Fieldwork and Language Documentation

I argue in this paper that Nez Perce has covert hyperraising to object: the DP in the highest A-position of a finite embedded clause covertly moves into an object position in the matrix VP. Implications of the Nez Perce facts include the following: The distribution of hyperraising cannot be regulated purely in terms of Activity (Chomsky 2001), but it cannot be regulated purely in terms of Intervention (Halpert 2016), either. CPs that are transparent for hyperraising may be opaque for other phi-Agree (viz complementizer agreement, A scrambling). My analysis follows Chomsky's 2001...

At first glance, Nez Perce looks like a language lacking any correlate of the traditional mass-count distinction. All Nez Perce nouns behave like canonical count nouns in three ways: all nouns combine with numerals without an overt measure phrase, all NPs may host plural features, and all NPs may host adjectives like big and small. I show that Nez Perce nevertheless makes two countability distinctions in noun semantics. A sums-based (cumulativity) distinction is revealed in the interaction of quantifiers with plural; a parts-based (divisiveness) distinction is revealed in...

The job of a fieldworker involves both elicitation from native speakers and interpretation of the data thus elicited. This chapter concerns the process of reasoning by which the bare results of elicitation are interpreted. One hypothesis often used in interpretation is that the input to translation and the output of translation are equivalent in meaning. Another is that, in a particular context, speakers will accept (or reject) sentences expressing the same range of propositions, regardless of what language they are speaking. Both hypotheses can be highly useful in reasoning about...