Volume 62, Issue 2

This article discusses the right node raising construction in Chinese (henceforth the RNR). It aims to provide a novel analysis that can deal with two new observations made in the Chinese RNR construction, including the tone sandhi phenomenon, which provides clues to the syntax of RNR from syntax-prosody mapping, and a syntactic constraint that only arguments, but not adjuncts, may qualify as an RNR target. Based on these new observations, I show that none of the previous analyses of the RNR (mainly in English) are fully adequate in accounting for the RNR in Chinese. An alternative analysis is pursued here. Given the syntactic and syntax-prosodic properties, I propose to analyze the gaps within the coordinated structure in Chinese Right-Node Raising (RNR) by exploring the notion of an empty noun, along with the concept of the True Empty Category. In the RNR construction, the coordinated structure undergoes leftward movement over the RNR target, which is driven by considerations of information structure. As a result, this induces an illusion of rightward movement on the surface.

Indexing P arguments on bivalent predicates is often considered more restricted and less often obligatory than A indexing. However, differential A indexing, i.e., the absence versus the presence of an index referring to the A argument role, is not uncommon either: usually present A indexes can be omitted in particular discourse settings. However, differential A indexing has been a Cinderella subject in the typological study of differential marking, as opposed to differential P indexing or differential A flagging. This paper scrutinizes various cases of both differential A and P indexing and examines structural and functional differences and similarities. It will be shown that exploring differential indexing helps to understand how indexing in general is linked to referential prominence which surfaces as factors such as identifiability, animacy or topicality. Cases where indexing is particularly sensitive to referential prominence, and where it thus is employed only if the referent fulfills certain criteria, bring out the fact that A and P indexing have a common purpose, namely tracking referents through discourse. In this context, the paper also points out that differential A indexing presents an exception from generalizations concerning the amount of material in coding asymmetries.

This research sets out to challenge a conventional wisdom in Japanese linguistics, that the reflexive pronoun zibun is unable to take an inanimate antecedent. Through careful presentation of the data, including corpus sources, it is unequivocally demonstrated that the reflexive use of zibun can indeed overcome the animacy constraint and be anteceded by an inanimate antecedent, without any personification present. This has specific theoretical consequences in the sense of providing a theoretical simplification behind reflexivity modeling in Japanese. This is followed by a psycholinguistic experiment investigating how native Japanese speakers judge and process sentences with inanimate zibun . The key factors tested are the animacy of the antecedent, and also if the type of sentence, episodic versus generic, will affect the acceptability of inanimate zibun . Results from the experiment show that native speakers indeed do find inanimate zibun acceptable, and appear to process it slightly slower than the animate counterpart. The episodic versus generic distinction does not play a role in either the judgment or processing. Combining the corpus and experimental data anchors the phenomenon firmly. Finally, our attention turns to how to account for inanimate zibun theoretically, where we draw information from how zibun can already take inanimate antecedents if they are construed as agentive, or if zibun is used as an adverbial reflexive, showing that in fact, inanimate zibun does not require additional theoretical treatment – leading to a reformulation of Kuno’s animacy constraint.

In this study, we tested the possibility that different word orders engender different processing preferences. Our key hypothesis was that a head-initial language like English (SVO) allows more prediction compared to a head-final language like Japanese (SOV). In Experiment 1, English and Japanese native speakers completed a cloze task in which they heard a sentence fragment (SV_ in English and SO_ in Japanese) and had to complete it with the word they thought best. We assessed cloze probability of the words produced and voice onset times. Experiment 2 examined written completions in English, in which we compared the cloze probabilities in SV_ fragments versus OS_ fragments. Following the central hypothesis, this experiment allowed us to determine (within language) whether there is more prediction from a noun and verb compared to two nouns. Finally, in Experiment 3, we compared written completions in English and Japanese, in which the stimuli given to participants were identical (SV_ in English and S_V in Japanese). Results across all three experiments were consistent with greater prediction in English. We argue that prediction is one important factor in processing, that it is relied on more in English than in Japanese, and that prediction will be especially favored in languages like English in which the verb regularly precedes its direct object.

Fragment answers are nonsentential utterances quite pervasive in daily-life dialogues. This article focuses on fragment answers involving a negative dependency expression in Korean. The key question for the analysis of such a negative fragment expression is how to resolve sentential meaning from its non-sentential status. This article argues against sentential approaches that postulate clausal sources together with move-and-delete operations to generate negative fragments. Instead, the article supports a discourse-based direct interpretation analysis that allows negative fragment answers to be directly projected as a full utterance and obtain their propositional meaning by referring to the organized discourse structure in question.

X 0 -dependencies are known to be highly local. It has been argued that syntactic head movement can affect locality constraints. While some recent studies have revealed that verbal heads can undergo long-distance movement similar to phrasal movement, nominal categories still appear to adhere to strict locality constraints on head movement. In this context, we examine an exception, the particle suo in Mandarin Chinese, and explore its theoretical implications. We begin by showing that the X 0 -element suo exhibits a long dependency across every type of clausal boundary in Chinese, including finite ones. By placing suo in a typology that accommodates resumptive pronouns and Romance-type clitics, we highlight the significance of suo ’s long dependency. Next, we argue that suo forms a big-DP with the relative operator; since movement of the relative operator has satisfied the locality constraint, according to Richards’ (1998. The Principle of Minimal Compliance. Linguistic Inquiry 29. 599–629) Principle of Minimal Compliance, suo can have a long dependency on its underlying position. This discussion leads us to conclude that the original formulation of the Principle of Minimal Compliance needs reexamination regarding the true meaning of exemption. Once exemption from a locality condition is separated from movement itself, both the initial data for the PMC and the behaviors of suo are accounted for.

The clitic pronoun ne and the functional element de introducing nominal constituents have many nominal and prepositional functions across Romance languages. In this article, we focus on the nominal functions, singling out three different bundles of semantic features that characterize both ne and de . They can denote properties of individual entities, properties of kinds, or predicate properties. The article shows that Catalan ne and de display the three types of denotation, while Italian ne and de only display the first one. This article further supports the hypothesis that the indefinite determiner de can be overt or silent, thereby unifying de -phrases (and the Italian partitive article) with bare nouns. The analysis of de as an indefinite determiner is then extended to adjectival de, which is claimed to mark concord features on adjectives in both Catalan and Italian.

The goal of this article is to offer new empirical evidence regarding the grammatical and semantic properties of Italian spatial prepositions, and to provide a theoretical account based on this evidence. We show that Italian has four grammatical types of prepositions (simple, complex, contracted and uncontracted), and three semantic types (geometric, projective and region prepositions). By studying the syntactic distribution of prepositions and the phrases they form with measure phrases (e.g., dieci metri ‘ten meters’) we argue that a non-isomorphic (i.e., not one-to-one) relation between grammatical and semantic type emerges. Region and geometric prepositions form phrases that block the presence of measure phrases (e.g., #dieci metri a fianco del muro ‘ten meters beside the wall’), whereas projective prepositions license them (e.g., dieci metri dietro al muro ‘ten meters behind the wall’). We show that previous accounts postulate a type of symmetry that leads to problematic predictions regarding these patterns. We then propose an alternative account based on the Lexical Syntax framework that models the data via a feature-matching mechanism.