Parallel (A)Symmetries And The Internal Structure Of Negative Expressions

While the development of negation has in recent years gained an increased interest in linguistic research, as witnessed by a large number of new publications, this development has not yet been thoroughly and diachronically studied for historical Low German, as the historical syntax of Low German more generally is only recently coming out of the shadows. The book investigates quantitatively two empirical domains. First, the development of the expression of standard negation, or Jespersen’s Cycle, and second the changing interaction between the expression of negation and indefinites in its scope, giving rise to different types of negative concord along the way. The entire period of attestation from Old Saxon (Old Low German) to the point when Middle Low German is replaced by High German as the written language, after the completion of Jespersen’s Cycle, is taken into consideration. It is shown that the developments in Low German form a missing link between those in High German, English, and Dutch, which are much better researched. The developments are analysed using a generative account of syntactic change combined with minimalist assumptions concerning the syntax of negation and negative concord.

“Infinitival clauses” are constructions with a clausal status whose predicate is an infinitive. Romance infinitive clauses are mostly dependent clauses and can be divided into the following types: argumental infinitival clauses (such as subject and object clauses, the latter also including indirect interrogatives), predicative infinitival clauses, infinitival adjunct clauses, infinitival relative clauses, and nominalized infinitive clauses (with a determiner). More rarely, they appear as independent (main) clauses (root infinitival clauses) of different types, which usually have a marked character. Whereas infinitival adjunct clauses are generally preceded by prepositions, which can be argued to be outside the infinitival clause proper (i.e., the clause is part of a prepositional phrase), Romance argumental infinitive clauses are often introduced by complementizers that are diachronically derived from prepositions, mostly de/di and a/à. In most Romance languages, the infinitive itself is morphologically marked by an ending containing the morpheme {r} but lacks tense and agreement morphemes. However, some Romance languages have developed an infinitive that can be inflected for subject agreement (which is found in Portuguese, Galician, and Sardinian and also attested in Old Neapolitan). Romance languages share the property of English and other languages to leave the subject of infinitive clauses unexpressed (subject/object control, arbitrary control, and optional control) and also have raising and accusative-and-infinitive constructions. A special property of many Romance languages is the possibility of overtly expressing a nominative subject in infinitival clauses, mostly in postverbal position. The tense of the infinitive clause is usually interpreted as simultaneous or anterior to that of the matrix clause, but some matrix predicates and infinitive constructions trigger a posteriority/future reading. In addition, some Romance infinitive clauses are susceptible to constraints concerning aspect and modality.

The debate over whether preverbal subjects of transitive verbs are canonical or non-canonical elements in Iberian Romance and other null-subject languages over the past twenty-plus years has arguably left the field of Generative syntax at an impasse with respect to the issue. Researchers have argued quite convincingly that preverbal subjects are non-canonical, non-argument (A′) constituents (e.g. Barbosa 1996, 2000; Ordóñez and Treviño 1999; Uribe-Etxebarria 1992, 1995), while others have presented equally compelling evidence supporting the analysis of preverbal subjects as canonical argument (A) constituents (e.g. Costa 2004; Goodall 2001). The results of this debate are of great theoretical importance, as they been claimed to have implications for the universality of the EPP and its associated feature(s). In this paper, I present evidence for Galician in the spirit of previous research and show that, with respect to the standard syntactic tests of A-versus A′-status for preverbal subjects in the literature, Galician is also inconclusive. I discuss how an experimental methodology incorporating a structured discourse context may provide greater insight on the issue and, assuming López's (2009) analysis of CLLD elements, present evidence suggesting that preverbal subjects are not left-peripheral, A′-elements in the discourse contexts examined in Galician, but rather A-elements.

The single argument of unaccusative verbs has gone from being predominantly postverbal in Classical (16th century) Portuguese to being predominantly preverbal in Modern Portuguese. While Portuguese has no morphological case marking, we find that the position immediately before the verb is becoming more and more reserved for subjects, while arguments in postverbal position are more likely to be objects. This correlates with general tendencies in the organization of information structure in Portuguese, which goes from being primarily a Theme – Rheme language with a T(heme)V(erb)X-structure, where X can be any type of constituent to an (X)S(ubject)V(erb)O(bject) structure. This has implications for the case of the arguments. In a TVX structure, the subject of any type of verb is likely to occur postverbally, since there is only room for one argument before the verb. In Classical Portuguese, there is agreement between the postverbal subject and the verb. The change from TVX to (X)SVO is accompanied by the possibility of postverbal subjects of unaccusatives, passives and reflexives to occur without agreement with the verb, thus not receiving nominative case. In modern popular Portuguese this construction is quite common. These arguments then bear very little resemblance to what we traditionally perceive of as subjects. In the popular language, this type of structure may even include an expletive subject pronoun. The preverbal subjects however show all the normal signs of subjecthood in Portuguese: They occur in the canonical preverbal subject position where they receive nominative case, there is agreement with the verb and no expletives.

