Fieldwork and Language Documentation

Various languages allow instances of external possession—possessive encoding without a possessive structure in DP. The analysis of these cases has long been a battleground of raising versus control. I provide a new argument from Nez Perce in support of possessor raising of a type thematically parallel to raising to subject. The possessor phrase moves from a possessum-DP-internal position to an athematic A-position within vP. Like raising to subject, this movement is obligatory and does not result in the assignment of a new θ-role to the moving element. A case-driven treatment of...

This paper analyzes two patterns of number marking in the DP in Nez Perce (Sahaptian) within the framework of Distributed Morphology. The first involves under-realization of plural on nouns. Number has classically been understood as a feature inherent to nouns, rather than to adjectives that modify them. In Nez Perce, however, only a small set of nouns show number morphology, whereas number morphology is highly productive on adjectival modifiers. Adjectives in fact may realize the plural more than once per word—an instance of multiple exponence. I show that the puzzle of under-...

Applicatives of unaccusatives provide a crucial test case for the inherent case view of ergativity. If ergative is assigned only to external arguments, in their theta-positions, there can be no “raising to ergative” in applicative unaccusatives; an internal argument subject can never receive ergative case. In this paper I present evidence from Nez Perce (Sahaptian) that this prediction is false. In Nez Perce applicative unaccusatives, the theme argument raises over the applicative argument and is accordingly marked with the ergative case. Nez Perce thus demonstrates raising to...