This article presents a syntactic account of the spray/load alternation in Japanese (e.g., nuru ‘smear’, tsumeru ‘pack’, etc.,). Fukui, Miyagawa and Tenny (1985) claim that the alternation verbs show the double object structure under a single VP node; namely both the Material (i.e., something that is painted) and the Location (i.e., somewhere that is painted) participants are co-sisters of the verb. When the Material participant is affected, it will be realized as the direct object of the verb. On the other hand, when the Location is (completely) affected, it will be realized as the direct object of the verb. I build an account on their intuition that the Material and the Location elements are thematically connected with the lexical verb within the binary branching hypothesis (Kayne 1994, among others); thus, they are arguments of VP. But this structure is valid only for the ni-variant where the Material is the single sister of VP. In the structure of the de-variant, the Location is a single sister of VP but the Material element is a PP, merging above VP. Under this view, the two syntactic alternants are available because they are derived from different numeration arrays. The present analysis minimizes the burden on the syntax by eliminating the affectedness condition for determining argument distribution of spray/load verbs in Japanese.

We discuss how we use the Japanese version of PAPPI, a multilingual parsing engine in the Principles-and-Parameters framework (Chomsky 1981), to computationally model a theory that accounts for the grammaticality of certain Japanese wh-constructions. In this theory, a Q-feature is base generated within a wh-phrase and raises to C, where it checks an uninterpretable Q-feature. Qfeature movement can be blocked by an intervening quantificational head; an effect due to the Minimal Link Condition (Chomsky 1995). Furthermore, certain multiple wh-questions in which Q-feature movement is not subject to the Minimal Link Condition are accounted for in terms of the Principle of Minimal Compliance (Richards 2001), which is basically the notion that once a constraint is satisfied it may be subsequently ignored. In this paper, we describe modifications to the parsing engine of PAPPI necessary to implement this Q-feature movement theory.

Ultrasound imaging experiments were conducted to study vowel-to-vowel coarticulation patterns involving the environment of vowel assimilation in Korean. Results showed that anticipatory coarticulatory effects occur and that vowel assimilation is truly phonological and that the degree of coarticulation is stronger in assimilated words than in non-assimilated words. These results imply that phonological rules might directly influence coarticulation in a phonology-phonetics unified grammar.

In Mandarin Chinese topic constructions of the possessor, optional resumptive pronouns (RP) seem to occur. Meanwhile, the data also show a difference in the extractability of the possessor, i.e., the so-called subject-object asymmetry in extractability (Huang 1982). That is, when the possessor of a subject possessive phrase is topicalized/left-dislocated, a gap is grammatical, and an RP is also allowed; when the possessor of an object possessive phrase is topicalized, a gap is disallowed, and an RP saves the otherwise illicit extraction of the possessor. This paper first argues that the Chinese possessive phrase has a phrase structure that resembles the English counterpart, and adopts Abney’s (1987) DP-Hypothesis for the Chinese possessive phrase. Based on the Left Branch Condition (LBC; Ross 1986), the paper then proposes the Symmetrical Hypothesis, i.e., extraction of the possessor is equally illegal from either argument position. With respect to the occurrence of the seemingly optional RPs along with the extraction of the possessor from the subject possessive phrase, the paper posits two distinct possibilities for the extraction: extraction from the subject position directly, which is an argument position, or from the topic position instead, which is a derived position in the left periphery. LBC is at work with the former possibility, and therefore the subject-object asymmetry dissolves; LBC is violable in the latter possibility, given the specific nature of the left periphery (Rizzi 1997). The analysis for the latter possibility leads to the claim that the RP is in fact obligatory, and that the RP and the gap are in different derivations. Further data from Lu (1995) present a challenge to Huang’s asymmetry as well as the proposed Symmetrical Hypothesis. That is, when the possessor is 3rd person non-human, the extraction of the possessor from the object position renders the gap grammatical, but the RP ungrammatical. The analysis of the data finds that the animacy of the possessor plays an important role in eliciting the different grammaticality judgment here. As a result, the utterance of the 3rd person nonhuman RP is prohibited, hence the proposed No Pronunciation Rule. In this sense, Mandarin Chinese also has null RPs.

This paper provides a Distributed Morphology (DM) approach to the thematic licensing of verbs and extends that approach to the licensing of strong verb alternations such as eat/ate. These verbal behaviors have been captured in the DM literature by limiting the morphological environments that condition the insertion of Vocabulary Items (c.f. secondary exponence). In this paper, I show that the verbs in question gain the features of the environment they appear in by undergoing fusion with the relevant heads. In this way, DM does not need to rely upon conditioning the insertion of irregular verbs, but need only rely upon the Subset Principle to license the insertion of these verbs.

One of the most widely-discussed issues in Arabic syntax concerns the position of the subject. In this work, we investigate the processing of verb-initial and subject-initial structures in spoken Saudi Arabic in order to shed light on this debate. We examine the processing times associated with these constructions and argue that processing considerations provide evidence for a particular conception of Arabic syntax according to which VSO order is derived with the subject remaining in VP and verb raising over the subject, while SVO order is derived with the subject raising out of VP to Spec, TP, or to a higher Inflectional Phrase, and the verb raising to a position lower than the subject.

This paper describes a technique for aligning ultrasound images of the tongue to images of the palate, providing both a fixed point of reference and a means to consider the tongue in the context of passive articulators, thereby addressing two major challenges presented by ultrasound as a means of articulatory imaging, without compromising its portability.