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The aim of this dissertation is to provide a detailed analysis of anaphoric dependencies in Vietnamese, with right from the start, a focus on theoretical puzzles and phenomena that contribute to our understanding of this particular language and of language in general. To achieve this goal, I investigated the inventory of anaphoric expressions, the expression of reflexivity, the syntactic representation of non-local anaphoric dependencies and the restrictions these dependencies are subject to. Prima facie the binding patterns in Vietnamese look rather different from the patterns in well-known languages like English. In addition to pronominal elements and an anaphoric element mình, also proper names and common noun expressions such as kinship terms and status terms show pronominal characteristics. Honorificity features appear to play a much more significant role in the language. While mình can be non-locally bound, for coargument binding it requires the element tự, just like other pronoun-type elements, reflecting the cross-linguistic pattern that reflexivity must be licensed. In addition, mình can virtually always be interpreted as the speaker in the absence of an overt 1st person antecedent. Non-local binding of mình is subject to a blocking effect that at first sight may seem similar to the blocking effect in Mandarin Chinese but is rather different in detail. With all the similarities and differences the Vietnamese anaphoric system possesses in comparison to other languages, I show that it can be unified into the world of anaphors/reflexives and successfully accounted for by a Multiple-Agree based approach to anaphor binding as elaborated in this dissertation. more...

This thesis is a study of syntactic constraints on the distribution and interpretation of the Russian reflexive pronouns sebja and svoj. These are usually, but, importantly, not always subject-oriented and in complementary distribution with pronominals, and in certain conditions they trigger some hitherto poorly studied interpretive effects. Russian also demonstrates considerable versatility in binding of NP-internal reflexives, including possessives. An explanatory account of the patterns in question, which canonical Binding Theory of Chomsky (1981) has been unable to provide, is offered. The proposed account assumes no features or principles specific to the reflexives. They are taken to realize bundles of derivationally valued interpretable phi-feature that enter into feature sharing dependencies with the antecedents, which encodes binding. In Chapter 2 constraints on the Agree operation are discussed and refined. It is concluded that they must apply to every feature and each direction of valuation independently. An unvalued feature instance can only receive its value from the closest matching relation, but itself can value multiple feature instances. Thus, Agree is supposed to be subject to relativized rather than absolute locality. Unlike in other Agree-based approaches to syntactic anaphora, in this thesis it is assumed that different phi-features (specifically person and number) can be shared separately, and either of them can support an anaphoric dependency. This is made possible by defective phi-feature probes, most importantly a number probe consistently positioned immediately above every complete argument structure. Anaphoric dependencies based on different phi-features have different interpretive properties: person sharing encodes awareness effects, while number sharing yields a distributive interpretation. This also has implications for the possibility of inanimate antecedents in various configurations. Possibly because the Russian reflexives can only be partially valued and thus cannot be spelled out as fully specified personal pronouns, they never realize derivationally acquired phi-feature values morphologically. It is well known that across languages long-distance reflexives tend to be more strictly subject-oriented than local ones. In Russian this holds even if locality is understood in the relative sense.Except PRO, only antecedents that trigger overt agreement can bind reflexives across closer non-nominative potential antecedents. The latter can only enter into number dependencies and don't prevent a person dependency across them, which explains this pattern. The complementary distribution of reflexives and pronominals as an effect of Agree holds for every alternating derivation separately, so if the derivations don't converge on the same antecedent, their superposition may result in apparent non-complementarity. This presents a challenge to global competition approaches to pronominal distribution. Where pronominals are not ruled out by the effects of the Agree operation in Russian, it becomes possible to detect that they can only be bound in configurations that are not too local. Among other issues considered in this thesis are certain differences in binding of dependents of process and result nominals, which correlate with their NP-internal movement possibilities, as well as binding into higher circumstantial PPs and comparative adverbs, which appear accessible only to number dependencies. more...

