SYNTAX & SEMANTICS CIRCLE

university of california, berkeley

Fall 2024

PAST MEETINGS:

6 december
Rebecca Jarvis (UC Berkeley)
Subjecthood and cliticization in Atchan: An argument for m-merger of branching projections

This talk focuses on the morphosyntax of clitic subject pronouns in Atchan. First, I show that Atchan subject movement phenomena exhibit a split in resumption between lexical DPs and pronouns: extracted pronominal subjects are resumed, while extracted lexical DP subjects are not. I propose that this split results from subject pronoun cliticization: subject pronouns cliticize (formalized as m-merger, Matushansky 2006) in Atchan, and this cliticization feeds resumption. Extending the analysis, I present (non-)cliticization patterns of in-situ subjects in Atchan; I show that subjects which consist of pronouns with adjoined particles, or which consist of conjoined pronouns, cannot occur truly in-situ. I argue that this data is correctly captured on a view of the m-merger operation on which branching projections can undergo m-merger (Harizanov 2014, cf. Kramer 2014). This analysis also provides support for a root person feature that distinguishes pronouns and lexical DPs (Harley & Ritter 2002, a.o.).

29 november
No meeting. Happy Thanksgiving!

22 november
Abby Roberts (UC Berkeley)
Characterizing Nukuoro copulas: Analysis and implications

In this talk, I present in-progress work on copulas and focus in Nukuoro, a Polynesian Outlier language of Micronesia. I am currently investigating three particles (go, se, and ni) which appear with nominals in non-verbal clauses. In general, se appears with singular predicates in predicative clauses, ni with plural predicates, and go in equative, specificational, and identificational clauses.

The project has multiple aims: articulating additional evidence in support of the claim (Drummond 2023) that these particles are copulas; determining the syntactic and/or semantic factors that differentiate go from se and ni; investigating the relationship between these particles and focus; and examining the implications of the diachronic development of go. All of these will support the development of a unified theory of Nukuoro copulas, with an eye to exploring the implications for syntax, semantics, and typology.

15 november
Kang Franco Liu (UC Berkeley)
Quirks of head-internal relativization: Lessons from Northern Tujia

This talk is concerned with a curious relativization restriction in Northern Tujia (Sino-Tibetan, China). In externally headed relative clauses (EHRCs), all arguments can be relativized, but only objects and intransitive subjects can be relativized in internally headed relative clauses (IHRCs). Similar restrictions targeting transitive subject IHRCs but not EHRCs have been reported in morphologically ergative languages Shipibo (Valenzuela 2002) and Belhare (Bickel 1995). So far, these cases have been analyzed as effects of syntactic ergativity (Deal 2016); EHRCs in these languages are argued to not involve movement and therefore immune to this ban on relativizing transitive subjects. In this talk, I argue that ergativity-based approaches to this IHRC restriction are not tenable given that Northern Tujia does not show ergative alignment and both EHRCs and IHRCs are island-sensitive. As an alternative, I argue that the relativization restriction in question is correlated with clause size: IHRCs are structurally smaller than EHRCs, and only the former is subject to relativization restriction possibly due to an anti-locality constraint on A’-extracting transitive subjects. This re-analysis also captures the cross-linguistic generalization that all languages that disallow transitive subject IHRCs—regardless of their case alignment—exhibit structural reduction. In the end, I provide typological predictions as well as a new perspective on what has been traditionally analyzed as ‘syntactic ergativity.’

8 november
No meeting.

1 november
Zachary O'Hagan & Lev Michael (UC Berkeley)
Reconsidering Chamikuro tense-marked determiners: Methodological and analytical perspectives

This presentation reports on some of the results of six weeks of fieldwork in the summer of 2024 with Alfonso Patow Chota, likely the most fluent living speaker of Chamikuro, an Arawakan language of Peruvian Amazonia. Parker (1999) makes the typologically remarkable claim (cf. Matthewson 2005) that Chamikuro exhibits two tensed “definite articles,” =na and =ka, which express non-past and past tense, respectively (“T on D”; Wiltschko 2003 inter alia). He describes them as modifying nouns to their right, but cliticizing to hosts to their left. Significantly, Parker’s claims have been widely cited in the literature (e.g., Adamou 2015; Leu to appear; Nordlinger and Sadler 2004a, 2004b).

We argue that these markers are not articles, and indeed, not systematically associated with DPs at all. We instead argue that they form part of a larger paradigm of spatio-temporal clitics, together with =la, and that =na is in fact spatio-temporally underspecified rather than being a non-past tense marker per se. We also provide a refined description of the morphosyntactic distribution of these three clitics, showing that their tendency to appear immediately before DPs, which inspired Parker’s analysis, is epiphenomenal, and results from a restriction against their appearing at the right edges of certain phrasal and clausal boundaries. In this context, we also demonstrate that =ka exhibits an allomorph =ka:ti, which appears in syntactic positions in which =ka is disallowed. Our analysis thus removes this apparently unique case of tensed determiners from the literature and instead integrates these markers into a more general system of spatio-temporal deixis in Chamikuro.

