"Also" in Turkish and Ishkashimi (original) (raw)
`Also' in Ishkashimi: additive particle and sentence connector.
Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS)
The paper discusses the distribution and meaning of the additive particle -m@s in Ishkashimi. -m@s receives different semantic associations while staying in the same syntactic position. Thus, structurally combined with an object, it can semantically associate with the focused object or with the whole focused VP; similarly, combined with the subject it can semantically associate with the focused subject and with the whole focused sentence.
Topics in Turkish syntax: Clausal structure and scope
Unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation. MIT, 2001
This dissertation asks two main questions for Turkish: (i) what is the interaction between verbal morphology and the structure?, and (ii) what is the interaction between word order and interpretation? Following Kornfilt (1996) I argue that there are two verbal forms in finite structures: one consists of a participle and a copula, which is inflected for tense and agreement, and the other is a fully inflected verbal form. I propose that the former is formed by a derivation in which the verb moves as far as a functional head such Aspect or Modal, creating a participle. A verbal feature (copula) is inserted at T o satisfying its verbal requirement. In the latter case the verb moves all the way up to T o. No copula is inserted. The rest of the dissertation focuses on the interaction between structure and quantificational elements. One question addressed is why indefinites marked overtly for accusative case violate scope rigidity, and are interpreted as having wide scope over quantificational elements c-commanding them. It is argued that they do not violate scope rigidity, but rather the unexpected wide scope interpretation is the result of a special interpretative mechanism. Accusative-marked indefinites are interpreted as choice functions. Structures with various quantifiers, indefinites and negative polarity items are discussed, and it is argued that the interpretation of both choice function variables and negative polarity items are subject to intervention effects. Finally, structures with clausal possessives are analyzed. The discussion focuses on one type of clausal possessive in which the possessor is in the genitive case and the possessee agrees with the possessor. It is shown that this construction is subject to a constraint similar to the there-sentences in English in that the possessee cannot be presuppositional. It is argued that the possessor is generated in a constituent within VP with the possessee, but raises to the [Spec, TP]. The possessee remains within VP, and is interpreted non-presuppositionally.
2019
In his article Three clause-final particles and the syntax of clausal complementation in Dravidian, K. A. Jayaseelan discusses the role of the question particle-oo, the complementizer ennǝ, and the relativizer-a, which occur in a fixed order in Malayalam, in case they co-occur. He argues that this order can be generated only if we postulate that the complementizer, which is a quotative element derived from the verb 'say', still retains its verbal syntax and projects its own clause. The relativizer-a can then be in the C domain of the clause projected by ennǝ, and the question particle-oo can be in the C domain of the CP complement of ennǝ. A surprising consequence of this analysis is that every embedded finite clause in Dravidian-the 'ennǝ + clause' structure-is in fact bi-clausal. Rahul Balusu's article Fine tuning the Dravidian left periphery: The three 'complementizers' in Telugu picks up on this, now with a focus on the related Dravidian language Telugu. He investigates in detail three left-peripheral morphemes that have been considered at various places in the previous literature as instances of complementizers. According to Balusu, none of these morphemes are typical complementizers. The linearly first left-peripheral morpheme-aa has all the signature properties of a polar question particle and is in many respects similar to its Hindi counterpart kyaa. The second left-peripheral morpheme,-oo, delimits the scope of questions in Telugu. This he attributes to its location in the Spec of CP, where it is basegenerated, and to its semantics, which is essential for interrogative semantics, thus explaining scope delimitations. The third left-peripheral morpheme, the quotative complementizer ani, is analysed as being syntactically and semantically true to its source, a verbum dicendi, the verb say, and its complementizer nature as arising only due to its not putting forth its extended projection (in the spirit of Grimshaw 2005) and instead being merged into the matrix clausal spine at various levels. The third contribution in this section turns to yet another Dravidian language, namely Tamil. In their article Discourse-driven scrambling to the peripheries in child Tamil, R. Amritavalli and Annu Kurian Mathew argue that the SOV-language Tamil has a pre-verbal focus and postverbal topic position. A subject wh-word must occur in focus, and not in a topic or in a canonical S(ubject) position. This leads to the distribution: *SwhOV, POSwhV, *OVSwh. Utterances from Josef Bayer & Yvonne Viesel 3 children 26-29 months of age are shown to obey these word order restrictions. The authors argue that child scrambling in Tamil moves arguments to criterial positions to check topic/focus features. A possible generalization with Japanese is suggested. A non-focus account of wh-is briefly critiqued. The second section, on Indo-Aryan, continues with the article Clause particles and cleft sentences in Bangla: Some preliminary generalizations by Probal Dasgupta. Intimacy-oriented discourse particles (DiPs), called Modul[ator]s in the Bangla syntax literature normally follow a finite verb or a compact wh-phrase. In his article, Dasgupta surveys interactions between a Modul and Zero Copula Construction (ZCC) in three subtypes of ZCC. He extends the discussion to other contexts now diagnosable as ZCCs-sentences in which a post-verbal constituent hosts either a Modul or some other DiP. He argues that certain sentences with these properties instantiate cleft constructions whose properties are explored here in the context of the study of DiP elements. Some preliminary generalizations are proposed. Section 3 contains two contributions on Japanese. The phenomenon of DiPs, which was introduced in Dasgupta's article, plays a role in the first article here, as well as in Sergio Monforte's article in Section 6, which concludes this volume. Yoshio Endo's article Exploring right/left peripheries: Expressive meanings in questions discusses non-standard questions in Japanese such as rhetorical, surprise, disapproval, exclamative, etc. (Obenauer 2006, Bayer and Obenauer 2011, Bayer 2018) within the framework of the cartography of syntactic structures. After introducing the basic ideas of the cartographic approach, Endo first examines the expressive meanings of some wh-expressions asking for reasons such as what…for, how come, etc. familiar from languages such as English, German, etc. He then turns to the main topic of examining various sentence final particles in the right periphery of the Japanese sentence to show how they contribute to creating expressive meanings in questions. Methodologically, he does this by looking at translations of Peanuts comics. Endo draws comparisons with German, where corresponding particles are placed in clause-medial position, and he speculates about the absence of similar particles in English. The article by Norio Nasu, Adverb-predicate agreement in Japanese and structural reduction, turns to the related topic of sentence adverbs (S-adverbs). In cartographic work, S-adverbs have a high position in the adverb hierarchy. Nasu shows that in Japanese, S-adverbs occur with a particular inflectional form of a predicate. He argues that this phenomenon is a manifestation of the agree relation between the adverb and a functional head. An agree-based analysis correctly predicts that an S-adverb can occur in more than one position as long as it is able to c-command the functional head it agrees with. It also accounts for restrictions on the cooccurrence of more than one S-adverb in a single clause. In Japanese, an epistemic adverb cannot precede an evidential adverb. The illegitimacy of this order is reduced to an intervention effect arising from agree. Nasu's analysis predicts that some S-adverbs in Japanese can occur at the edge of more than one functional projection as long as they enter an agree relation with the appropriate functional head. In this respect, the distribution of Japanese S-adverbs presents a departure from a principal assumption of the cartographic approach, i.e. a constituent appearing on the clausal left periphery is in a one-to-one spec-head relation with the appropriate functional head. The two contributions that appear in Section 4 discuss mainly the head-final language Turkish but also draw comparisons with the partially head-final language German. The article by Tamer Akan and Katharina Hartmann, SOV-X: Syntactic and pragmatic constraints of the postverbal domain in Turkish, sets out to develop a novel syntactic account for the postverbal domain in Turkish, which establishes a tight connection between syntactic and information-structural (IS) properties of the language. The authors first analyze the properties of the Turkish postnominal domain in comparison to the SOV-language German. Turkish is much less restricted than * I wish to thank Katalin Kiss for helpful comments on this paper. I also wish to thank the audience at the conference for an insightful discussion. 'He said (he) would come.' he (Nom.) come-1stP.Sg. say-3rdP.Sg. K. A. Jayaseelan 9 In (5), the complement of ennǝ is just a representation of a sound; there is no C domain here to generate ennǝ in. Even the noun complement construction can have a simple nominal as the complement of ennǝ, cf. (6) "kaakka" enn-a waakkǝ '(the) word "crow"' crow QUOT-REL word What such data show is that ennǝ is still a 'say'-verb, which can take as its complement anything that can be 'said', i.e. uttered; e.g. a sound ('Say "Boo!"'), or a word ('Say "crow"'), or a clause ('Say "Mary is pregnant"'). Though bleached in meaning-in (5), e.g., the machine doesn't 'say' anythingennǝ retains its verbal syntax. 