This dissertation describes and explains the distribution of Russian complement clauses with the complementizer čto. It is shown that complement clauses with čto display distributional restrictions that are not manifested by their English and Dutch counterparts and that do not follow from the standard account of complement clauses in the literature. Two classes of environments are discussed where such restrictions are observed, namely, complements of speech act verbs in their non-agentive uses and complements of nouns. In order to account for the observed restrictions, this dissertation argues that clausal complements in Russian project a DP-layer and thus are subject to the Case requirement, just like nominal complements. Consequently, clausal complements must appear in Case positions, in contrast to the standardly held view. It is proposed that in apparent “Caseless” positions clausal complements are licensed by a null preposition, which has licensing conditions related to its semantic interpretation (as a two-place relation between a proposition and its “utterer”/“holder”). As a result, the observed restrictions on clausal complements in Russian follow from the Case requirement of clausal complements coupled with the licensing conditions on the null preposition. This dissertation is of relevance to researchers working on the syntax and semantic of clausal complements, Case and the grammar of Slavic languages. more...

What makes a sentence hard to process? Apart from the meanings of the words it contains, their number, and the way these words combine into constituents, words also contribute to processing difficulty on the basis of their accessibility in lexical retrieval. Apart from their frequency of use or their complexity in form, the words’ accessibility is also influenced by the number and roles of related forms in the structure in which they are stored. This is a factor that so far has not been sufficiently taken into account. As is experimentally shown in this dissertation, a measure for this is the inflectional entropy of the paradigm, an information theoretic measure that quantifies the support that a word can receive from its inflectional paradigm during activation. This study investigates how the interplay between the available processing resources, as predicted by the inflectional entropy, and the linguistic constraints, modulates the speed of processing within and between-sentences, as well as within- and between-languages. I follow the ACT-R model of sentence comprehension, proposed by Lewis and Vasishth (2005), which states that processing delays in working memory result from interference during retrieval induced by the similarity between the target and the already processed items. Assuming that interference effects are present across the board, I focus on the stage of lexical activation (the stage before interpretation) and on verbs, in particular. The experimental results reported in this dissertation demonstrate that a verb's accessibility in long term memory, what I call the Activation Potential (AP), is proportional to the inflectional entropy of its paradigm, determining the speed, and thus the effort, with which it is processed, and also, crucially,modulating the processing of the rest of the sentence. In fact, the processing speed of a reflexive object, like the Dutch zichzelf, and unlike a definite NP like Maria, depends on the way the main verb was processed, providing evidence that the reflexive’s interpretation requires an operation on the verb. The processing speed of dependent elements in a sentence follows the “easy-to-activate-hard-to-re-access” principle and can either be boosted or delayed by the amount of available processing resources: reflexives will be processed more slowly as an object of a quickly processed verb than as an object of a hardly processed verb, unless the processing system abounds in resources and can boost the slow processing of the former. This principle holds within a sentence but is more apparent at a between-language level. More precisely, languages with rich inflection, like Greek, although they have longer words and more complicated paradigms, nevertheless benefit in terms of processing effort, at least during theinitial processing stages. This is because they have verbs with higher inflectional entropy which require fewer resources during first activation when compared to languages with poor inflection, like Dutch. Saving on resources at the first stages of sentence processing can boost computations that are costly but can also lead to excessive processing effort in subsequent steps. I take this to be a reflection of the necessary trade-off between space and information for the sake of successful real-time computations. more...

During my research I looked at 117 languages and their anaphoric systems. The main goal of this study was to analyse reflexivization, its reasons and effects, by covering cross-linguistic data and by taking into account the variation we find on a macro- and micro-level. To be more precise, throughout this dissertation I investigated: whether we find indeed some special marking for reflexivity, i.e. licensing of reflexivity, across languages. whether there are complex reflexives that do not have to be locally bound. whether locally bound pronouns provide indeed an argument against a requirement of universal reflexive-marking. The languages discussed in this thesis show that licensing of reflexivity is universally required, but also that a complex anaphor doesn’t necessarily enforce reflexivity, as for instance Indonesian dirinya. Hence, licensing and enforcing can be seen as two separate mechanisms. Looking at the different non-enforcing anaphors showed that one always has to take into account language specific characteristics when analyzing the anaphoric system of one language. Also, of relevance for the binding behaviour of anaphors is on the one hand the internal structure of the noun phrase and on the other hand the feature composition of the elements involved. Locally bound pronouns in Fijian and Mashan Zhuang have been shown to be able to license reflexivity and to make use of reflexive strategies. Consequently, we can conclude that the cross-linguistic analysis of the phenomena of reflexivization serves as evidence that universals do exist contrary to what has been recently claimed in the literature. more...