We then turn to a discussion of methodological lessons stemming from our work, including the importance of being cautious about inferring semantics from free translations, being attentive to textual data, and the perils posed by partial descriptions of grammatical systems—in this case, an incomplete description of definiteness in the language. We also discuss methodological issues arising in the study of definiteness, in working with a 99-year-old person, and in coordinating ”last-minute” fieldwork among the two of us on a language with exceedingly little morphosyntactic documentation.

25 october
Huilei Wang (UCLA)
Apparent overt extraction from Mandarin relative clauses

While relative clauses (RCs) are well-known islands for extraction, acceptable cases of overt extraction from RCs have been attested in a variety of languages, e.g. Mainland Scandinavian languages, Hebrew, Italian, and English (Engdahl 1980; Chung and McCloskey 1983; Rubowitz-Mann 2000; Cinque 2010; Kush, Omaki, and Hornstein 2013; Sichel 2018, a.o.). In this talk, I focus on a case in Mandarin that appears in parallelism with the acceptable extraction from RCs observed in the above languages. I show that the parallelism is only apparent, and argue for a movement-less analysis in the spirit of Li (2014). I will also discuss the possibility of movement from Mandarin RCs (if time permits), taking into consideration both the cross-linguistic generalizations on the acceptability of extracting from RCs and the claim argued for in Wang 2023 that it is possible to covertly extract (i.e. QR) from certain Mandarin RCs.

18 october
No meeting. Have fun at NELS 55!

11 october
Travis Major (USC)
Raised heads and subjects in Uyghur relative clauses

Turkic Genitive Subject Relatives (GSRs) raise a number of challenges for syntactic theory. Via a case study of Uyghur, we propose a novel analysis which unifies GSRs with raising-to-object constructions/ECM constructions, by which genitive subject relative clauses are derived from bare subject relative clauses. We further argue in favor of a raising analysis of the head noun in Uyghur relatives. Of particular interest is that the A-dependency involved in deriving genitive subjects is highly reminiscent of another cross-clausal A-dependency observed in the language - hyperraising. In this particular case, the relevant A-dependency is between D, which is external to the RC and the subject that is base generated within the RC (generally considered an island), which results in movement to spec,DP. (This is joint work with Gary Thoms and Gulnar Eziz.)

4 october
NELS practice talks

  1. Morphological boundary glottals in A'ingae: A new argument for [δ] (Maksymilian Dąbkowski)
  2. Person hierarchy effects from φ-agreement at the left periphery in Kawahíva (Wesley dos Santos)
  3. The clause-medial vP phase is real: Evidence from Moselle Franconian (Akil Ismael & Jessica Göbel)

27 september
Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley)
Boundary glottals and A'ingae information structure: A morphological argument for a discourse feature hierarchy

I describe and analyze patterns of syntactically conditioned allomorphy observed in A'ingae (or Cofán, an endangered Amazonian isolate, ISO 639-3: con). Three information structural morphemes — the new topic -(ʔ)ta 'NEW', contrastive topic -(ʔ)ja 'CNTR', and exclusive focus -(ʔ)yi 'EXCL' — are realized as non-preglottalized (-ta, -ja, -yi) when attaching to most categories, such as DPs, CPs, or adverbs, but as preglottalized (-ʔta, -ʔja, -ʔyi) when attaching to TPs. I propose that the glottal stop (-ʔ) is a spell-out of T° conditioned by linear adjacency to a higher-order discourse feature [δ] (Bossi and Diercks, 2019; Mikkelsen, 2015) that dominates all the maximal information structural features. By documenting an overt realization of a vocabulary item conditioned by [δ], I provide novel morphological evidence for a hierarchical arrangement of discourse features (Bossi and Diercks, 2019; Mikkelsen, 2015), and of A'ingae feature geometry more broadly (e.g. Aravind, 2018; Baclawski, 2019; Baier, 2018).

20 september
Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley)
Case discrimination, Agree, and the theory of features

If case features are present in syntax, we expect syntactic operations to be able to reference them. Case discrimination is a cover term for ways in which reference of this type occurs. The recent literature on case discrimination calls attention to patterns of phi-agreement, movement, and intervention. In this talk I ask: how should we state syntactic operations (Agree) such that case features figure into them? What are case features themselves like - are they structured hierarchically? What is the status of case hierarchies in discrimination phenomena, and (how) can we derive them? In working to answer these questions I will draw out some conclusions for the interaction/satisfaction theory of Agree, along with what I see as a striking conflict between the best supported theories of case features and the case hierarchies posited in the phi-agree and movement literature.

13 september
No meeting. Go check out talks about the syntax-phonology interface at the Phonological Domains Workshop!

6 september
Round robin

Join us at Amy Rose's house to discuss any tricky data that you've come across recently!