Pronouns In Embedded Contexts At The Syntax Semantics Interface

This volume presents studies on pronouns in embedded contexts, and offers fundamental insights into this central area of research. Much of the recent research on pronouns has shown that embedded environments, such as clausal complements of attitude predicates, provide a window into the nature of pronouns. Pronouns in such environments not only exhibit familiar distinctions such as that between bound and referential pronouns; if they refer to the attitude holder, they also participate in a broader range of phenomena, e.g., distinguishing between a de se reading (involving a conscious self-directed belief) and a de re reading (involving an accidental belief about oneself). Topics covered include: the semantics of attitude reports that contain pronominal elements, the semantics of pronominal features and their connection to indexicality, new insights in the connection of pronominal typology and logophoricity or anti-logophoricity, and finally, the localization of embedded pronouns within a bigger picture involving the nature of perspective and the analysis of quasi-pronominal phenomena such as sequence of tense.

This volume offers a selection of interface studies in generative linguistics, a valuable “one-stop shopping” opportunity for readers interested in the ways in which the various modules of linguistic analysis intersect and interact. The boundaries between the lexicon and morphophonology, between morphology and syntax, between morphosyntax and meaning, and between morphosyntax and phonology are all being crossed in this volume. Though its focus is on theoretical approaches, experimental studies are also included. The empirical focus of many of the contributions is on Hungarian, and several chapters respond to work published by István Kenesei, to whom the volume is dedicated.

A critical survey of key issues in the analysis of propositional attitude reports, a central topic in natural language semantics.

Even though null subjects have been extensively studied in the past four decades, there is a growing interest in partial null subject languages (e.g. Finnish) and a subtler classification of null subject phenomena overall. This volume aims at contributing to this trend, focusing on Slavic and Finno-Ugric groups, with some extension to Baltic and Samoyedic languages. Interestingly, these groups offer an impressive array of macro- and microvariation. Moreover, given an increasing interest towards the internal structure of the pronominal elements and the role of various types of topics in the left periphery of the sentence structure, the enterprise taken up in this book is to investigate lexical and null, referential and generic subjects in order to understand and compare their feature composition, licensing conditions, and structural properties. Rather than trying to squeeze the studied languages into a predefined set of parameters, this volume highlights some properties that may lead to a refinement of the existing generalizations. It brings together contributors from both generative and typological traditions and will be of interest to any researcher willing to investigate argument-drop in a wider crosslinguistic perspective.

With input from a team of scholars, this book brings together linguistics and philosophy, empowering new conversations in the process.

Control, typically defined as a specific referential dependency between the null-subject of a non-finite embedded clause and a co-dependent of the matrix predicate, has been subject to extensive research in the last 50 years. While there is a broad consensus that a distinction between Obligatory Control (OC), Non-Obligatory Control (NOC) and No Control (NC) is useful and necessary to cover the range of relevant empirical phenomena, there is still less agreement regarding their proper analyses. In light of this ongoing discussion, the articles collected in this volume provide a cross-linguistic perspective on central questions in the study of control, with a focus on non-canonical control phenomena. This includes cases which show NOC or NC in complement clauses or OC in adjunct clauses, cases in which the controlled subject is not in an infinitival clause, or in which there is no unique controller in OC (i.e. partial control, split control, or other types of controllers). Based on empirical generalizations from a wide range of languages, this volume provides insights into cross-linguistic variation in the interplay of different components of control such as the properties of the constituent hosting the controlled subject, the syntactic and lexical properties of the matrix predicate as well as restrictions on the controller, thereby furthering our empirical and theoretical understanding of control in grammar.

A comprehensive overview of the semantics and syntax of indexical shift that develops a constrained typology of the phenomenon across languages. The phenomenon of indexical shift—whereby indexicals embedded in speech or attitude reports draw their meaning from an attitude event rather than the utterance context—has been reported in languages spanning five continents and at least ten language families. In this book, Amy Rose Deal offers a comprehensive overview of the semantics and syntax of indexical shift and develops a constrained typology of the phenomenon across languages—a picture of variation that is both rich enough to capture the known facts and restrictive enough to make predictions about currently unknown data points. Deal draws on studies of indexical shift in a broad range of languages, focusing especially on Nez Perce, Zazaki, Korean, and Uyghur. Using new data from fieldwork, Deal presents an in-depth case study of indexical shift in the Nez Perce language, and uses this evidence to propose a novel theoretical approach based on the meaning and grammar of shifty operators. She explores several dimensions of variation related to indexical shift across and within languages, showing how the cross-linguistic patterns can be explained (and constrained) within the shifty operator view. Finally, she contrasts indexical shift with surface-similar phenomena, clarifying the controls needed to test the constrained typology on new data sets.

This volume brings together 19 cutting edge studies written by some of the most prominent linguists working on Chinese formal syntax, as a Festschrift volume dedicated to Yen-Hui Audrey Li. The contributions to the volume address a wide range of issues currently developing in the field of Chinese syntax, grouped into five thematic sections on the structure of lexical and functional projections, modal verb syntax, syntax-semantics interactions, the syntax and interpretation of particles, and the acquisition of syntactic structures. With its rich descriptive content sourced from different varieties of Chinese, and its theoretical orientation and analyses, the book provides an important new resource both for researchers with a primary interest in Chinese and other linguists interested in discovering how properties of Chinese can inform the analysis of other languages.