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Bidese Ermenegildo - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Rethinking V2 and Nominative Case assignment: new insights from a Germanic variety in Northern Italy
country:GBR, 2020Co-Authors: Bidese Ermenegildo, Padovan Andrea, Tomaselli AlessandraAbstract:Cimbrian is a German(ic) VO heritage language that does not display the linear V2 restriction: the DP subject can show up before the finite verb together with other constituents while verb-subject inversion a la German only obtains with clitic pronouns. In recent literature on Cimbrian, pronominal subject inversion has been taken as a traditional argument in favor of mandatory V-to-C movement (assuming a split-C configuration). Building on this assumption, the syntax of the enclitic expletive subject, -da/-ta, (which shows up whenever the DP subject does not raise in the C-domain) makes the Cimbrian scenario particularly relevant since it casts light on the correlation between V2 and Nominative Case licensing. Our take is that Nominative Case in Cimbrian is assigned by C and not by T \u2013 as is the Case of other Germanic V2 languages \u2013 but in a very idiosyncratic way: (i) it applies within the C domain, i.e FinP; (ii) expletive -da/-ta absorbs Nominative Case and acts as a defective goal with respect to the \u201clow\u201d subject.\u2028 Basing on the feature-spreading model in Ouali (2008), we take the phasal head C in Cimbrian to \u201cKEEP\u201d its relevant \u3c6- and T-features assigning Nominative Case in [Spec,FinP] and triggering mandatory V-movement.\u202
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Subject clitic languages in comparison: Subject clitics, finite verb movement and Nominative Case assignment in Germanic (Bavarian, Cimbrian) and Romance (French, North Italian) varieties
place:Berlin, 2019Co-Authors: Tomaselli Alessandra, Bidese ErmenegildoAbstract:Since the seminal work by Brandi & Cordin (1981; 1989), the syntactic differences between subject clitics in Italian dialects (Trentino and Fiorentino) and subject clitics in French have been assumed to rely on the value of the null subject parameter: subject clitics in Italian dialects behave like verbal affixes; that is, they do not realize a specific position but should be considered as verbal morphology. Subject clitics in French realize the structural position for the subject connected with Nominative Case assignment. The Germanic-Romance comparative perspective allows us to provide a more complex picture. On one hand, the difference between \u2018weak pronouns\u2019 and clitics could be better understood: \u2018weak\u2019 German pronouns in the so-called Wackernagelposition are not morphologically distinct from full pronouns and cannot double the subject, but they present some analogies with French clitics rather than with clitics in Italian dialects. On the other hand, subject clitics in Germanic varieties such as West Flemish and Bavarian, and even in isolated varieties such as Cimbrian, differ strongly from their Romance counterparts with regard to both finite verb movement and Nominative Case assignment, and have been analyzed as being either agreement morphology in C or Nominative Case markers. The consideration of all the factors involved in the definition of \u2018subject clitic\u2019 allow us to define the feature characterization of the hosting head, which acts as a probe for the cliticization process, and to re-evaluate the traditional distinction between comp-dominant versus infl-dominant languages through the distinction between phase versus non-phase head
Tomaselli Alessandra - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Rethinking V2 and Nominative Case assignment: new insights from a Germanic variety in Northern Italy
country:GBR, 2020Co-Authors: Bidese Ermenegildo, Padovan Andrea, Tomaselli AlessandraAbstract:Cimbrian is a German(ic) VO heritage language that does not display the linear V2 restriction: the DP subject can show up before the finite verb together with other constituents while verb-subject inversion a la German only obtains with clitic pronouns. In recent literature on Cimbrian, pronominal subject inversion has been taken as a traditional argument in favor of mandatory V-to-C movement (assuming a split-C configuration). Building on this assumption, the syntax of the enclitic expletive subject, -da/-ta, (which shows up whenever the DP subject does not raise in the C-domain) makes the Cimbrian scenario particularly relevant since it casts light on the correlation between V2 and Nominative Case licensing. Our take is that Nominative Case in Cimbrian is assigned by C and not by T \u2013 as is the Case of other Germanic V2 languages \u2013 but in a very idiosyncratic way: (i) it applies within the C domain, i.e FinP; (ii) expletive -da/-ta absorbs Nominative Case and acts as a defective goal with respect to the \u201clow\u201d subject.\u2028 Basing on the feature-spreading model in Ouali (2008), we take the phasal head C in Cimbrian to \u201cKEEP\u201d its relevant \u3c6- and T-features assigning Nominative Case in [Spec,FinP] and triggering mandatory V-movement.\u202
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Subject clitic languages in comparison: Subject clitics, finite verb movement and Nominative Case assignment in Germanic (Bavarian, Cimbrian) and Romance (French, North Italian) varieties
place:Berlin, 2019Co-Authors: Tomaselli Alessandra, Bidese ErmenegildoAbstract:Since the seminal work by Brandi & Cordin (1981; 1989), the syntactic differences between subject clitics in Italian dialects (Trentino and Fiorentino) and subject clitics in French have been assumed to rely on the value of the null subject parameter: subject clitics in Italian dialects behave like verbal affixes; that is, they do not realize a specific position but should be considered as verbal morphology. Subject clitics in French realize the structural position for the subject connected with Nominative Case assignment. The Germanic-Romance comparative perspective allows us to provide a more complex picture. On one hand, the difference between \u2018weak pronouns\u2019 and clitics could be better understood: \u2018weak\u2019 German pronouns in the so-called Wackernagelposition are not morphologically distinct from full pronouns and cannot double the subject, but they present some analogies with French clitics rather than with clitics in Italian dialects. On the other hand, subject clitics in Germanic varieties such as West Flemish and Bavarian, and even in isolated varieties such as Cimbrian, differ strongly from their Romance counterparts with regard to both finite verb movement and Nominative Case assignment, and have been analyzed as being either agreement morphology in C or Nominative Case markers. The consideration of all the factors involved in the definition of \u2018subject clitic\u2019 allow us to define the feature characterization of the hosting head, which acts as a probe for the cliticization process, and to re-evaluate the traditional distinction between comp-dominant versus infl-dominant languages through the distinction between phase versus non-phase head