The thesis is concerned with a peculiar extraction construction in German, called wh-copying. The peculiarity of this extraction construction is that the fronted constituent seems to be repeated in all intermediate clause initial positions. This peculiarity is interesting from a theoretical point of view, as it raises a number of questions regarding the way extraction is implemented in the grammar. After an inspection of mainly new data from German, the thesis argues first that the term wh-copying is a misnomer. The apparent copies of the fronted constituent are actually independent elements, more specifically, pronominals. These however often happen to be homophonous to the fronted constituent. Secondly, it is shown that these independent elements are nevertheless subject to a number of matching constraints requiring partial identity between this element and the fronted constituent. The theoretical challenge posed by these two results is the tension between them. On the one hand, the repeated element is distinct from the fronted constituent; on the other hand, it has to share some properties with it. The thesis then argues that this tension can be resolved if the Arc Pair Grammar framework is adopted. That the repeated element is a pronominal distinct from the fronted constituent is an effect of the interplay between the analyses for pronominals and extractions. Extraction in general creates a context in which pronominals can appear in clause initial positions; wh-copying is then nothing but the result of exploiting this option. The matching conditions regulating the features the fronted and the repeated element have to share can be subsumed under a single and simple requirement, viz. the requirement that both elements agree in the grammatical relation they bear. The reason why Arc Pair Grammar allows a resolution of the tension has to do with the analytical tools this framework provides. On the one hand, only the Arc Pair Grammar analysis of pronominals allows one to capture the connection between extraction and the presence of pronominals. On the other hand, since only Arc Pair Grammar recognizes grammatical relations as primitives, only it allows the formulation of such the requirement that the fronted constituent and the repeated element have to agree in their grammatical relation. In addition to this, the thesis also argues that the tension cannot be resolved in an adequate manner without recourse to these analytical tools. In the remainder if the thesis it is shown that these tools also offer insight into a number of syntactic phenomena completely different from wh-copying. more...

This dissertation is a study of prosody and anaphora. Its basic aim is to study the syntax and semantics of anaphora by using data from the prosody of sentences with reflexive and pronominal anaphors. In order to achieve that I first lay out a theory of focus, i.e. a theory of the correlation between the prosodic properties of an utterance and the informational status of its parts. The main innovation of the focus theory I argue for is that it equates the domains of focus with cyclic nodes in the syntactic derivation. This theory is applied on a wide range of examples with reflexive and pronominal anaphors. In the case of reflexive anaphors it is shown that no analysis that treats them like elements of type e can capture their prosodic properties. Instead, the prosody of reflexive anaphors requires that i. the alternatives to a focused reflexive anaphor are argument structure operations rather than individuals, and that ii. reflexive anaphors are functions that take relations as arguments. The second requirement is also shown to apply in the case of pronominal anaphors. Both reflexive and pronominal anaphors, then, are not arguments of verbs like other definite DPs. Crucially, however, in order to explain their prosodic properties pronominal anaphors do have to share a property with full DPs; like full DPs they have descriptive content that interacts with focus semantics. Other descriptive content of pronominal anaphors, however, like gender, does not interact with focus. This is shown to reveal something about the interaction of focus values with presupposition, namely that focus values are blind to presuppositional content. more...

This dissertation is about the syntax and semantics of non-local dependencies. It focuses on wh-displacement and operator scope and addresses the challenge they pose to theoretical linguistics: How are form and meaning related and to which extent do syntax and semantics operate in parallel? A common approach of formal grammar theories is to assume that displacement and scope construal go hand in hand, and consequently to impose a strict correspondence between syntax and semantics. This approach is challenged, however, by a considerable amount of cases where the syntactic position of an operator expression does not coincide with its semantic scope position. This dissertation therefore pursues the opposite approach. It argues that syntactic displacement and semantic scope-taking do not interact at all. The overall picture that is developed is that grammar consists of two parts: a core system for establishing local dependencies, with syntax and semantics operating in parallel, and extensions to this core system for establishing non-local dependencies, with syntax and semantics operating independently. In developing this picture, it is shown that a substantial amount of data (such as pronunciation in wh-clusters, order preservation with multiple displacement, remnant movement and freezing, as well as different scopal behavior) can indeed be accounted for with a syntax and semantics that are largely independent from one another more...

