Quantified numeral subjects in Russian may famously trigger plural or singular verb agreement. Generative accounts (Pesetsky (1982), Franks (1995), Bošković (2006)) tie the variation to Case and the DP/QP distinction. Corpus-based accounts (Revzin (1978), Corbett (2000), Robblee (1993)), in addition to precedence and definiteness/specificity, note a strong correlation between agreement choice and the animacy of a QNP subject. In this paper, I attempt to reconcile the original generalizations in both linguistic traditions by proposing an account whereby (i) the animacy condition on agreement is an argument structure effect (ii) the connection between Nom case and agreement with QNP subjects is captured by Case as accessibility condition for agreement (Marantz (1991), Bobaljik (2008), Baker (2010) Baker and Vinokurova (2011) but contra Chomsky (2000), (2001)) (iii) definiteness/specificity effects with agreement follow from Diesing’s (1992) Mapping Hypothesis and a locality condition on semantic agreement.

In this research, we explore the linguistic structure of the Spanish of Heritage Speakers, those who have acquired Spanish as the home language in a minority language context (Iverson, 2010). We contribute to the discussion of the properties of Heritage Languages here by examining Preposition Stranding in Heritage Speakers versus native monolingual speakers of Spanish. We claim that the distinct behavior of Heritage Speakers of Spanish supports the claim that Heritage Languages may differ from native monolingual language in the narrow syntax, affecting uninterpretable features of the grammar.

This paper proposes a unified treatment for Turkish embedded clauses headed by the complementizer 'ki,' an element known to be borrowed from Persian. Embedded ki-clauses are generally thought of as just another case of subordination, albeit with an 'Indo-European' pattern. However, arguments are provided that ki-clauses are'paratactic assertions,' that is, paratactic clauses with their own assertoric illocutionary force. The puzzling root-clause character of these clauses, as well as their characteristic syntactic/semantic behavior with respect to word order, NPI-licensing, WH-questions, binding, and focusing adverbs are explained by virtue of this paratactic-assertoric analysis. The presented account of ki-clauses is derivational, capturing the relationship that the ki-clause has with a position inside the matrix clause through an adaptation of Torrego and Uriagereka's (2002) analysis of parataxis used forcomo-clauses in Spanish, and Yoon's (2011) paratactic analysis of Korean subjunctive and evaluative negation constructions.

In the present study, a corpus of more than 18,000 online dating ads (downloaded from Craigslist.com, ~ 1.4 million words) is used to investigate differences in language use between men and women in the online dating context. Few studies have investigated gender differences in written texts, Newman, Groom et al. (2008), Mulac and Lundell (1994) and Koppel, Argamon et al. (2002) being the notable exceptions. These papers, however, differ remarkably in methodology and results. In the dataset studied here, regression analysis reveals marked differences the use of linguistic features such as emoticons or abbreviations. Writer gender and addressee gender emerge as predictors of variation.

Basic spatial and temporal meanings of the preposition after in Standard American English and Highland Scottish English are accounted for in this proposed semantics of the preposition. In addition, two seemingly aberrant meanings in Highland Scottish English and Lowlands Scots/ Lowlands Scottish English are discussed; the proposed semantics accounts for these meanings as well. The meaning of after is related to the meanings of first and subsequent, which are given definitions in terms of points of reference.

This paper uses case and agreement patterns to argue for a reformulation of Agree (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2001). Throughout syntactic literature, various proposals that account for the assignment of case and agreement have been made. Chomsky (1991) proposes that different projections are responsible for the two types of features. Case is assigned in Spec,TP, while agreement is established in Spec,AgrP. By contrast, Agree divorces feature checking from movement (Bobaljik and Wurmbrand 2005, Wurmbrand 2006). Case and agreement are assigned under c-command via the same Agree operation. A head, T, checks the case of a DP with a matching case feature and, in turn, that DP checks the agreement features on T. The prediction, therefore, is that case and agreement should necessarily pattern together: verbs should agree with DPs that are in a case relationship with T. I provide evidence not only that case and agreement features may pattern differently, but also that individual agreement features may pattern differently. As such, I argue that features on heads – not heads themselves – are probes. While I argue that case and phi features are not an indivisible bundle, I maintain the proposal that feature-checking need not force movement to a specifier, thus eliminating the need for independent agreement projections. Additionally, I illustrate probing is not restricted to c-command. I redefine Agree so as to allow a probe-goal relation to be established either under c-command or in a spec-head configuration.

