Control in Dangling Participles (original) (raw)
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Proceedings of SALT 25 , 2015
Arguably the biggest challenge in analyzing English tense is to account for the double access interpretation, which arises when a present tensed verb is embedded under a past attitude—e.g. "John said that Mary is pregnant". Present-under-past does not always result in a felicitous utterance, however—cf. "#John believed that Mary is pregnant". While such oddity has been noted, the contrast has never been explained. In fact, English grammars and manuals generally prohibit present-under-past. Work on double access, on the other hand, has either disregarded the oddity (e.g. Abusch 1997: 39) or treated it as a reflex of a particular dialect (e.g. Kratzer 1998: 14). The goal of the paper is to argue—based on a corpus study—that a present-under-past sentence is grammatical, but modulated by two, interacting pragmatic phenomena: cessation and parentheticality.
Syntactic Reanalysis of Pronouns as Demonstratives: A Case of Degrammaticalization
ENGLISH LINGUISTICS, 2010
for their careful reading of the manuscript and their insightful suggestions. Thanks also to John Whitman for discussions of the issues and suggestions on various versions of the manuscript. I am also grateful to three anonymous reviewers for suggestions and comments which helped improve the original paper. The author is of course responsible for any errors. Work on this paper was supported by grants-in-aid for scientific research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Grant No. 19520327.
On the Internal Structure of Pronouns: From the Perspective of Noun Ellipsis
Revue Roumaine de Linguistique, 2023
The widespread pattern of “noun-less” variants of DPs (e.g. two/these [nP/NumPØ] vs. two/these cars) might lead to the expectation that the definite determiner should be able to head DPs with a null complement. The best candidate for representing the structure [Ddef [nP/NumPØ]] are 3rd person personal pronouns (Elbourne, 2005; a.o), an analysis supported by evidence for NP-ellipsis (or N-anaphora) in pronouns. However, equating pronouns with THE+[nP/NumPØ] faces a number of issues: the different behavior of pronouns and other definite descriptions with respect to binding; the differences in syntactic and semantic features between pronouns and DPs headed by THE (e.g. gender); the one-to-many structure-form relationship between the single structure THE+[nP/NumPØ] and different series of pronominal forms (strong and weak forms); and, a gap in the attested combinations of THE and [NØ]. Our account addresses these issues. We propose that the D used in pronouns, which we label Dpron, has the semantics of THE, but THE and Dpron differ in their formal features. We posit that a null NP complement needs to be licensed by features on the determiner the NP merges with, and that Dpron bears such features. Thus, we capture the fact that typical THE does not surface in cases where there is no overt element in the complement of D (i.e. what we call total emptiness) via the absence of these features on THE. Additionally, to further explore the differences between strong and weak forms in Romanian, we present the results of a corpus study on these forms.