Showing papers in "Natural Language and Linguistic Theory in 2016"

Anti-locality and optimality in Kaqchikel Agent Focus

Abstract: Many Mayan languages show a syntactically ergative extraction asymmetry whereby the A-extraction of subjects of transitive verbs requires special verbal morphology, known as Agent Focus. In this paper I investigate the syntax of Agent Focus in Kaqchikel, a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala. I argue that this extraction asymmetry in Kaqchikel is the result of a particular anti-locality constraint which bans movement that is too close. Support for this claim comes from new data on the distribution of Agent Focus in Kaqchikel that show this locality-sensitivity. The distribution and realization of Agent Focus will then be modeled using a system of ranked, violable constraints operating over competing derivations. This theoretical choice will be supported by details in the pattern of agreement in Agent Focus. I will then show how rerankings of the proposed constraints can model the attested distribution of Agent Focus in a number of other Mayan languages. I also discuss extensions of this approach to other patterns of anti-agreement.

Experimental syntax and the variation of island effects in English and Italian

Abstract: The goal of this article is to explore the utility of experimental syntax techniques in the investigation of syntactic variation. To that end, we applied the factorial definition of island effects made available by experimental syntax (e.g., Sprouse et al. 2012) to four island types (wh/whether, complex NP, subject, and adjunct), two dependency types (wh-interrogative clause dependencies and relative clause dependencies) and two languages (English and Italian). The results of 8 primary experiments suggest that there is indeed variation across dependency types, suggesting that wh-interrogative clause dependencies and relative clause dependencies cannot be identical at every level of analysis; however, the pattern of variation observed in these experiments is not exactly the pattern of variation previously reported in the literature (e.g., Rizzi 1982). We review six major syntactic approaches to the analysis of island effects (Subjacency, CED, Barriers, Relativized Minimality, Structure-building, and Phases) and discuss the implications of these results for these analyses. We also present 4 supplemental experiments testing complex wh-phrases (also called D-linked or lexically restricted wh-phrases) for all four island types using the factorial design in order to tease apart the contribution of dependency type from featural specification. The results of the supplemental experiments confirm that dependency type is the major source of variation, not featural specification, while providing a concrete quantification of what exactly the effect of complex wh-phrases on island effects is.

Goal and DOM datives

Abstract: In a range of Indo-European languages (Romance, Albanian, Iranian, Indo-Aryan), the same oblique case (‘dative’) is associated with indirect objects and with animate/definite direct objects, independently of the particular morphology employed to spell out the oblique (inflectional or pre/postpositional). We argue that there is a syntactic category dative coinciding with the morphological one and encompassing both goal dative and definiteness/animacy dative. We provide a characterization of goal dative as an elementary predicate introducing a part-whole (i.e. possession) relation, arguing that the definiteness/animacy dative is an instance of this elementary predicate. Evidence sometimes used against the unification proposed (e.g. passives, agreement) admits of, or requires, other explanations.

DP-internal semantic agreement: A configurational analysis

Abstract: “Hybrid” nouns are known for being able to trigger either syntactic or semantic agreement, the latter typically occurring outside the noun’s projection. We document and discuss a rare example of a Hebrew noun that triggers either syntactic or semantic agreement within the DP. To explain this and other unusual patterns of nominal agreement, we propose a configurational adaptation of the concord-index distinction, originated in Wechsler and Zlatic (2003). Morphologically-rooted (=concord) features are hosted on the noun stem while semantically-rooted (=index) features are hosted on Num, a higher functional head. Depending on where attributive adjectives attach, they may display either type of agreement. The observed and unobserved patterns of agreement follow from general principles of selection and syntactic locality.

Right-dislocation as deletion

Abstract: While the left clausal periphery has been in the center of attention of syntactic theory since the 1970s, the right periphery remains comparatively ill-understood. The goal of this paper is to rectify this situation. We argue that Germanic right-dislocation constructions are composed of two juxtaposed clauses, the dislocated peripheral XP being a remnant of ellipsis in the second clause. This analysis explains the extra-sentential status of right-dislocated constituents while simultaneously accounting for signs of syntactic connectivity. These two seemingly conflicting facets are reconciled in a manner familiar from deletion-based accounts of sluicing and fragment answers, i.e. by attributing the relevant (apparent) grammatical interactions to parallel but silent clausal structure. We show that this analysis successfully derives the core properties of both backgrounded and focused (‘afterthought’) phrases at the right periphery, whereas monosentential movement or base-generation accounts necessarily fall short of accounting for the observed facts. The analysis not only eliminates a putative case of rightward movement, but shows that right-dislocation can be fully understood in terms of independently motivated computations, thereby removing constructional residue from the theory of Universal Grammar.

