Breton Masculine Human Plurals, Locality, and Impoverishment

This paper presents an apparent locality condition violation observed in Standard Breton masculine human plurals ending in -où. It proposes a unique impoverishment rule deleting a syntacticosemantic feature conditioned by a specified phonological exponent. Adopting a specific architectural view of lenition, it forces a rethinking of the precise timing of various post-syntactic processes, including certain types of impoverishment rules as well Agree-Copy in dissociated Agr nodes. It also lends support to the independent claims that syntacticosemantic features are not overridden during Spell-Out and that Vocabulary Insertion applies to a linearized structure, not a hierarchical one.

Agreeing in number: Verbal plural suppletion and reduplication

Verbal suppletion for participant number has recently attracted theoretical attention (Bobaljik & Harley 2017; Toosarvandani 2016). I show that cross-linguistically, participant number is marked by suppletion and reduplication and is part of a broader phenomenon, verbal number. I argue that reduplication provides evidence that participant number suppletion is not directly triggered by the argument, and I propose a unified account of participant number where there is a verb-internal number node that reflects number and mediates an agreement relation between the argument and the root. The number node, which marks plural arguments and events, may be valued by the closest c-commanding DP, and will be realized as reduplication or will trigger root suppletion. This is supported cross-linguistically by languages which mark both participant and event number by reduplication and suppletion. I propose that this head allows a stricter locality condition on suppletion where the trigger is always a head in the morphological word (complex X⁰). My analysis bears on current issues of locality and suppletive domains since I argue that the topmost complex X⁰ node forms a morphological domain which contains smaller domains that are privileged in the syntax but restrictive in the morphophonology.

Suppletion is local

Bobaljik (2012) proposes that the insertion of suppletive vocabulary items can be sensitive to features within the same maximal projection, but not across a maximal projection boundary. Among heads (X0 nodes), this condition restricts suppletion to synthetic formations and excludes suppletion in analogous analytic formations. In Hiaki, however, the number of a subject DP can trigger verbal suppletion in certain intransitive verbs. The verbs in question, however, can be shown by language-internal diagnostics to be unaccusative. Suppletion, then, is in fact triggered by an element within the maximal projection of the suppleting verb. The analysis supports the position that internal arguments are base-generated as sisters to their selecting verb (Kratzer 1996; Marantz 1997; Harley 2014). Further, we see that the locality condition does not distinguish between word-internal and word-external triggers of suppletion, but is rather a condition of structural locality, showing that morphological structure is, in a fundamental way, syntactic.

Resumptivity and two types of A′‑dependencies in the Minimalist Program

This paper examines the derivation of two types of A′-dependencies — relative clauses and Left-Dislocation structures — in the framework of Minimalist Program based on Mandarin data. Relatives and LD structures demonstrate many distinct syntactic and semantic properties when they contain a gap and a resumptive pronoun respectively. A thorough study of the relevant data reveals that when a gap strategy is adopted, island effects and crossover effects are always observed, irrespective of whether the relevant gap is embedded within a relative clause or within an LD structure; on the contrary, when the resumptive strategy is adopted, a sharp distinction is observed between these two structures. A resumptive relative clause gives rise to island effects and crossover effects systematically; by contrast, a resumptive LD structure never gives rise to these effects. In the Minimalist Program, island effects and crossover effects are not exclusively used as diagnostic tests for movement since the operation Agree is also subject to locality constraints. I will argue that a relative clause containing either a gap or an RP and an LD structure with gap are derived by Agree and they are subject to the locality condition whereas a resumptive LD structure is derived by Match that is an island free operation and it is not subject to the locality constraint. Multiple Transfer and multiple Spell-Out are possible in an Agree chain, but not in a Matching chain. The choice of the derivational mechanism depends on the interpretability of the formal features attached to the Probe and to the Goal in the relevant A′-dependencies.

Locally covariant quantum field theory and the problem of formulating the same physics in all space–times

The framework of locally covariant quantum field theory is discussed, motivated in part using ‘ignorance principles’. It is shown how theories can be represented by suitable functors, so that physical equivalence of theories may be expressed via natural isomorphisms between the corresponding functors. The inhomogeneous scalar field is used to illustrate the ideas. It is argued that there are two reasonable definitions of the local physical content associated with a locally covariant theory; when these coincide, the theory is said to be dynamically local. The status of the dynamical locality condition is reviewed, as are its applications in relation to (i) the foundational question of what it means for a theory to represent the same physics in different space–times and (ii) a no-go result on the existence of natural states.

On the role of locality in learning stress patterns

This paper presents a previously unnoticed universal property of stress patterns in the world's languages: they are, for small neighbourhoods, neighbourhood-distinct. Neighbourhood-distinctness is a locality condition defined in automata-theoretic terms. This universal is established by examining stress patterns contained in two typological studies. Strikingly, many logically possible – but unattested – patterns do not have this property. Not only does neighbourhood-distinctness unite the attested patterns in a non-trivial way, it also naturally provides an inductive principle allowing learners to generalise from limited data. A learning algorithm is presented which generalises by failing to distinguish same-neighbourhood environments perceived in the learner's linguistic input – hence learning neighbourhood-distinct patterns – as well as almost every stress pattern in the typology. In this way, this work lends support to the idea that properties of the learner can explain certain properties of the attested typology, an idea not straightforwardly available in optimality-theoretic and Principle and Parameter frameworks.

Remarks on focus feature organization in narrow syntax with special reference to the additive mo ‘also’

Following the spirit, but not the same mechanism, of Kayne’s (1998, 2000) overt syntactic derivational analysis of focus-related elements such as only, also/too, and even in English, this paper explores the nature of focus feature organization in narrow syntax (NS) with special reference to the additive use of the focus particle mo ‘also’ in Japanese. First, it is argued that, in spite of their attractiveness, at least the versions of LF focus particle movement analysis of association with focus entertained in Aoyagi (1998, 1999, 2006) are faced with theoretical/empirical problems. Then, it is claimed that association with focus in Japanese should be best captured in overt syntax without recourse to any LF movement operations, while keeping to Aoyagi’s (1998, 1999, 2006) original insight of taking association with focus as “focus feature agreement or sharing.” In so doing, a new hypothesis for focus feature organization in NS (Focus Feature-Splitting Hypothesis) is proposed, which dictates that in principle an interpretable focus feature [focus] and an uninterpretable focus feature [uFoc] in the domain of the Foc head occupied by mo can be separated under some “locality condition” based on phases. To the extent that the proposed overt syntactic derivational approach is on the right track, it provides another empirical support for the single-cycle computational system for NS in the faculty of language (FL), entertained in Kayne (1998, 2000), Epstein et al. (1998), Chomsky (2001b, 2004), and Epstein and Seely (2006) inter alia.