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Marcel den Dikken
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Linguistic Inquiry (2023) 54 (3): 479–503.
Published: 23 June 2023
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The principal objective of this article is to establish a direct relationship between the structural height of the base position of the applied argument and the case and promotion-to-subject patterns observed in applicative constructions, with particular reference to applicatives of unaccusatives. The article achieves this through an approach exploiting dependent case, with the domains relevant for dependent case assignment being identified as phases, defined as (a) complete predicate-argument structures and (b) propositions. By making argument structure a defining ingredient of the delineation of phases, the article distills precise and accurate predictions about the interaction between the base-generation site of the applied object and the case patterns of unaccusative constructions featuring such an object, improving on the efficacy of previous accounts. In the process, the article reexamines the syntactic status of constituents located on the edge of a phase.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Linguistic Inquiry (2017) 48 (4): 543–584.
Published: 01 October 2017
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Of the three logically possible approaches to contrastive left-dislocation (CLD) (base-generation cum deep anaphora; movement cum surface anaphora; elliptical clausal juxtaposition cum resumption), two are represented prominently in the recent literature. Ott’s (2014) account treats CLD uniformly in terms of clausal juxtaposition, the first clause being stripped down to its contrastive topic via an ellipsis operation said to be akin to sluicing. He argues that this analysis is superior to Grohmann’s (2003) approach, featuring movement within a single prolific domain and late spell-out of a resumptive element. Using data mainly from Hungarian and Dutch, we reveal problems for Ott’s biclausal account that undermine its apparent conceptual appeal and compromise its descriptive accuracy. We show that the ellipsis operation required is sui generis, that the approach fails to assimilate the crosslinguistic variation attested in the availability of multiple CLD to known cases of parametric variation in the left periphery, and that it undergenerates in several empirical domains, including P-stranding and “floated” arguments. Grohmann’s movement- cum -surface-anaphora analysis as it stands also cannot handle all these data, but it can be fixed to fit the facts. For Ott’s analysis, no patches seem available. Some further empirical properties of CLD appear underivable from either of these approaches. For these, the base-generation- cum -deep-anaphora analysis can be considered.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Linguistic Inquiry (2007) 38 (2): 302–320.
Published: 01 March 2007
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Ouhalla's (2004) valuable discussion of relativized and possessed noun phrases in Amharic leaves a number of questions open. Foremost among these is the placement of the linker element yä -. Starting from an analysis of relative clauses and possessors as predicates of their “heads,” this article develops a syntax of complex noun phrases in Amharic that explains the raison d'être and placement of yä -, and also accommodates facts about definiteness marking and agreement in the Amharic complex noun phrase that have hitherto largely escaped attention or analysis. The analysis emphasizes the role of Predicate Inversion and head movement in syntax, and it confirms and extends the minimalist Agree- and phase-based approach to syntactic relationships.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Linguistic Inquiry (2006) 37 (4): 653–664.
Published: 01 October 2006
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Linguistic Inquiry (2005) 36 (4): 497–532.
Published: 01 October 2005
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The comparative correlative construction ( The more you eat, the fatter you get ) has received sporadic attention in the literature, with few concrete results when it comes to our understanding of the syntax of the construction. This article analyzes comparative correlatives as well-behaved, crosslinguistically consistent correlative constructions whose initial clause is a relative clause adjoined to the second clause, which functions as the root of the construction. Examining comparative correlative data from a variety of languages, the article subjects the internal structure of the construction's two clauses to careful scrutiny, as well as the microscopic structure of the comparative-headed constituents introducing the two clauses.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Linguistic Inquiry (2002) 33 (1): 31–61.
Published: 01 January 2002
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Pesetsky's (1987) “aggressively non-D-linked” wh -phrases (like who the hell ; hereinafter, wh-the-hell phrases) exhibit a variety of syntactic and semantic peculiarities, including the fact that they cannot occur in situ and do not support nonecho readings when occurring in root multiple questions. While these are familiar from the literature (albeit less than fully understood), our focus will be on a previously unnoted property of wh-the-hell phrases: the fact that their distribution (in single wh -questions) matches that of polarity items (PIs). We lay out the key data supporting this claim, embed the PI nature of wh-the-hell phrases in the theory of polarity developed in Giannakidou 1998, 1999, 2001, and establish the link between the lexical content of these phrases and their PI status by identifying wh-the-hell as a dependent PI. We subsequently exploit the PI status of wh-the-hell to explain the more familiar puzzles mentioned above, showing that these are not peculiarities specific to wh-the-hell but manifestations of the general properties of the class of PIs that wh-the-hell belongs to. The syntactic aspects of the polarity analysis of wh-the-hell are shown to have important consequences for the fundamental properties of wh -movement in English.