A streamlined approach to online linguistic surveys

Abstract: More and more researchers in linguistics use large-scale experiments to test hypotheses about the data they research, in addition to more traditional informant work. In this paper we describe a new set of free, open-source tools that allow linguists to post studies online, turktools. These tools allow for the creation of a wide range of linguistic tasks, including grammaticality surveys, sentence completion tasks, and picture-matching tasks, allowing for easily implemented large-scale linguistic studies. Our tools further help streamline the design of such experiments and assist in the extraction and analysis of the resulting data. Surveys created using the tools described in this paper can be posted on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, a popular crowdsourcing platform that mediates between ‘Requesters’ who can post surveys online and ‘Workers’ who complete them. This allows many linguistic surveys to be completed within hours or days and at relatively low costs. Alternatively, researchers can host these randomized experiments on their own servers using a supplied server-side component.

The semantics of partial control

Abstract: In a partial control configuration the denotation of the controller is properly included in the understood subject of the infinitive. This paper proposes a compositional semantics for partial control—the first such proposal that we are aware of. We show that an account of what determines whether a given predicate licenses partial control follows naturally from the analysis without additional syntactic assumptions. At the heart of the proposal lies the idea that partial control predicates are attitude verbs and as such, quantify over a particularly fine-grained type of modal base—so-called centred worlds. Unlike in traditional semantics for attitude reports, however, the lexical entry of these predicates requires that the property expressed by the control complement is applied not to the coordinates of this modal base, but rather to world, time and individual arguments that stand in a systematic relationship to those coordinates. This makes sense of the observation, going back to Landau (2000), that the ability of a control predicate to license partial control is intimately connected to its temporal properties.

Noun incorporation and phrasal movement

Abstract: While we agree with Baker (2009) that noun incorporation (NI) is not a unified phenomenon cross-linguistically, we argue against his claim that head movement is still needed for NI in a number of languages (including Mohawk and Mapudungun). Our proposal is that NI involves phrasal movement. The motivation behind our proposal is that incorporated nominals can be much larger than bare roots with a structure incompatible with head movement. The empirical foundation for the phrasal movement claim comes primarily from Onondaga (qua Northern Iroquoian) and Ojibwe (qua Algonquian). In these languages, incorporated nouns appear with nominalizers and inflectional morphemes violating Baker’s (1996, 2003) Proper Head Movement Generalization. Our proposal about NI has important theoretical ramifications: while it has been popular to build words in polysynthetic languages in the syntax via head movement, we view “wordhood” and the polysynthetic properties of such languages as a phonological phenomenon (Dechaine 1999; Branigan et al. 2005; Compton and Pittman 2010).

Gapping as hypothetical reasoning

Abstract: The scope anomaly observed in sentences like Mrs. J can’t live in Boston and Mr. J in LA (¬◊>∧) and No dog eats Whiskas or cat Alpo (¬∃>∨) is known to pose difficult challenges to many analyses of Gapping. We provide new arguments, based on both the basic syntactic patterns of Gapping and standard constituency tests, that the so-called ‘low VP coordination analysis’—the only extant analysis of Gapping in contemporary syntactic theories which accounts for this scope anomaly—is empirically untenable. We propose an explicit alternative analysis of Gapping in Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar, a variant of categorial grammar which builds on both the Lambek-inspired tradition and a more recent line of work modelling word order via a lambda calculus for the prosodic component. The flexible syntax-semantics interface of this framework enables us to characterize Gapping as an instance of like-category coordination, via a crucial use of the notion of hypothetical reasoning. This analysis of the basic syntax of Gapping is shown to interact with independently motivated analyses of scopal operators to immediately yield their apparently anomalous scopal properties in Gapping, offering, for the first time in the literature, a conceptually simple and empirically adequate solution for the notorious scope anomaly in Gapping.

Phrasal grammatical tone in the Dogon languages

Abstract: Tonosyntax in the Dogon languages of Mali is characterized by word-level tone overlays that apply in specific morphosyntactic contexts. This paper focuses on the resolution of competitions that arise when a word is targeted by more than one tone overlay. For example, in Poss N Adj the possessor and the adjective compete to impose their respective tone overlays on (at least) the noun, and Dogon languages show different outcomes. We argue that overlays are tonal morphemes associated with particular syntactic positions and propose a series of phrasal Optimality Theoretic constraints, grounded in syntactic structure, that control the association of these morphemes. The relative ranking of constraints determines the outcome of tonosyntactic competitions in a given language.

