Head Movement, Suspended Affixation, and the Turkish Clausal Spine

Previous work has shown that Turkish has two structurally different ways of forming predicates with a range of effects for phonological stress, the selection of verbal suffixes, and particle placement (Hankamer 2008; Kelepir 2001; Kornfilt 1996; Zanon 2014). I present evidence drawn from a pilot study of a previously unnoticed difference between these predicate types: In vP-sized or larger coordinated phrases which realize a single sentencefinal predicate, verbal predicates are highly degraded when the person features on the conjuncts’ subjects mismatch, while participial predicates are relatively acceptable under the same conditions. Building on Kelepir (2001) & Zanon (2014)’s work on head-movement in Turkish predicates, I argue that gapping generates these strings from different sized coordinations, and explains the grammatical degradation split observed in the pilot study if we assume a more stringent identity requirement in Turkish gapping than we do for English.

Interpretations of VP anaphora through reference to salient events

Previous work has largely agreed that the verbal anaphors do it/this/that can freely be resolved with respect to information in either the linguistic or nonlinguistic context, whereas there has been more debate regarding the resolution strategy for verb phrase ellipsis. We present an experiment that confirms the intuition that interpretations of do that are highly sensitive to information in the nonlinguistic context. Comparison to a prior experiment on verb phrase ellipsis using the same paradigm reveals that ellipsis is much less sensitive to nonlinguistic manipulations, suggesting that it is not resolved solely with respect to salient discourse events, and that there is a separate linguistic identity requirement for ellipsis.

On the (non)-existence of verb-stranding ellipsis in Chinese

This paper develops the empirical and theoretical basis for the necessity in admitting the operation of verb-stranding ellipsis (VVPE) in Chinese. I present new arguments showing that, though two analytic possibilities — null argument analysis and VVPE analysis — are in principle available in the grammar of Chinese, they can be differentiated in specific syntactic environments. In particular, I show that the existing null argument approaches would have difficulty in accounting for the following facts: disjunction of multi-constituent elements under negation, the difference of island effects in the presence of a linguistic antecedent, the verb identity requirement and the possibility of having part of the idiomatic expression as the missing gap. Therefore, it is argued that VVPE must remain a viable syntactic operation in Chinese when a null object analysis is unavailable.

A comprehensive theory of coordination of unlikes

The principal aim of this paper is to present a comprehensive theory of coordination of unlikes, i.e., a theory that is capable of dealing with every phenomenon resulting from coordination of unlikes. The proposed theory accounts not just for standard cases of coordination of unlike arguments and coordination of unlike functors but also for cases involving single-conjunct agreement and what will be called each-conjunct agreement. In the course of the argumentation, it is also shown that, even in a language like English, predicate-argument agreement needs to be described in terms of a relational constraint that is not simply an identity requirement.