Syntax and Semantics

The syntactic diversity of SAuxOV in West Africa

Hannah Sande
Nico Baier
Peter Jenks
2019

Surface SAuxOV orders abound in West Africa. We demonstrate that apparent examples of this word order have important structural differences across languages. We show that SAuxOV orders in some languages are due to mixed clausal headedness, consisting of a head initial TP and head-final VP, though this order can be concealed by verb movement. Other languages are more consistently head-initial, and what appear to be SAuxOV orders arise in limited syntactic contexts due to specific syntactic constructions such as object shift or nominalized complements. Finally, we show that languages which...

Theory and description in African linguistics

Emily Clem
Peter Jenks
Hannah Sande
2019

This collection contains 36 papers presented at the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics at UC Berkeley from March 23-March 26, 2016.1 This meeting of ACAL coincided with a special workshop entitled “Areal features and linguistic reconstruction in Africa”, and we are glad to include four papers from that workshop in this collection as well. Collectively, these papers add a sizable body of scholarship to the study of African languages, including valuable new descriptions of African languages, novel theoretical analyses of them, and important insights into our...

Is word-level recursion actually recursion?

Taylor Miller
Hannah Sande
2021

There is a longstanding debate in the literature about if, and where, recursion occurs in prosodic structure. While there are clear cases of genuine recursion at the phrase level and above, there are very few convincing cases of word-level recursion. Most cases are—by definition—not recursive and instead best analyzed as different constituents (e.g., the Composite Group, Prosodic Word Group, etc.). We show that two convincing cases of prosodic word-level recursion can easily be reanalyzed without recursion if phonology and prosody are evaluated cyclically at syntactic phase...

Possessor raising

Amy Rose Deal
2013

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...

Person-based split ergativity in Nez Perce is syntactic

Amy Rose Deal
2016

Nez Perce is one among many ergative languages that consistently use nominative case, rather than ergative, for 1st and 2nd person transitive subjects. Two major lines of analysis have been proposed for the synchronic grammar of this type of ergative split. Morphological analyses approach the phenomenon as a case of syncretism between ergative and nominative in 1st and 2nd person; all transitive subjects are assigned an identical syntax. Syntactic analyses posit a featural or structural distinction between 3rd person subjects and 1st and 2nd person subjects, or the clauses containing...

Plural exponence in the Nez Perce DP: a DM analysis

Amy Rose Deal
2016

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-...

Syntactic ergativity: analysis and identification

Amy Rose Deal
2016

Some languages showing morphological ergativity in case and/or agreement also show ergative patterns in core syntactic domains—syntactic ergativity. The most-studied type of syntactic ergativity is a ban on the Ā movement of ergative subjects; an additional type concerns the distribution of absolutives in nonfinite clauses. This article first presents the standard view of syntactic ergativity, which is closely connected to the treatment of ergative as an inherent case. Evidence from Shipibo suggests that a ban on ergative Ā extraction does not require inherent ergative. This points...

Cyclicity and connectivity in Nez Perce relative clauses

Amy Rose Deal
2016

This article studies two aspects of movement in relative clauses, focusing on evidence from Nez Perce. First, I argue that relativization involves cyclic Ā-movement, even in monoclausal relatives: the relative operator moves to Spec,CP via an intermediate position in an Ā outer specifier of TP. The core arguments draw on word order, complementizer choice, and a pattern of case attraction for relative pronouns. Ā cyclicity of this type suggests that the TP sister of relative C constitutes a phase—a result whose implications extend to an ill-understood corner of the English that-trace...

Raising to ergative: remarks on applicatives of unaccusatives

Amy Rose Deal
2019

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...

Third person pronouns in Grassfields Bantu

Larry M. Hyman
2018

In this paper I have two goals. First, I propose a reconstruction of the pronoun system of Grassfields Bantu, direct reflexes of which are found in Eastern Grassfields, with a close look at the pronoun systems, as reflected across this varied group. Second, I document and seek the origin of innovative third person pronouns in Western Grassfields. While EGB languages have basic pronouns in all persons, both the Momo and Ring subgroups of WGB have innovated new third person (non-subject) pronouns from demonstratives or perhaps the noun ‘body’. However, these languages show evidence of...