Alemannic Verb Doubling Computationally (original) (raw)
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Verb doubling and the order of operations at PF: Insights from Asante Twi
Most work on predicate clefts seems to presuppose the implication that if a language shows verb doubling when the verb alone is fronted it also shows verb doubling when the verb is fronted together with its internal argument(s). In this paper, I present data from Asante Twi, where the verb is doubled in the former case but there is do-support in the latter instead. I argue that the patterns can be accounted for by varying orders of the operations Chain Reduction (CR) and Head-to-head movement (HHM) at PF. CR may either bleed HHM giving rise to consistent do-support (as in German) or counterbleed it leading to consistent verb doubling (as in Hebrew). The Asante Twi pattern then is a result of neutralisation due to the inability of A'-head movement to form chains. The account provides a unified analysis of verb doubling and do-support in predicate clefts, which derives all attested patterns to the exclusion of the unattested reverse Asante Twi pattern.
(2019c) The syntax and semantics of past participle agreement in Alemannic
Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 4(1), 105., 2019
This paper investigates agreement on past participles in Highest Alemannic dialects of German. We will first show that participle agreement only occurs in contexts where the participle is adjectival, viz., in stative passives and in resultative perfects, but not in eventive perfects. The participles thus pattern with predicative adjectives, which also display agreement in these varieties. In the main part of the paper, we address double compound perfects and eventive passives, which also display agreement on the lexical participle. Even though it is initially not obvious that the participle is adjectival in these cases, we will provide syntactic evidence for their adjectival status. Furthermore, we will pursue the hypothesis that the adjectival head of all agreeing participles is a stativizer, even in the double compound perfect and the eventive passive. At the same time, both the double compound perfect and the eventive passive also clearly have an eventive component. We will model their behavior by treating the participles as mixed categories, viz., as adjectival heads that take a large amount of verbal structure as their complement (VoiceP/AspP). While recent work on German stative passives has argued that even those should be analyzed as containing a substantial amount of verbal structure, the behavior of participles in the double perfect and the eventive passive in the varieties under consideration is clearly different. They thus contribute to the typology of adjectival passives in German and beyond and show that the familiar distinction between 'adjectival' and 'verbal' participles needs to be further refined.
Syntactic Doubling and the Structure of Chains
2008
A recent survey of 267 Dutch dialects provides five cases of syntactic doubling, in which two elements (WH-pronouns or subject pronouns) referring to the same syntactic entity co-occur in one and the same sentence. This paper focuses of four cases of non-identical doubling, where two distinctlooking elements co-occur. It is shown that the order of these pronouns is fixed and that the first (or syntactically higher) pronoun must be less specific that the second one. It is argued that this generalization follows from 'partial copying', a process that copies a proper subconstituent and remerges it higher in the structure. This naturally excludes the ungrammatical orders, as those would involve full copying plus the addition of features, in violation of the inclusiveness condition. The proposal requires pronouns to be spell outs of phrases (cf. Cardinaletti & Starke 1999 a.o.) and it is in combination with this hypothesis that the full set of data is accounted for in a uniform w...
1998
A Multi-Modal Analysis of Anaphora and Ellipsis* Gerhard Jager *I am indebted to Natasha Kurtonina and Alexander Williams for valuable discussions and comments. Besides I profited from the suggestions of two anonymous referees. The research that led to this paper was funded partially by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and partially by the National Science Foundation. I'd like to express my gratitude to both institutions.
Syntactic architecture and its consequences III: Inside syntax
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This paper reconsiders some core issues on the morphosyntax and semantics of deponents, and what I contend are their counterparts in languages with no fullyfledged voice paradigms, namely pseudo-reflexives in Germanic and Romance. In particular, I show that non-active voice and reflexive marking in these constructions functions as a verbalizer, specifically on the roots of these verbs, which are nominal. Consequently, at least some roots seem to be categorial, and their category and other selectional features (such as non-causative semantics) relevant for Merge. Thus, the paper provides novel evidence for the view that roots have meaning, and in particular, for the existence of entity denoting roots.