Predicate fronting in Yiddish and conditions on multiple copy Spell-Out

Predicate fronting with doubling (also known as the predicate cleft) has long been a challenge for theories of syntax that do not predict the pronunciation of multiple occurrences. Previous analyses that derive the construction via syntactic movement, including those attributing verb doubling to the formation of parallel chains (e.g., Aboh 2006; Kandybowicz 2008), are incompatible with remnant movement (Müller 1998), which does not give rise to doubling. This article presents data from the predicate fronting construction in Yiddish, in which verbs always double but complements never do. I argue that these seemingly contradictory pronunciation facts can be reconciled even if one assumes that phrasal movement and head movement are both syntactic. More specifically, the pronunciation of occurrences in Yiddish (doubled or not) follows from the general conditions on Spell-Out (or Transferpf) defined by Collins and Stabler (2016), modified only to accommodate syntactic head movement. Post-syntactic PF repairs are thus not required to account for the facts of the Yiddish predicate fronting construction. If such repairs are needed to generate doubling phenomena in other languages, they should be explicitly defined so as to modify or override the predictions of default Spell-Out conditions.

Verbal Predicate Fronting in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish

This article discusses the development of verbal predicate fronting (“predicate cleft”) in Modern Hebrew by comparing its properties with those of analogous constructions in Classical Hebrew and Yiddish, a critical contact language. The evidence, largely syntactic, lends support for contact-induced change as a plausible source of verbal predicate fronting in the contemporary spoken variety.

Japanese Predicate Cleft Constructions as a Morphological Reduplication

Japanese Predicate Cleft Constructions as a Morphological Reduplication

Russian predicative clefts: tensions between semantics and pragmatics

Russian predicate cleft constructions have the surprising property of being associated with adversative clauses of the opposite polarity. I argue that clefts are associated with adversative clauses because they have the semantics of S-Topics in Büring's (1997, 2000) sense of the term. It is shown that the polarity of the adversative clause is obligatorily opposed to that of the cleft because the use of a cleft gives rise to a relevance-based pragmatic scale. The ordering principle according to which these scale

Unifying Predicate Cleft Constructions

Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Syntax and Semantics in Africa (1997)

Predicative Constructions and Functional Categories in Haitian Creole

This paper seeks to provide a unified analysis of the particle se in Haitian Creole, traditionally identified as an equality marker, a resumptive pronoun, or a focus marker. This study also serves to illustrate the role and the structural organization of functional projections in this non-inflected language. Under the proposed analysis, se (as well as ye, which has long been recognized as bearing a relation to se) is not a verbal copula; rather, it is a predicate forming aspectual head. A unified analysis based on general principles of UG is offered for se, appearing in predicative sentences, in nominal clefts, and in predicate cleft constructions. It is argued that in all these contexts, se always occurs with DP predicates or predicates headed by a functional head, such as CP predicates, not with any other type of predicates.