Iberia: An International Journal of Theoretical Linguistics - 2012 - Vol. 4 - Nº 1
URI permanente para esta colecciónhttps://hdl.handle.net/11441/72131
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Artículo A spanning approach to the acquisition of double definiteness in Norwegian(Universidad de Sevilla, 2012) Anderssen, MereteThis study demonstrates how lexical spanning can be used to explain the various stages in the acquisition of double definiteness in Norwegian. The approach takes syntactic terminals to consist of submorphemic elements that are lexicalised by words or morphemes. Work on Scandinavian DPs has demonstrated that they involve two determiner-like projections. Within the spanning approach, simple, unmodified structures in Norwegian are distinguished from modified ones by the fact that one morpheme spans both projections in the first case, while two morphological exponents are required to spell them out separately in the second. Furthermore, it has been argued that the term double definiteness is a misnomer, and that the two determiners spell out separate subcomponents of definiteness, Uniqueness and Specificity. For developmental reasons, Norwegian children start out by lexicalising these features individually. The suffixal article spells out Specificity, while a phonologically zero determiner spells out Uniqueness. When adjectives are introduced into this grammar, the result is a system that only spells out the suffixal article overtly, that is, an Icelandic type system. This development is followed by a period with a great deal of instability as the grammar tries to determine how to lexicalise the various terminals in the determiner phrase.Artículo An intervention account of the distribution of main clause phenomena: Evidence from ellipsis(Universidad de Sevilla, 2012) Authier, J. Marc; Haegeman, LilianeBased on an examination of some asymmetries between VP ellipsis and VP fronting, this paper argues for an intervention approach and against a truncation approach to the distribution of main clause phenomena in adverbial clauses and, by extension, in non-root contexts in general. Adopting Authier’s (2011) treatment of VP ellipsis whereby the to-be-elided VP undergoes fronting in the computational component but fails to be spelled out at PF, these asymmetries follow from the fact that a fronted VP, being an intervener for wh-movement in adverbial clauses, triggers a PF crash unless ellipsis allows the derivation to converge via Bošković’s (2011) ‘rescue by PF deletion’ mechanism. This proposal entails that adverbial clauses are derived by wh-movement (Haegeman (2006) among others) and that the landing site for VP fronting is available in a non-root environment, two assumptions that militate against a truncation account of non-root clauses.Artículo UG or not UG: Where is Recursion?(Universidad de Sevilla, 2012) Atkinson, Martin; Al-Mutairi, FahadThe operation Merge, applying to two syntactic objects to produce a third and instantiating the property of recursion, has been a fundamental and largely uncontroversial feature in the development of the Minimalist Programme. In early formulations, such as Chomsky (1995a, b), Merge is cited as a feature of the human language faculty that illustrates virtual conceptual necessity, and it is an examination of this characterisation that stimulates the concerns addressed here, where we argue that neither of the familiar routes (satisfaction of interface conditions or computational economy) provides a justification for the conceptually necessary status of Merge. A third route, via considerations of ‘languages as such,’ a notion that includes human and artificial languages, may provide the required justification, but, as Chomsky (1980) urges, the study of ‘languages as such’ is unlikely to yield empirically interesting results. Specifically, this route to justification will not locate Merge in UG if the content of UG is an empirical matter. This conclusion is damaging to the view (Hauser et al., 2002) that the emergence of recursion (and Merge) is the single development crucial to the evolution of language, an empirical proposal, albeit in a different discourse, that firmly places Merge in UG.Artículo On the Lexical Integrity Hypothesis and its (In)accurate Predictions(Universidad de Sevilla, 2012) Bosque, IgnacioThe Lexical Integrity Hypothesis (LIH) holds that lexical items are syntactic atoms, which implies that neither their segments nor their semantic components are accessible to syntax. LIH is, thus, a double-faced hypothesis, since its predictions are relevant for both the syntax-lexicon interface and the morphology-syntax distinction, and specifically the controversial issue of whether or not morphology is an independent component of the Grammar. Both sides of LIH are addressed in this paper through a series of syntactic tests (movement, scope, modification, anaphora, ellipsis, coordination), which are shown to often give different results depending on whether the grammatical units targeted are semantic components (and lack phonological features) or morphological segments. LIH is shown to be only partially wrong. Its failures, which cannot be dismissed, are shown not to be random, since, to a large extend, they depend on the grammatical properties of the relevant components of lexical items.Artículo A generalization concerning DP-internal ellipsis(Universidad de Sevilla, 2012) Cinque, GuglielmoIn this article I consider a particular generalization concerning ellipsis within the extended nominal projection: ellipsis can target a nominal modifier only if all constituents below it are also elided. Building on an analysis of ellipsis grounded in movement to left edges, I suggest that this generalization follows from a condition on DP-internal movement proposed in Cinque (2005).Artículo Don't Move!(Universidad de Sevilla, 2012) Borsley, Robert D.All versions of Transformational Grammar assume that movement is a central feature of the syntax of human languages. However, frameworks which make no use of movement processes have existed for thirty years, and there has been very little attempt to show that movement analyses are superior to the analyses proposed within these frameworks. The strongest evidence for movement comes from filler-gap dependencies, where there is an extra clause-initial constituent of some kind and a gap somewhere later in the clause. Wh-questions are a typical example. The assumption that the filler has moved from the position of the gap accounts for the appearance of both the filler and the gap. However, consideration of a broader range of data casts doubt on the movement approach. There are (i) cases which look like filler-gap dependencies where there is no visible filler, (ii) cases with two gaps, (iii) cases where filler and gap do not match, and (iv) cases in various languages which look like filler-gap dependencies but where there is not a gap but a resumptive pronoun (RP). The alternative to movement that has been developed within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar involves the feature SLASH, which makes certain kinds of information available higher and lower in the structure than would normally be the case. There is no reason (i) why this information should always be associated with a filler, (ii) why it should not be associated with more than one gap, (iii) why it should not be associated with a gap with rather different properties, and (iv) why it should not be associated with an RP. For all these reasons, it seems that the SLASH-based approach is superior to a movement approach.Artículo Determiners and relative clauses(Universidad de Sevilla, 2012) Benincà, PaolaIn the present paper, I consider first the behaviour of singular count nouns, showing that, in the limited set of contexts in which they are found, a specific kind of modification is in many cases necessary. The modification is represented by a variant of a kind defining relative clause. I briefly outline the main syntactic and semantic characteristics of kinddefining relatives; I then consider bare plural count nouns and singular mass nouns; I use the Left Dislocation construction as a test that permits us to explore the composition of the DP, and to localise the position of a silent operator. I show that, in this context too, the modifiers that permit the determiner to be omitted can be semantically interpreted as corresponding to a kind-defining relative. Finally, I examine the so-called partitive DPs introduced by di+article, which are often considered in the literature to be semantically equivalent to bare nouns, and I show that they are instead different, both semantically and syntactically; incidentally, this permits us to point out a minimal difference between French and Italian.