Unagreement is an illusion

Abstract: This paper proposes an analysis of unagreement, a phenomenon involving an apparent mismatch between a definite third person plural subject and first or second person plural subject agreement observed in various null subject languages (e.g. Spanish, Modern Greek and Bulgarian), but notoriously absent in others (e.g. Italian, European Portuguese). A cross-linguistic correlation between unagreement and the structure of adnominal pronoun constructions suggests that the availability of unagreement depends on whether person and definiteness are hosted by separate heads (in languages like Greek) or bundled on a single head (i.e. pronominal determiners in languages like Italian). Null spell-out of the head hosting person features high in the extended nominal projection of the subject leads to unagreement. The lack of unagreement in languages with pronominal determiners results from the interaction of their syntactic structure with the properties of the vocabulary items realising the head encoding both person and definiteness. The analysis provides a principled explanation for the cross-linguistic distribution of unagreement and suggests a unified framework for deriving unagreement, adnominal pronoun constructions, personal pronouns and pro.

Interpreting verb clusters

Abstract: We argue for syntactic verb cluster formation in certain restructuring configurations, the result of which is interpreted via function composition. This cluster formation can be diagnosed by its semantic consequences. In particular, we observe that in these configurations all embedded elements must receive a matrix interpretation even if there is no evidence that these elements leave the embedded VP at any stage of the derivation. We show that verb cluster formation and function composition provide a solution to this puzzle. We propose that the process of cluster formation takes place whenever two lexical verbs are part of the same phasal Spell-Out domain, which we relate to Richards’ (2010) distinctness proposal. Our analysis entails that (i) some instances of head movement have semantic effects and hence cannot take place at PF; (ii) the set of rules of semantic composition must include function composition; and (iii) it provides additional support for the notion of distinctness and extends its application to head movement.

Relative clause extraposition and prosody in German

Abstract: Whether a relative clause (RC) can be extraposed has been argued to depend both on contextual focus and on whether an RC is restrictive or appositive. However, no previous study has looked at the interaction between these two factors in restricting extraposition, despite the fact that different types of relative clauses are generally taken to differ in how they relate to focus. Furthermore, previous studies have not looked at the role of prosody in accounting for the effect of focus on extraposition, and have found contradictory results with respect to the prosodic differences between appositive and restrictive relative clauses. This paper presents the results of a production experiment on German which crosses the location of focus and the type of RC in order to explore how they interact in affecting prosody and extraposition.

Feature sharing in agreement

Abstract: This article discusses the mechanism of feature sharing in the analysis of agreement across theories. We argue that there are agreement phenomena that require an agreement mechanism which is both symmetric and feature sharing. Our main argument relies on a Latin nominalized clause construction which has until now remained ill understood. We show that this construction requires a feature sharing and symmetrical approach to agreement. We also show that phenomena in Tsez and in Algonquian that have so far been described in terms of long distance agreement lend themselves to a treatment in terms of feature sharing, and we look at the consequences for the theory of agreement. We show that there are also cases of agreement which resist a feature-sharing treatment. This means that we cannot pin down a single agree mechanism. Some agreement phenomena require feature sharing, others do not, and yet others are incompatible with feature sharing.

Japanese downstep revisited

Abstract: This paper presents the results of a production experiment in which downstep in Tokyo Japanese was re-examined. There are three major assumptions that have been widely adopted in the literature: (1) the Major Phrase (MaP) is the domain of downstep; (2) a syntactic boundary blocks downstep, as a result of the insertion of a MaP boundary; and (3) focus blocks downstep, as a result of the insertion of a MaP (left) boundary. The results of the experiment raise questions about these basic assumptions, and call for new theoretical explanations of the data. There are two major findings in the results: (i) no complete register resetting by focus of a syntactic boundary, and (ii) phonetic differences between the effect of focus and that of syntactic boundary. The first finding raises questions as to whether Assumptions 1 and 2 should be maintained, and if so, how they should be modified to capture the results. Recursive prosodic phrasing along the lines of Ito and Mester (2007, 2012, 2013) is adopted to account for the incomplete resetting. The second finding particularly casts doubt on Assumption 3, because the focus effect lacks some of the properties of the boundary effect. The difference between focus and boundary needs to be explained by assuming that the focus effect is independent of MaP-phrasing, as proposed in Ishihara (2011b).

