Volume 37, Issue 3

This paper investigates the phenomena of obligatory object preposing in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) and Hakka. We first refute the previous treatment of having the information-structural theory as an exclusive account of TSM and Hakka obligatory object preposing and show that telicity is another important dimension to object prespoing in the two languages. In particular, object preposing always takes place when a given verb bears a designated telicity marker, independent of the referential and information structural properties of its object. Consistent with recent work on the syntax of lexical aspect that telic readings are reflected in certain syntactic configurations, we suggest that in TSM and Hakka, telicity involves feature checking of the verb and its objects in the checking domain of a functional projection InAspP. For a theme argument to be able to measure out an event, it must enter an Agree relationship with the [telic] feature in InAsp, which has the edge property that triggers movement of the theme to its specifier. The proposed aspectual structure is further supported by distributional and interpretational properties including object preposing asymmetry, height of interpretation site of ambiguous adverbials, as well as the distribution of time-frame adjuncts and durative adjuncts.

In light of recent work on syntactic head movement and clitic movement in Phase Theory, this paper argues for a feature-based, head-movement account of argumental object clitics in Spanish. The novelty of the proposal outlined in this paper is the extension of a movement approach to indirect object (IO) clitics, which are commonly regarded in the literature as base-generated verb-agreement morphemes. It is shown that IO clitics, like their DO counterparts, engage in probe/goal relations to value and delete uninterpretable Case features, and, upon Agree, cliticize via head movement. Chomsky’s operation of inheritance (2008) figures in this account, as it helps explain the derived order of clitics in IO-DO clusters in Spanish. This study is the first of its kind in offering a unified movement proposal for both types of argumental object clitics, while at the same time maintaining the simplest ‘Minimalist’ assumption that both are pronouns of the category DP. Finally, the syntactic analysis proposed for the derivation of argumental clusters is applied to derive dialectally-attested strings composed of three members in which the foremost form is a non-argumental SE clitic.

This paper discusses wh -extraction in Spanish clauses involving a V + de + CP sequence ( de ‘of’ is a preposition). The previous literature has observed that objects, but not adjuncts, can be extracted from a single de + CP embedded clause. I make the following novel observations: (i) subjects pattern with adjuncts (not with objects) in that they cannot be extracted from a single de + CP embedded clause, (ii) there is a ‘distance’ effect in that subject extraction improves when one more level of embedding is added, and (iii) there is also a ‘distance’ effect with regard to adjunct extraction, which improves when one more level of embedding is added. (i)–(iii) are surprising since subjects otherwise do not pattern with adjuncts with regard to extraction out of islands due to the pro-drop nature of Spanish, and adjunct extraction out of islands is otherwise uniformly unacceptable. I propose a phasal account of the pattern in question where Phase Collapsing (i.e., a mechanism whereby two phasal heads, here de and C, are collapsed into one, thus voiding the phasehood of the lower phase headed by the C) and successive cyclic movement play crucial roles. I further extend the account to other cases where a CP co-occurs with a preposition.

A persistent issue for the Prosodic Hierarchy is what repertory of prosodic constituents is needed to define the commonly recurring domains for phonological processes. Even though there is a long tradition of work arguing in favor of up to three subphrasal constituents (Composite Group (CG), PWord and PStem), a body of recent work has argued in favor of a more parsimonious view of the repertory , making the strong claim that, at the subphrasal level, the Prosodic Hierarchy contains only one constituent, Phonological Word (PWord). Any additional subphrasal domains required by the phonology must be defined as recursions of PWord. This paper argues that PStem must find a place even in a parsimonious Prosodic Hierarchy. It cannot easily be replaced by recursive PWord or by a CG-PWord distinction. The cross-linguistic validity of a PStem-PWord distinction is supported by showing that it accounts for a robust cross-linguistic generalization concerning subphrasal phonological domains. Alternatives to PStem not only miss this generalization but also prove to be formally inadequate.