This thesis investigates two issues. It studies the interpretations of sentences with plural arguments and it analyzes anaphoricity triggered by the presence of semantically plural nouns. Regarding the first point, it is standardly assumed that sentences with plural arguments can have many interpretations. This thesis discusses various psycholinguistic experiments, as well as two new questionnaire studies, which show in detail how the preferences among these interpretations depend on the type of noun phrase, including preferences that are commonly not acknowledged in the semantic literature. One goal of this thesis is to offer a semantic and pragmatic account which captures all the interpretations but can also explain why some are preferred over others. The explanation is used for studying the anaphoric expressions `same', `different', `others' and reciprocals. What these expressions share is their ability to be anaphoric sentence-internally if there is a semantically plural noun in the clause. However, the availability of this reading depends on the type of noun phrase used, in a similar way that preferences in the interpretations do. Based on these and other data, the thesis offers a novel formal semantic analysis of reciprocals and argues for a particular semantics of `same', `different' and `others'. It is shown what consequences the analysis has for our understanding of anaphoricity and plurality. This study is relevant for scholars working on binding, anaphora, and the semantics and pragmatics of pluralities. More generally, it is of interest to scholars in the field of semantics and pragmatics, as well as for linguists working on the syntax-semantics interface more...

Anaphoric elements (e.g. reflexives such as himself, and pronouns such as she and his) are among the most frequently encountered words in virtually all human languages. The most important feature of these linguistic elements is that they cannot be fully interpreted in isolation, but depend on other elements in the utterance or text instead. Hence, an important question for linguists and psycholinguists is: How does our language system construct anaphoric dependencies? A straightforward possibility is that when readers or listeners encounter an anaphoric element, this will trigger a resolution mechanism which searches the mental representation of a text and picks the most plausible referent for the anaphoric element. However, linguistic research has shown that such a single-mechanism account would be too simple: we should distinguish between syntactic dependencies (i.e. A-Chain formation between a reflexive and its antecedent), semantic dependencies (i.e. bound-variable pronouns) and discourse dependencies (i.e. coreferential pronouns). In this dissertation Arnout Koornneef discusses the findings of a series of eye-tracking and self-paced reading experiments, aimed at evaluating the linguistic ‘Primitives of Binding’ model (Reuland, 2001). In this account it is proposed that a general economy principle governs the division of labor between the different subcomponents of the anaphora resolution system: the syntactic process is thought to be more economic than the semantic process and, similarly, the semantic process is thought to be more economic than the discourse process. The results suggest that this economy hierarchy has ‘behavioral reality’ and, furthermore, that anaphora resolution occurs in a fixed sequential order, i.e. syntactic anaphoric dependencies emerge before semantic anaphoric dependencies and, likewise, semantic anaphoric dependencies emerge before discourse anaphoric dependencies. At a more general level of conception the reported behavioral results demonstrate that incorporating linguistic research into (neuro)cognitive approaches to language comprehension is often helpful – or even mandatory – since linguistic theories clearly define the object of interest (e.g. the nature of anaphoric dependencies) and, furthermore, they generate research questions that would not have emerged otherwise. The author combines insights from theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics and this dissertation should therefore be of interest to scholars in any of these domains. more...

This dissertation addresses the issue of the relation between deviant behavior in agrammatic Broca's aphasia and the theory of grammar. Agrammatic Broca's aphasics have particular difficulties comprehending semantically reversible sentences in which the canonical order of arguments have been inverted. The working hypothesis is that agrammatic comprehension deficits with movement derived sentences are reducible to special cases of syntactic islands and ultimately can be explained as a minimality (in the sense of Rizzi 1990, 2004b) effect generated by an underspecification of the morphosyntactic featural make-up normally associated with syntactic categories. This impoverishment is attributed to a syntactic specific processing deficit which allows for a partial recovery of the full feature array needed to distinguish between a moved element and any potential intervener. The underspecification hypothesis is extended to comprehension and production deficits and, on this basis, parallels between deficits with movement and binding are drawn. Particular emphasis is given to the analysis of passives. Following Gehrke and Grillo's (2007, 2008) analysis of passivization as an operation on the event structure of the predicate, a novel approach to comprehension difficulties with passives in language acquisition and breakdown is discussed. Experimental data on production (originally discussed in Garraffa and Grillo 2008) of wh-questions in Italian is also discussed. This work is of interest to scholars working in the field of language breakdown, language acquisition as well as to linguists interested in the syntax of movement, locality and passivization. more...