Superlatives in Syrian Arabic

Abstract: This paper describes superlative constructions in contemporary Syrian (Levantine) Arabic. These have the revealing property that the superlative morpheme may be linearly separated from the term that provides the degree scale it makes reference to. This displacement is syntactically constrained, lending support to theories that postulated movement in the derivation of superlative constructions. The data reported here also document a tight correlation of scopal options for the superlative in Arabic and English, indicating that the languages are uniform at LF, while the surface distribution of the superlative morpheme is wider in Arabic than in English. The remarkable convergence of a variety of interpretational nuances between these two unrelated languages suggests that these uniformities can be traced to Universal Grammar.

A case for a Weak Case Contiguity hypothesis—a reply to Caha

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to discuss some counterexamples to the Strong Case Contiguity Hypothesis (scch) argued for by Caha (2009, 2013) from West Nordic, which were absent from Caha’s sample of languages. The languages to be discussed are Old Norse, Modern Icelandic and Modern Faroese. These three languages show a great deal of syncretism between dative and accusative to the exclusion of genitive, which also fulfill Caha’s criteria for systematic syncretism. This pattern is not predicted to be possible under Caha’s theory. Under closer inspection, however, the data from West Nordic turns out to be compatible with a weaker version of Case Contiguity. Syncretism between accusative and dative appear in a variety of contexts whereas syncretism between accusative and genitive to the exclusion of dative occurs only in a highly restricted context and should be considered accidental under Caha’s criteria. Syncretism thus appears to target continuous regions on a slightly different case hierarchy. Hence although scch is wrong a weaker version is still feasible. I also propose a draft of a feature-based account for the observed variation in case hierarchies, providing a restrictive medium between scch and an unrestricted variation in hierarchies.

Predicting distributional restrictions on prenasalized stops

Abstract: Previous studies on prenasalized stops (NCs) focus mainly on issues of derivation and classification, but little is known about their distributional properties. The current study fills this gap. I present results of a survey documenting positional restrictions on NCs, and show that there are predictable and systematic constraints on their distribution. The major finding is that NCs are optimally licensed in contexts where they are perceptually distinct from plain oral and nasal stops. I provide an analysis referencing auditory factors, and show that a perceptual account explains all attested patterns.

Revisiting the loss of verb movement in the history of English

Abstract: Most of the discussions of the loss of verb movement in the history of English have focused on data related to the rise of do-support In this paper, we extend the empirical basis to evidence from adverb placement Our analysis of the distribution of finite main verbs with respect to adverbs in a range of prose texts in the history of English shows that the decline of V-movement in English starts in the middle of the 15th century and that verb movement past adverbs is lost to a large extent around the middle of the 16th century These observations differ considerably from what data involving the sentential negator not indicate According to that evidence, the loss of verb movement is a rather long process starting in the 16th century and coming to completion over 200 years later In order to reconcile the conflicting diachronic evidence from adverb placement and the syntax of negation, we propose that the loss of verb movement in English is not a single event but occurs sequentially In a first phase, verb movement to T is lost while movement to a lower inflectional head is maintained In a second phase, verb movement starts being lost completely We show that the Rich Agreement Hypothesis, which has been very prominent in accounts of variation with respect to verb movement, cannot capture these developments in a satisfactory way Instead, it is verbal morphology more generally that will be argued to play a role in connection with the occurrence of verb movement However, we do not postulate a strong correlation between morphology and syntax and propose that the loss of verb movement in English is the result of a combination of factors: changes in the verbal morphosyntax (loss of subjunctive, rise of periphrastic forms), an acquisitional bias towards simpler structures, the decline of the subject-verb inversion grammar found in early English, and effects of dialect contact

Go get, come see

Abstract: This paper addresses the interaction between morphology and syntax in cases where the morphological realization of a structure appears to determine its grammaticality. The empirical focus of the discussion is the go get construction (Zwicky 1969; et seq.), a construction which in English is subject to a strict morphological restriction, only being possible with “bare” morphology. It is proposed that this kind of surface-oriented restriction can be accounted for within the morphological component on the assumption that the syntax can place multiple sets of features on a verb: these multiple feature sets will be interpretable within the morphology only when all sets of features converge on a single realization. The analysis developed for English is then generalized to analogues of the go get construction in languages that show morphological restrictions different from the one seen in English: Marsalese (Cardinaletti and Giusti 2001), Modern Greek, and Modern Hebrew, and an outline is given for its extension to other phenomena in which morphological syncretism is able to resolve cases of syntactic feature conflicts.