In two sentence repetition experiments, we investigated whether four- and five-year-olds master distinct representations for intransitive verb classes by testing two syntactic analyses of unaccusatives (Burzio, 1986; Belletti, 1988). Under the assumption that, with unaccusatives, the partitive case of the postverbal argument is realized only on indefinites (Belletti, 1988), we tested whether children used indefiniteness as a feature to assign the partitive case to the verb's argument. In the sentences, we manipulated whether the subject preceded or followed the (unaccusative or unergative) verb and whether the subject was expressed by means of a definite or indefinite NP. With unaccusatives, children tended to place the subject in the postverbal position when the subject NP was indefinite, whereas, when the sentence presented a definite postverbal subject, children preferred to place the definite subject in the preverbal position. Definiteness exerted an effect only with unaccusatives, suggesting that children treated unergatives and unaccusatives differently.

Middle French offers significant variations in word order. We put forward the hypothesis that the analysis of information packaging and narrative structuring can help to understand such variations. The distribution of subject noun phrases before or after the tensed verb appears linked to communicative parameters: the pre-verbal position is preferably used for established thematic subjects within a narrative sequence, while a postverbal position is used for either known, not fully thematic subjects, or entirely new thematic subjects at the beginning of a narrative sequence.

The abbreviated Haruku language (HL) is a language that has yet to be touched by researchers regarding its grammatical relationships. This phenomenon is the basis for this research, so this research aims to describe the grammatical relationships found in the Haruku language. The research method used is a qualitative method with a lexical-functional-grammar approach. The research data source is five sources from the indigenous tribe of the Haruku Islands. Data collection was carried out using the skill method with fishing techniques. Data analysis uses the method for direct elements. The research results show that HL has main core structural functions, namely SUBJ and OBJ functions, then noncore grammatical functions, namely OBL, KOMP, and ADJ. The grammatical function of SUBJ in HL is always present in the preverbal position, while OBJ is present in the postverbal position. It was, furthermore, based on the constituent order system. HL is classified as VO, SVO, and VOS languages.

Chapter 3 investigated ways in which languages convey negation by means of an expression that corresponds to the first-order logic connective ¬. In English this would be not. Negation can also be attracted to other expressions in the sentence, particularly indefinites in argument or adjunct position (Section 1). Negative attraction creates negative indefinites. The class of negative indefinites includes both negative quantifiers (English nobody, nothing, nowhere, never) and n-words. Negative attraction is extended to multiple indefinites under negation in Section 2. Sentences involving a range of negative indefinites raise problems for the principle of compositionality of meaning, because some languages assign a double negation reading to such a sequence, and others a single negation reading. Chapter 1 argued that the compositionality problem cannot be solved in the lexicon, and exploited the polyadic quantifier analysis proposed by de Swart and Sag (2002) to offer a grammatical analysis. The argumentation is briefly summarized in Section 3, in preparation of the typology of double negation and negative concord languages. The polyadic quantifier analysis developed by de Swart and Sag (2002) works well for French because it displays ambiguities between single and double negation readings in sentences that combine two negative expressions. However, in most other languages there is a strong bias toward either the double negation or the negative concord reading. Section 4 builds a bidirectional optimality theory (OT) built on top of the polyadic quantifier analysis in order to account for the systematic contrast between negative concord and double negation languages. In negative concord languages, the functional motivation that favors marking of ‘negative variables’ in the syntax wins out. Double negation languages value first-order iteration in the semantics. Languages that display ambiguities have an overlapping range of constraints in a stochastic extension of the model developed in Chapter 6 (Section 3). As Section 4 emphasizes, the bidirectional setup is essential, for syntactic and semantic variation go hand in hand. Section 5 returns to the relation between negative concord and negative polarity, and offers a diachronic perspective while Section 6 concludes the chapter.

