Volume 5
2007
The co-editors of the second volume are Gregory ELLISON and Gabriela SOARE.
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Jacques Moeschler
(Jacques.Moeschler@lettres.unige.ch)
This article will demonstrate that Horn’s Conjecture, which is based on the theory of scalar implicatures, only partially succeeds in explaining the linguistic non-realization of the negative particulars of the Aristotelian logical square. It will be shown that although Horn’s predictions are correct, his explanations are not. An alternative version will be set forth. This new version, which is not based on the theory of scalar implicatures, shows that the main explanation for the lack of negative particulars in complex values has to do with the calculability of what is being lexicalized rather than with its complexity. It will be shown that since the implicatures of negative particulars are not calculable, they therefore cannot be lexicalized. The consequences of the conclusions about the relationship between the lexicon and pragmatics will be stated.
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Eric Haeberli (Eric.Haerbeli@lettres.unige.ch)
Old English has a subject-verb inversion syntax that is to some extent reminiscent of modern Germanic Verb Second languages. During the Middle English period, we can observe a decline in the productivity of subject-verb inversion. This development exhibits certain peculiarities that have generally not been accounted for in the literature. In this paper, I will consider four of these peculiarities and I will explore to what extent they could be dealt with by invoking language contact as a factor influencing the diachronic developments. After a brief discussion of potential effects of contact with Scandinavian, the main focus will be on the role Anglo-Norman and/or continental French may have played in connection with the developments in the subject-verb inversion syntax in Middle English.
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Yoshio Endo (endo@ynu.ac.jp)
In this paper, I will discuss some problems of floating numeral quantifiers in Japanese posed by functional approaches and semantic approaches. After reviewing a number of syntactic approaches to floating NQs, I will suggest a unified analysis based on Rizzi’s (2004) feature-based Relativized minimality, which enables us to capture the basic insight into the syntactic, semantic and functional analyses of floating numeral quantifiers, along the lines of Endo (2006, forthcoming). According to this approach, in the configuration …X…Z…Y…, the locality between X and Y is blocked by Z when X and Z are of the same feature class, where feature classes include discourse-related notions like topic and focus.
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Gregory Campbell Ellison (Gregory.Ellison@lettres.unige.ch)
In the traditional analysis of the English clause, modal auxiliaries are considered to be base-generated in I°, offering a clear-cut explanation for the lack of non-finite forms in their paradigms, and by extension, for the restriction to one such form in a grammatical finite clause. Despite a number of attempts, this framework has failed to account for the grammaticality in certain non-standard varieties of clauses containing more than one modal auxiliary. This article offers a novel syntactic explanation for multiple modal constructions based on the insights of the cartographic approach, particularly as put forth by Cinque (1999) in Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Succinctly, I propose that auxiliaries encode functional features associated with specific projections of the IP domain, and as such are not in principle incompatible with each other. From this standpoint, the real mystery is why there should be limitations to co-occurrence at all. To this end, I offer a structural explanation and a speculative historical account for the lack of multiple modal constructions in Standard English.
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Gabriela Soare (Gabriela.Soare@lettres.unige.ch)
The paper suggests an antisymmetric typology of question formation based on the cartographic framework. Two features, Q and wh, are universally present on the left-peripheral Focus head. Language variation in the domain of wh-movement and Q-particle realization is argued to be captured in the following way. First, in some languages, the Q particle is realized overtly and in some languages it is covert. Secondly, either one of the features, or both, can be endowed with the EPP property. This determines the type of constituent which raises to the Spec of the head hosting the feature. In other words, what distinguishes among the languages considered is the mechanism of AGREE vs. AGREE+MOVE instantiated by the Q-feature or by the wh-feature. These six-way combinatorial possibilities account for the existence of wh-movement in non-syncretic languages like Vata (and Tlingit), on the one hand, and syncretic languages like French I (the movement strategy) and Romanian, on the other, and its absence in Japanese, Sinhala, Chinese, Tumbuka and French II (the in-situ strategy).
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Nina Rojina (ninarojina@gmail.com)
This paper studies four types of ‘whys’ in Russian: (a) počemu – why, (b) začem –why/what for, (c) aggressively non-D-linked kakogo cherta – why the hell, (d) and nominal adjunct wh-elements for asking a reason čto/če/čego. The why-types are analyzed based on occurrence in multiple wh-questions, allowance of long-distance dependencies, occurrence in the scope of factive predicates and presence of interrogative interpretation. The data force to divide nominal why-wh-elements into two subtypes, where the first one is represented by če and čego which resemble počemu and začem and the second subtype consists of čto, which shares the features with kakogo cherta and can be seen as some kind of complementizer.
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Stephanie Durrleman(stephanie.durrleman@lettres.unige.ch)
Aspectual markers in Jamaican Creole all obligatorily precede the VP with the exception of one: the completive marker don, which has the particularity of also occurring in a post-VP configuration (Cassidy 1961, Bailey 1966, Durrleman 2001). In addition, a completive reading may be derived in the absence of the overt realization of don in certain instances. I take these two properties to be related. Following Durrleman (2001), I adopt an analysis of the marker don as the head of the Completive Aspect Projection in the clausal structure, and account for its post-VP realizations in terms of VP-movement to [Spec,CompletiveP]. This VP-movement is seen to occur when a [-stative] VP is ‘delimited’ (along the lines of Tenny 1987) by the presence of certain functional material in its DP object. Such an analysis has repercussions on deriving a completive reading in the absence of the overt realization of don: Movement of the VP to the Specifier of CompletiveP suffices to render the Completive projection visible and in turn allows for Completiveº to be left morphologically null. This is reminiscent of the observation made by Dimitrova-Vulchanova & Giusti (1998) that “A Functional Projection must be visible at all levels of representation: by (a) making the Spec visible and/or (b) making the head visible”. As a result of this reasoning, we arrive at a new account for temporal/aspectual interpretations of Creole ‘bare sentences’, where a default past, completive reading results for certain VPs in the absence of TMA marking.
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