The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language

In his analysis of action sentences, Donald Davidson drew a clear distinction between arguments and adjuncts. Neglecting temporal relations, sentences like 

(1)

We bought your slippers in Marrakesh.

Severing the External Argument from its Verb

Rules and Representations

This paper investigates the ability of artificial neural networks to judge the grammatical acceptability of a sentence, with the goal of testing their linguistic competence. We introduce the Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability (CoLA), a set of 10,657 English sentences labeled as grammatical or ungrammatical from published linguistics literature. As baselines, we train several recurrent neural network models on acceptability classification, and find that our models outperform unsupervised models by Lau et al. (2016) on CoLA. Error-analysis on specific grammatical phenomena reveals that both Lau et al.’s models and ours learn systematic generalizations like subject-verb-object order. However, all models we test perform far below human level on a wide range of grammatical constructions.

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Neural Network Acceptability Judgments

The structure of the Japanese language

The goal of this paper is to give a precise, formal account of certain fundamental notions in minimalist syntax. Particular attention is given to the comparison of token-based (multidominance) and chain-based perspectives on Merge. After considering a version of Transfer that violates the No-Tampering Condition (NTC), we sketch an alternative, NTC-compliant version.

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A Formalization of Minimalist Syntax

In this squib, I analyze raising constructions involving an overt experiencer, as in the following example (I indicate lower occurrences or traces with the notation): (1) John seems to Mary [ to be nice]. The issue that (1) poses is the following: given the Minimal Link Condition (MLC) or Relativized Minimality (RM), why doesn't the DP 'Mary' block movement of the DP 'John' from the embedded clause to the matrix Spec,IP? In this squib, I will suggest a solution to this problem based on smuggling. The basic idea is that VP-movement smuggles the embedded subject 'John' past the experiencer 'Mary', thus avoiding a violation of the MLC/RM.

A Smuggling Approach to Raising in English

Normally, a speaker uses a first person singular pronoun (in English, I, me, mine, myself) to refer to himself or herself. To refer to a single addressee, a speaker uses second person pronouns ( you, yours, yourself). But sometimes third person nonpronominal DPs are used to refer to the speaker--for example, this reporter, yours truly--or to the addressee-- my lord, the baroness, Madam ( Is Madam not feeling well?). Chris Collins and Paul Postal refer to these DPs as imposters because their third person exterior hides a first or second person core. In this book they study the interactions of imposters with a range of grammatical phenomena, including pronominal agreement, coordinate structures, Principle C phenomena, epithets, fake indexicals, and a property of pronominal agreement they call homogeneity. Collins and Postal conclude that traditional ideas about pronominal features (person, number, gender), which countenance only agreement with an antecedent or the relation of the pronoun to its referent, are much too simple. They sketch elements of a more sophisticated view and argue for its relevance and explanatory power in several data realms. The fundamental proposal of the book is that a pronoun agrees with what they call a source, where its antecedent constitutes only one type of source. They argue that the study of imposters (and closely related camouflage DPs) has far-reaching consequences that are inconsistent with many current theories of anaphora.

Imposters: A Study of Pronominal Agreement

An extended argument for a syntactic view of NEG raising with consequences for the syntax of negation and negative polarity items. In this book, Chris Collins and Paul Postal consider examples such the one below on the interpretation where Nancy thinks that this course is not interesting: Nancy doesn't think this course is interesting. They argue such examples instantiate a kind of syntactic raising that they term Classical NEG Raising. This involves the raising of a NEG (negation) from the embedded clause to the matrix clause. Collins and Postal develop three main arguments to support their claim. First, they show that Classical NEG Raising obeys island constraints. Second, they document that a syntactic raising analysis predicts both the grammaticality and particular properties of what they term Horn clauses (named for Laurence Horn, who discovered them). Finally, they argue that the properties of certain parenthetical structures strongly support the syntactic character of Classical NEG Raising. Collins and Postal also offer a detailed analysis of the main argument in the literature against a syntactic raising analysis (which they call the Composed Quantifier Argument). They show that the facts appealed to in this argument not only fail to conflict with their approach but actually support a syntactic view. In the course of their argument, Collins and Postal touch on a variety of related topics, including the syntax of negative polarity items, the status of sequential negation, and the scope of negative quantifiers.

Classical NEG Raising: An Essay on the Syntax of Negation

I argue that verbal compounds in ≠ Hoan are derived from underlying structures similar to serial verb constructions. I show that the derivation crucially involves multiple verb movement, which is subject to the same kinds of locality constraints as other types of multiple movement. I show how the multiple verb movement analysis applies to a range of verbal compounds in ≠ Hoan.

Chris Collins

Papers

A Formalization of Minimalist Syntax

A Smuggling Approach to Raising in English

Imposters: A Study of Pronominal Agreement

Classical NEG Raising: An Essay on the Syntax of Negation

Multiple Verb Movement in Hoan