We provide empirical evidence that colloquial Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is a variable negative concord language, which allows negative indefinites (NIs) to occur in postverbal position without a preverbal negative licensor, as in Vi nada ontem ‘I saw nothing yesterday.’ The results of an online survey (N = 443) distributed via Facebook show that speakers’ acceptability judgments toward the lack of negative concord in BP are closely connected to the frequency of the individual NIs, and in particular to the frequency of V + NI collocations. Speaker judgments are also sensitive to the type frequency and token-type ratio of individual NIs. We conclude that variable negative concord in BP is paradigmatically constrained by the identity of the NI in question.

This paper concentrates on the syntax and semantics of bare nominals in Germanic and Romance languages. These languages do not normally allow nominals to occur without an article. However, some syntactic configurations, including predicative constructions, supplementives and some prepositional phrases, allow bareness of certain nominals. We argue that bare nominals in these constructions refer to capacities: professions, religions, nationalities or other roles in society. Capacities are analyzed as entities of type e, sortally distinct from regular individuals as well as kinds. We further argue that the capacity interpretation is associated with NP—a layer within the DP that lacks number features. This accounts for the number-neutral status of bare nominals. We also show some patterns in languages other than Romance and Germanic that provide further cross-linguistic support for the postulation of capacities as a separate ontological category, specific to a low position within the DP.

Pseudo-right dislocation, the bare-topic construction, and hanging topic constructions

This paper provides new evidence that syntactic principles that are proposed to explain the (un)grammaticality of a sentence can also hold in sociolinguistic variation. In particular, we argue that two puzzling frequency patterns involving negation in French—the proximity effect on negative concord and the polarity effect on future temporal reference—are deeply related and are both derived from the sensitivity of syntactic agreement to “soft” locality constraints. Recent quantitative studies of future temporal reference reveal that, although all negative items are subject to the polarity effect in Laurentian French, pas does not give rise to the polarity effect in Parisian French. We argue that this dialectal difference can be explained by minor variations in the syntactic and semantic properties of the negative marker pas, given an appropriate analysis of the syntax of negative concord. Our paper therefore shows that incorporating sociolinguistic variation into syntactic theory helps refine our understanding of general syntactic principles, such as locality constraints, and argues that frequency/preference patterns should be included in the full theory of syntactic competence and performance of speakers.

The analysis of Internal Localization Nouns (ILNs) is considered here in the framework of the general studies on part-whole relations or meronomies. Data from Basque and French indicate that these lexical elements have semantic and syntactic properties which clearly differentiate them from other meronomic relations, in particular from component nouns usually used for designating functional parts of spatial entities. Beyond a strict opposition, it seems that ILNs diachronicly derive from component nouns and acquire, during such an evolution, semantic properties which make them real relational markers of spatial localization. More generally, this study on ILNs of Basque and French seems to indicate that there exists a general concept of location which plays a great part in the linguistic and cognitive classification of spatial entities and underlies the functioning of several linguistic markers of space.

THINGS-data reflects three large-scale neuroimaging and behavioral datasets of object processing in humans, comprising densely sampled functional MRI and magnetoencephalographic recordings, as well as 4.70 million similarity judgments in response to thousands of photographic images for up to 1854 objects.

This paper deals with three copular constructions in French that take bare nominals as a predicative complement (attribut du sujet). From a lexical point of view, these constructions, which are typical of colloquial French, are very open frames. After a detailed analysis of the syntactic and semantic properties of these constructions, I will examine them in the light of a more theoretical question, viz. that of the categorial status of the bare nouns involved. More precisely, I will determine to which extent they are ‘recategorized’ into adjectives.On the basis of a fine-grained syntactic and semantic analysis, I provide a nuanced—gradual—account of adjectivization. First, I discard what I call the ‘lexicalized’ cases of recategorization, i.e. the fully adjectivized ones (vache, chatte,…), in order to focus on ‘syntactic recategorization’, i.e. the occasional adjectival use of (bare) nouns in the constructions under investigation. Then, I show that the first of the three constructions involves a primarily syntactic (i.e. non permanent), contextual recategorization of the bare noun. By contrast, the second adjectival use, which is characterized by a superficial adjectivization, involves the copula as well and should be considered as a copular construction sui generis. Finally, the third use is somewhere in between the two other syntactically as well as semantically.By way of conclusion, I suggest that the best way to account for the recategorization of bare nouns into ‘adjectival’ nodes might still be Tesnière's (1959) concept of translatif. A parallel will be drawn with the role of determiners in nominalizations.