48044,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Inquiry","volume":"54 1","pages":"147-167"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49400302","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When Ellipsis Can Save Defectiveness and When It Can’t","authors":"Gesoel Mendes;Andrew Nevins","doi":"10.1162/ling_a_00428","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00428","url":null,"abstract":"We discuss cases of salvation and non-salvation by deletion in the domain of lexical gaps, and distinguish two types of defectiveness: (a) defectiveness that can be saved by PF deletion, which we take to signal the lack of an eligible allomorph for certain environments within a language, and (b) defectiveness that cannot be saved by PF deletion, which we take to signal the lack of a proper alloseme for a given environment. With ellipsis modeled as an instruction for nonpronunciation on the PF branch of the grammar, only gaps on the Exponent List can be saved by it.","PeriodicalId":48044,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Inquiry","volume":"54 1","pages":"182-196"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71903314","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}