Isbukun, a major dialect of Bunun, is one of the Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan. According to the Taiwan government statistics in 2009, Bunun had a population of 51,447, around half of which were registered as Isbukun. As Mandarin and Southern Min are the predominant languages, the Austronesian languages in Taiwan including Bunun are endangered. This study investigates word stress in Isbukun Bunun from the perspective of Optimality Theory. In particular, the stress patterns of monomorphemic and compound words, derivational and inflectional suffixed words, and words with clitics are explored. In Isbukun Bunun, a single quantity-sensitive trochee formed at the right edge of a word. Consequently, prefixation is generally irrelevant to footing, whereas suffixation closely interacts with stress placement. This paper presents two types of extrametricality along with quantitative adjustment that are found in suffixed words. Morphological extrametricality prevents inflectional suffixes and clitics from being footed and thereby prosodically distinguishes derivation and compounds from inflection and clitics. Positional extrametricality avoids forming a foot at the left edge of a root, which only emerges in derivational words, because inflectional words are required to fulfill morphological extrametricality first. In addition, since feet are constructed at the end of a word and derivational suffixes are allowed to be footed, quantitative changes take place in derivational suffixation: adjacent vowels with the same quality merge into one when two vowels come from different morphemes (i.e. the final segment of the stem and the initial segment of the suffix), and moras are deleted if otherwise the number of syllables in a word would increase. To account for the morphological extrametricality, a pair of output-output faithfulness constraints are used: a higher ranked OO-IDENT(stress)INF with an index referring to inflectional suffixes and clitics, and a lower ranked clone OO-IDENT(stress) without an index. The constraint ranking OO-IDENT(stress)INF >> ALL-FT-R >> OO-IDENT(stress) generates inflectional words with stress on the same syllable as in their stems, while derivational words follow general footing principles. As for the positional extrametricality, an anti-alignment constraint *ALIGN-L(Root, FT) is proposed, which concerns positions of feet only with respect to the root, rather than the stem that may be polymorphemic. The constraint ranking OO-IDENT(stress)INF, DEP-μ >> *ALIGN-L(Root, FT) >> *STRUC-σ confines the emergence of non-initiality in derivational words with roots not smaller than two moras.

Predicate which-appositives (PWAs) are a class of nonrestrictive, parenthetical relative clauses that take as their antecedents predicate-denoting material in the spine of a clause. PWAs contain a gap, and it is difficult to tell whether this gap is derived by a deletion operation like verb phrase ellipsis or by wh-movement. Indeed, diagnostics meant to distinguish these two possibilities provide evidence that both are correct. In order to remedy the apparent conundrum, I draw on recent work on Danish verbal anaphora. I argue that the VP itself undergoes A'-movement and that the relative operator which is inserted post-syntactically in place of the VP, replacing its phonological material. This post-syntactic operation explains why there appears to be phonological deletion involved in the derivation of PWAs while still allowing the A'-movement properties of the construction to be explained.

This paper presents an empirical argument for the claim that implicit subjects of passives are syntactically projected. It is shown that obligatory control by implicit subjects in the passive is subject to a syntactic restriction. Specifically, across languages, promotion of a DP to spec-TP blocks control by the implicit subject of a passive. This is what lies behind the old observation that subject control is incompatible with passivization in English, or Visser's Generalization (VG) (e.g. Jenkins 1972; Bresnan 1982). This generalization is a natural consequence of the logic of an agreement-based theory of control (Borer 1989; Landau 2000 et seq.), if it is assumed that control by implicit subjects is established syntactically.

The simple, canonical form of SVCs has been much studied (e.g. Lee, 1992; Chung, 1993; Kim 2010 for Korean, and Aikhenvald, 2006; Dixon, 2006 for various African languages). In this paper, I investigate a more complex form of SVCs (namely resultative SVCs) which are almost ignored in the literature. Specifically, I show that (i) the causing event and result state of a Korean change-of-state verb should be separately represented in the lexical information of the verb, (ii) the resultative SVCs are really a type of SVC by comparing the core concept of SVCs (i.e. serializing subevents and so non-cancellation of V1 result state or object) with the corresponding properties of the construction in question, and (iii) SVCs generally have the constraint that result state or object should be created after the event of V1 (with more evidence from light verb SVCs). Finally, I present an analysis of the resultative SVC and light verb SVC in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag, 1994; Sag et al., 2003).