2, 3 5 Clausal complementation in Dravidian What we have said has serious implications for the syntax of clausal complementation in Dravidian. When 'say' takes an object complement-irrespective of whether it is a sound, word, or clause-it goes without saying that it is outside that complement. Now consider a sentence where ennǝ takes a finite clause as its complement: (7) John [ Mary wannu ennǝ ] paRaññu 'John said that Mary has come.' John Mary came QUOT said We can now see that the correct analysis of (7) is that ennǝ is outside its CP complement; it is not in the C domain of the embedded clause at all. The 'say'-verb projects its own clause, which is nonfinite but can have its own C domain. The structure we postulate for (7) is (8) (abstracting away from word order): 4 2 Do we wish to entertain a "squishy" account of ennǝ, saying that it has been reanalyzed as a complementizer when it takes a clausal complement, but that it is still a 'say'-verb when it takes a nominal expression as its complement? Such a "two ennǝ's" analysis would be unsatisfactory for several reasons. First of all, note that ennǝ occurs indifferently with assertive and interrogative matrix verbs, showing an insensitiveness to the matrix predicate which is unexpected in a complement but is quite in keeping with an adjunct: (i) John [ Mary wannu ennǝ ] paRaññu 'John said that Mary has come.' John Mary came QUOT said (ii) John [ Mary wannu-oo ennǝ ] coodiccu 'John asked whether Mary has come.' John Mary came-Q QUOT asked Again, where do we generate ennǝ in the C domain? Suppose we generate it as the head of Finiteness Phrase. Then, in a sentence like (ii) above (or like (4)), the question particle-oo-and by implication ForceP-will have to be below the Finiteness Phrase; and a "low ForceP" will make Dravidian a typological oddity. 3 Readers unfamiliar with Dravidian languages might ask: Is ennǝ confined to the complements of 'verbs of saying'? It is not. The matrix verb can be any verb that takes a clausal complement, cf. (i) Mary [ John kaLLan aaNǝ ennǝ ] wiśwasiccu/ samśayiccu/ aaroopiccu Mary John thief is QUOT believed/ suspected/ alleged 'Mary believed/ suspected/ alleged that John is a thief.' But there is one restriction that needs to be noted on what ennǝ can take as its...
The Affix-like Status of Certain Verbal Elements
2007
This papers explains the syntactic behaviour of the verbal sequences of two verbs (Vl+V2) -and specifically the sequences haver + participle, va + infinitive, and modal epistemic verbs + infinitive-in Catalan as the result of the syntactic and morphological characteristics of V 1. These characteristics are given by the following specifications of affixal features: [+ syntacticlmorphological]. With these we predict the behaviour attested if we follow Baker (1988)'s theory of incorporation with the modifications in Roberts (1991) and his excorporation proposal. The consequence of the given specifications for the features is that the two verbal elements in the sequences are always adjacent in Catalan as long as we assume that V1 selects V2 and that this selection implies morphological subcategorization. The result of this type of subcategorization is the creation of a slot in the structure which requires substitution in the course of the derivation. Three crucial predictions follow from considering V1 an affix: (a) that V2 cannot move once it has incorporated unless there is another fi which may replace it (another V); (b) that the selecting element cannot move either (by the Stray Affin Principle ), and (c) that incorporation is wmpulsory.
Peripheral and Clause-internal Complementizers in Bangla: A Case for Remnant Movement
The purpose of this paper is to show that the notion of what is not a Phase is equally important as the notion of what constitutes a Phase. Since the notion of a Phase is one particular (albeit an emphatic) instance of the notion of constituency, a non-Phase or an incomplete Phase is predicted to be a nonconstituent. This paper looks at a curious geometrical puzzle involving clauses with internal Comps in Bangla (=Bengali) and show that such clauses are incomplete phases. In particular, it is shown that the C and its complement are not merged in sequence, nor can they be spelled out as a Phase during the course of the derivation. The claim that the C and its complement do not form a constituent challenges the familiar notion of constituency by showing that an internal C has a non-linear relation to what has been traditionally considered to be its complement. This challenge is inspired by Kayne's ( ,b, 1999 demonstration that P-Comps do not form constituents with their complements. Although Kayne's algorithm accounts for a set of unresolved problems involving P-Comps in Romance, it has not yet been tested for Cs in general. This algorithm, if followed verbatim, is shown to derive the unmarked order of constituents but fails to derive the puzzling C -internal order in Bangla. Another goal of this paper therefore is to present a revised Kaynean algorithm, which, by way of solving the puzzle, is shown to provide crucial evidence for derivation by Phase , Chomsky 1999. This is a particularly welcome result as it brings two different research strands together.