VERBAL CLITICS IN ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR

Purpose of the study: The present study analyses the interplay of semantics, syntax and pragmatics in Pashto clauses containing verbal clitics (VC) in the light of the Role and Reference framework. It particularly focuses on the relational aspect of the clause. The lexical representation of the predicating elements is presented. Methodology: The four projections of a Pashto clause i.e., constituent projection, operator projection, logical structure projection and focus structure projection are analyzed in the Role and Reference Grammar theoretical framework. Main Findings: The findings of the study show that VCs are different from both agreement markers and pronouns with some shared properties. A linking algorithm is proposed for Pashto from semantics to syntax and syntax-to-semantics based on the activation level of the referents. Applications of this study: The study analyses the discourse pragmatic conditions responsible for the occurrence of VCs in Pashto clause terms of role and reference grammar. The novelty of this study: The study has novelty in the sense that it describes the structure of the Pashto clause from a discourse pragmatic perspective which has never been investigated in previous studies. The study shows the movement is triggered by both actor (in present) and undergoer (in past) along with syntactic neutralization. The VCs are different from both agreement markers and pronouns with some shared properties identifying dative arguments like arguments and causing doubling like agreement markers and so, are linked to an ‘agreement index’ node.

Dative Arguments in Turkish: Caused Experiencers versus Applicatives

This paper investigates a type of construction in Turkish which is similar to Ingason's (2016) "caused experience" construction in Icelandic. The study draws a distinction between experiencers and applicatives through an investigation of novel data, and contends that these two arguments occupy distinct syntactic positions in the structure. The caused experiencers in Turkish are introduced by the syntactic head Aff(ect) of Bosse and Bruening (2011); Bosse et al. (2012), whereas applicatives are introduced by the Applicative head (Pylkkänen, 2008). The proposal also captures the at-issue meaning of the sentence as well as not-at-issue meaning (an implicature) of the sentence.

Severing idiosyncratic case from the lexical verb in Uyghur-Chinese code switching

This paper discusses case marking in mixed verbs in Uyghur-Chinese code switching, where a lexical verb from Mandarin Chinese is combined with a light verb from Uyghur. In mixed verbs containing a Chinese verb whose Uyghur translational equivalent idiosyncratically selects a dative object, the mixed verb also selects a dative object. We analyze this fact by proposing that dative arguments are introduced by an applicative head (Cuervo 2003) whose presence is required by a little head selecting for certain types of roots along the lines of Merchant (2018).

Alignment in transitive clauses: case determining agreement

After having discussed how agreement can determine Case in Chapter 4, this chapter moves on to discuss how Case can determine (and restrict) agreement. In many languages, the verb can only agree with arguments without overt case-marking. In others, accusative or dative arguments can agree as well. The distribution of agreement and case-marking is highly systematic, which has led researchers to propose that if a language allows agreement with any argument, this must include arguments without case-marking. It is shown that this analysis can capture such generalizations and extend them to the domain of ditransitive clauses, as well. This provides further evidence for analyses of Case as hierarchically organized sets of features, and shows that the framework argued for can make testable predictions.