Jalabneh Atef - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Mandative Subjunctive in Arabic Syntax: A Minimalist Study
Arab Journals Platform, 2020Co-Authors: Jalabneh AtefAbstract:An Arabic sentence is dealt with in this article as SVO at spell-out and VSO at the logical form (LF). Thus, the objective of this study is to check the grammaticality of the mandative subjunctive structure in the absence of a Case assignor for the Nominative Case. It also checks the relevant syntactic and semantic formal and informal features that support the grammaticality of mandative subjunctive at LF. To achieve the objectives, the researcher refers to Chomsky’ s (1981, 1986a, 1986b and 1995) Minimalist Views and Radford’ s (1988) Empty Tense Theory. The problem is to find out the actual Nominative Case assignor for the subjunctive subject in the absence of an overt tense. The study illustrates that the only Case assignor for the Nominative Case in these types of structures in Arabic is the empty tense [e]. The formal features ([T],[D-], [P-] and [’an]) are proved to be parts of numeration, and they have [+interpretable] features at LF; however, informal features, namely, (Nominative Case, theta-marking and Agrs”) are not. The study concludes that the complementizer ’ an ‘that’ and the subjunctive marker [a] are necessary to be overt for the grammaticality of the subjunctive sentence. It is proved that a mandative subjunctive sentence occupies an argument position and must be theta marked at spell-out to render a well-formed sentence at the logical form. The study is significant because the researcher found syntactic solutions to the grammaticality of these types of structures in Arabic syntax
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The Case Assignment And V-movement In Verbal Sentence in Arabic Syntax: A Minimalist Approach
Arab Journals Platform, 2020Co-Authors: Jalabneh AtefAbstract:This paper discusses the concept of government and Case-system pro- posed by Traditional Arab Grammarians, (see Haque (1984), Wright (1984) and Abdulhamid (1980)). They, basically, regarded the system of oven morphological realizations and the transitivity theory but not government as primary factors for it to assign the Case of an NP. As- their approach is unable to account for the assignment of the Nominative Case without a governor, we opt for Case - theory of Chomsky (1995) to solve this and other problems. X-bar syntax as a module of Case theory guarantees the assignment of Case to a DP in the presence of a Case - assignor. The DP must be governed by specific Case - assignor in its maximal projection. This theory introduces the principle of Exceptional Case Marking as a mechanism that guarantees the assignment of the accusative Case by the matrix verb to the subject of IP under government. In this process. we depend on the Spec-head relation to achieve this kind of assignment in X- bar syntax
Peter C Gordon - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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linguistic complexity and information structure in korean evidence from eye tracking during reading
Cognition, 2007Co-Authors: Peter C GordonAbstract:The nature of the memory processes that support language comprehension and the manner in which information packaging influences online sentence processing were investigated in three experiments that used eye-tracking during reading to measure the ease of understanding complex sentences in Korean. All three experiments examined reading of embedded complement sentences; the third experiment additionally examined reading of sentences with object-modifying, object-extracted relative clauses. In Korean, both of these structures place two NPs with Nominative Case marking early in the sentence, with the embedded and matrix verbs following later. The type (pronoun, name or description) of these two critical NPs was varied in the experiments. When the initial NPs were of the same type, comprehension was slowed after participants had read the sentence-final verbs, a finding that supports the view that working memory in language comprehension is constrained by similarity-based interference during the retrieval of information necessary to determine the syntactic or semantic relations between noun phrases and verb phrases. Ease of comprehension was also influenced by the association between type of NP and syntactic position, with the best performance being observed when more definite NPs (pronouns and names) were in a prominent syntactic position (e.g., matrix subject) and less definite NPs (descriptions) were in a non-prominent syntactic position (embedded subject). This pattern provides evidence that the interpretation of sentences is facilitated by consistent packaging of information in different linguistic elements.
Suzana Fong - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Proper movement through Spec-CP: An argument from hyperraising in Mongolian
Ubiquity Press, 2019Co-Authors: Suzana FongAbstract:The subject of an embedded finite clause in Mongolian can be marked with accusative Case, alternating with canonical Nominative Case. Following previous proposals, I analyze this option as the consequence of the presence of 'φ'-features in the complementizer of the embedded clause, which trigger the movement of the lower subject to Spec-CP. From that position, the embedded subject is accessible to the matrix v, which assigns Case to it without violating the Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC). A prediction that falls out from this analysis is that the accusative subject in Mongolian can move into the matrix clause, also without violating this locality condition. This type of construction is called 'hyperraising' and is indeed found in the language. Hyperraising in Mongolian displays some of the signature properties of A-movement, including the absence of weak crossover effects and of reconstruction for Condition C. A comparison with covert 'Wh'-movement in Mongolian will show that this type of movement does induce a WCO violation and reconstructs for Condition C. If the proposal that hyperraising in Mongolian involves a stopover position at Spec-CP is on the right track, this position would have to be an A-position. If correct, this paper contributes to the view that syntactic positions should not be considered as being intrinsically A or Ā: Spec-CP, which is usually taken to be an Ā-position, could potentially be an A-position too, at least in hyperraising in Mongolian