Negative concord and nominal licensing in Xhosa and Zulu

Abstract: Xhosa and Zulu nominals have restricted distributions when lacking an outer class prefix known as the augment. We argue that in negative contexts augmentless ([−A]) nominals bear negative concord features, uNeg, which must Agree with a negative licenser iNeg (Zeijlstra 2004). This accounts for the fact that some of them can be used as negative sentence fragment answers, and at the same time cannot appear in sentences without c-commanding negation. It also explains a clausemate requirement [S ...Neg...[−A]...] consistently reported by speakers of both languages in our study for all but subjunctive and (occasionally) neg-raising environments. We demonstrate that further distributional constraints attributed by Halpert (2012, 2015) to special Case-licensing needs of Zulu [−A] nominals are shared by [+A] DPs modified by kuphela–‘only’, and [+/−A] wh-phrases are subject to near-identical restrictions. This is a state of affairs that Halpert’s approach would not predict and cannot explain. We build on Sabel and Zeller (2006), and Zeller (2008) in attributing the pattern to incompatibility between [+focus] features characteristic of negative concord items, ‘only’-modified DPs, and wh-phrases, and [−focus] features of certain Zulu and Xhosa clausal positions. Thus all aspects of [−A] nominal distribution reduce to independently motivated features of the class of expressions to which they belong.

Multiple (coordinated) (free) relatives

Abstract: Building on the existing crosslinguistic research on wh-questions with coordinated wh-pronouns, in this paper we turn to relative clauses and examine the effects of coordination on the grammaticality of relative clauses with multiple relative pronouns. We first discuss a general restriction on relativization, which bans multiple relativization from a single clause. We attribute this restriction to either a syntactic violation (impossible promotion of the head) or a semantic violation (semantic mismatch between the head and the relative clause). Next, we turn to free and headed relatives with coordinated wh-pronouns, showing that they do not display the same amount of crosslinguistic variation as wh-questions with coordinated wh-pronouns. In particular, irrespective of the availability of a mono-clausal structure for wh-questions with coordinated wh-pronouns in a language (which in turn correlates with the availability of multiple wh-fronting), a mono-clausal structure for free relatives with coordinated wh-pronouns is not available. In this respect, free relatives pattern with headed relatives rather than wh-questions. We derive this parallelism from a fundamental difference between relative clauses and questions: the presence of a CP external head in relative clauses, but not in wh-questions.

The syntax-semantics interface of ‘respective’ predication: a unified analysis in Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar

Abstract: This paper proposes a unified analysis of the ‘respective’ readings of plural and conjoined expressions, the internal readings of symmetrical predicates such as same and different, and the summative readings of expressions such as a total of $10000. These expressions pose significant challenges to compositional semantics, and have been studied extensively in the literature. However, almost all previous studies focus exclusively on one of these phenomena, and the close parallels and interactions that they exhibit have been mostly overlooked to date. We point out two key properties common to these phenomena: (i) they target all types of coordination, including nonconstituent coordination such as Right-Node Raising and Dependent Cluster Coordination; (ii) the three phenomena all exhibit multiple dependency, both by themselves and with respect to each other. These two parallels suggest that one and the same mechanism is at the core of their semantics. Building on this intuition, we propose a unified analysis of these phenomena, in which the meanings of expressions involving coordination are formally modelled as multisets, that is, sets that allow for duplicate occurrences of identical elements. The analysis is couched in Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar. The flexible syntax-semantics interface of this framework enables an analysis of ‘respective’ readings and related phenomena which, for the first time in the literature, yields a simple and principled solution for both the interactions with nonconstituent coordination and the multiple dependency noted above.

The semantics, syntax, and morphology of Transparent Free Relatives revisited; a comparison of two approaches

Abstract: This article proposes to go beyond the earlier literature on Transparent Free Relatives (TFRs) by pursuing three interrelated goals:

English possessive ’s : clitic and affix

Abstract: The English possessive marker displays properties of both clitic and affix. I argue that synchronically it is, in fact, both, rather than only one or the other or something halfway between. I show that it is possible to model the dual clitic/affix status of the possessive in the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar, and that this model is capable of accounting for the full range of constructions in which the possessive marker appears. This also has consequences for questions of English noun phrase syntax, and issues of categoriality and degrammaticalization.

