Syntax & Semantics Circle
University of California, Santa Cruz
fall 2014
PAST MEETINGS
October 10
Jorge Hankamer: "A Pseudogapping Puzzle"
October 24
Line Mikkelsen: "What goes postverbal in a verb-final language? The interplay of syntactic category, information structure, and word order in Karuk"
November 7
Steven Foley: "Split Ergativity in Georgian is not Structural"
Recent research derives aspect-conditioned split ergativity structurally (Laka 2006, Coon 2010, Coon & Preminger 2012). According to this view, split ergative languages are actually uniformly ergative: "splits" are epiphenomena of clausal partitions which create two case-assignment domains. Such clausal partitions lead to the illusion of non-ergativity, since the external argument is in an effectively intransitive domain. While this structural account may work for certain languages, it cannot explain the Georgian facts. Building on syntactic and morphological evidence, I propose that Voice0 in certain languages assigns either ergative or accusative case, depending on aspect (see Ura 2006). Georgian, then, is a truly split ergative language.
November 14
Sandy Chung & Matt Wagers: "Chamorro and the universality of incremental structure-building operations"
Does the placement of relative clauses with respect to noun they modify affect the way they are interpreted? This question has played an important role in debates over whether aspects of incremental structure building are universal. On the one hand is a sizeable body of evidence that the language processor preferentially inserts subject gaps (== syntactically higher gaps) in open A-bar dependencies to complete them. On the other hand is a small and somewhat contentious body of evidence from languages with prenominal relative clauses, in which object gap insertion is claimed to be the favored option.
In this talk, we examine data from Chamorro, which is among the smaller set of languages that productively allow both prenominal and postnominal relative clauses (as well as other types). Moreover these relative clauses can be entirely ambiguous between subject and object relativization without changes in RC-internal word order. This makes Chamorro an ideal language in which to answer the question of how relative clause order alone affects real-time interpretation.
Based on a picture-matching design, combined with a touch-tracking task, we find that prenominal relative clauses are indeed more object-gap-friendly environments. However, based on the dynamics of participants' responses, we find evidence that insertion of the subject gap happens earlier in incremental structure building than the insertion of object gaps. Object gaps only occasionally out-compete an initial analysis and this, we argue, is a consequence the near-simultaneous pressure to satisfy the subject-verb agreement relation.
Finally, we examine the interaction of subject gap insertion with Chamorro's person-animacy hierarchy - a language-particular morphological filter on the combination of certain transitive arguments based on their person, animacy and pronominality. Here we find further evidence for a universal incremental structure-building operation. Person-animacy effects strongly influence participants' ultimate interpretation, but strong competition ensues if the person-animacy hierarchy requires reanalysis of an initial subject gap insertion.
December 5
Annemarie van Dooren: Dutch modals and their predicates: Three puzzles for compositionality