A note on possession and mereology in Ulwa property concept constructions

Abstract: Ulwa (Misumalpan; Nicaragua) shows a puzzling and unique pattern in which a single affix marks the head of a possessive noun phrase and appears on roots expressing property concepts. This pattern has been argued to be semantically motivated by Koontz-Garboden and Francez (2010). This paper discusses two con- structions of Ulwa that do not receive a natural treatment in their analysis, potentially casting doubt on the plausibility of a semantic motivation for the syncretism. We pro- vide a modified version of the analysis, in which property concept roots denote mere- ologically ordered sets of portions of substance (in the spirit of Link's 2002 treatment of mass nouns), as argued for in Francez and Koontz-Garboden (2015), rather than property theoretic ones. Possessive relations are then taken to include mereological ones. Such an analysis not only retains the motivation for a semantic approach to the syncretism, but also strengthens it, by showing that the range of interpretations available to the allegedly possessive affix is one expected of possessive lexemes more generally.

On truth unpersistence: At the crossroads of epistemic modality and discourse

Abstract: We propose a semantic analysis of the particles afinal (European Portuguese) and alla fine (Italian) in terms of the notion of truth unpersistence, which combines both epistemic modality and constraints on discourse structure. We argue that the felicitous use of these modal particles requires that the truth of a proposition p* fail to persist through a temporal succession of epistemic states, where p* is incompatible with the proposition modified by afinal/alla fine, and that the interlocutors share knowledge of a previous epistemic attitude toward p*. We analyze two main cases, that of plan-related propositions and that of propositions without plans. We also discuss the connections between truth unpersistence and evidentiality.

Quasi-definites in Swedish: Elative superlatives and emphatic assertion

Abstract: This paper analyzes nominal phrases in Swedish with a definite article but no definite suffix on the head noun, which we call quasi-definites (e.g. det storsta intresse ‘the greatest interest’). These diverge from the usual ‘double definiteness’ pattern where the article and the suffix co-occur (e.g. det storsta intresse-t ‘the greatest interest-def’). We give several diagnostics showing that this pattern arises only with superlatives on an elative (‘to a very high degree’) interpretation, and that quasi-definites behave semantically as indefinites, although they have limited scope options and are resistant to polarity reversals. Rather than treating the article and the suffix as marking different aspects of definiteness, we propose that both are markers of uniqueness and that the definite article signals definiteness that is confined to the adjectival phrase and combines with a predicate of degrees rather than individuals in this construction. The reason that quasi-definites do not behave precisely as ordinary indefinites has to do with their pragmatics: Like emphatic negative polarity items, elative superlatives require that the assertion be stronger (≈ more surprising) than alternatives formed by replacing the highest degree with lower degrees, and have a preference for entailment scales.

Short answers in Scottish Gaelic and their theoretical implications

Abstract: This article presents an analysis of a novel short answer strategy in Scottish Gaelic, called the Verb-Answer, which differs from standard fragment answers in allowing us to directly observe some of the clausal structure in which it is embedded It is shown that the Verb-Answer is identical to the fragment answer in virtually all other respects, demanding a unified analysis, and it is demonstrated that pursuing a unified analysis is problematic for Direct Interpretation approaches to short answers, but straightforward for the Silent Structure approach of Morgan (1973) and Merchant (2004) The extended typology of short answer strategies therefore provides an argument in favour of the latter approach to elliptical phenomena

On the syntax of English minimizers

Abstract: The syntactic behaviour of English minimizers such as (not) a/one word, (not) a/one bit and (not) sleep a/one wink is puzzling: while they can behave as polarity items (PIs) in non-negative and negative contexts, they become negative quantifiers (NQs) when merged with a negation in negative contexts. Unlike previous accounts, where emphasis is put mainly on highlighting the similarity of minimizers to any-PIs and on supporting the contribution of an even-reading, I integrate the peculiar behaviour of minimizers in English within an analysis of negative indefinites as existential quantifiers that can structurally associate with negation in different ways. I claim that English minimizers contain three basic ingredients: a Numeral Phrase, a Focus particle and, in negative contexts, a Negative Phrase, not. The presence of a Focus particle even in the structure of minimizers plus the flexible merging possibilities of not with respect to the other two components of the minimizer result in their NQ-like behaviour, which can be now fully integrated into a theory of negative indefinites as syntactic objects that are compositionally built.