Search

We review the various non-canonical positions in which the thematically highest argument can occur in Icelandic and in Swedish. We show that NPs in these non-canonical positions have subject properties in both languages. We summarize the restrictions that we are aware of holding on the various positions and discuss whether they are configurational or thematic/semantic in nature.

An ERP study investigated the processing of mass nouns used to convey ‘portions’ vs. ‘sorts’ interpretations in Icelandic. The sorts interpretation requires semantic Coercion to a count noun; the portions interpretation entails extra syntactic processing. Compared to a Neutral condition, Coercion escaped the expected penalty (N400), but the Extra Syntax condition incurred the anticipated costs (anterior negativity followed by P600). Furthermore, we examined the effects of having to revise an initial commitment to head-noun status. When another noun follows the mass noun (creating a compound), the second noun becomes the head-noun. We hypothesized, for Icelandic, there would be no effect for Extra Syntax because the compound should have been built before the second noun was encountered; by contrast, for the Coercion and Neutral conditions, processing costs would be incurred to detect and reconfigure the second noun as the head. These predictions were largely borne out (early and sustained anterior negativities).

A perennially challenging topic in generative syntax, the Middle Construction, has been the topic of several recent dissertations, including the book under review. Although not acknowledged as such in the published book, this is a moderately revised version of the Dr. Phil. (Promotion) dissertation, Middles in German: the syntax and semantics of transitive reflexive sentences, defended at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin in 1998. Steinbach's book is clearly the fullest treatment of the Middle Construction in German published in recent times. It presents an original and challenging analysis of this construction and offers a wealth of penetrating observations. As is natural for a review article, however, we will focus more on what we see as the problems and weaknesses of Steinbach's analysis than on the book's virtues.

This paper reports the results of an extensive study of a syntactic change currentlyunderway in Iceland. The new construction appears to contain a morphological passive auxiliaryand participle which is able to assign accusative case to a postverbal argument. The studywas designed to track the development of this ongoing change and to test the hypothesis thatthe innovative construction in fact involves the reanalysis of passive morphology as a syntactically active construction with a phonologically null impersonal subject. This syntactic change seems to parallel the completed development of the -no/to construction in Polish and theautonomous form in Irish.

This paper examines the mappings among morphological case, grammatical functions and thematic roles, focusing on dative as a place where the mapping between the morphosyntax and semantics is often assumed to be particularly regular. Evidence is provided from three Germanic languages, English, German and Icelandic, which shows that the mappings are more heterogeneous than is generally acknolwedged. An investigation of both co-occurrence restrictions and the lexical restrictions on adnominal genitives, middle formation and secondary prediction suggests that the linking of dative case to a verbal argument does not play a role in restricting lexical rules. Accusative goals are shown to behave in most respects just like dative goals, and dative themes just like accusative themes. Since the objects of transitive verbs do not all behave alike, theme cannot be treated as the default theta-role on verbal objects, and lexical rules may need to refer to the content of theta-roles, not just their relative position in a verb's theta-grid.

This article presents a theory of case assignment based on a hierarchy of grammatical functions. It focuses on the assignment of the syntactic cases nominative and accusative, singling out two phenomena: nominative objects and case alternations on adverbials of duration. A hierarchical as opposed to a structural analysis of nominative case provides a simple account for the occurrence of nominative objects with dyadic verbs which take oblique subjects, a phenomenon found in many genetically unrelated languages including Icelandic, Finnish, and Korean. Less common are languages in which adverbial noun phrases exhibit case alternations. This article reviews a complex array of case patterns focusing on certain adverbials which are sometimes marked accusative, sometimes nominative, depending on other properties of the clauses in which they occur.

In the Inalienable Possession Construction in Korean, the whole (possessor) and part (possessed) NPs typically agree in case. In this article, we argue that the apparent case-agreement is epiphenomenal. Investigation of verbs of various types that exhibit alternative case patterns reveals that the part-NP bears all and only the cases assigned by V to the relevant argument, whereas the whole-NP may bear either the case(s) assigned by V or nominative assigned by Infl, depending on its surface position. Thus the observed case-marking cannot be a consequence of case-agreement per se, but rather reflects direct case assignment by V and Infl independently to both part- and whole NPs. We call this the Direct Case Hypothesis. We further show that predication in small clause constructions is not marked by case-agreement in Korean, and suggest that case-agreement in this language is in fact limited to so-called Quantifier-floating. Finally, the evidence from case-marking is shown to shed light on the distinction between lexical versus syntactic passives.

This paper discusses constructions such as We'll have two beers and a coffee that are typically used for beverage orders in restaurant contexts. We compare the behavior of nouns in these constructions in three Germanic languages, English, Icelandic, and German, and take a closer look at the correlation of the morphosyntactic and semantic-conceptual changes involved. We show that even within such a restricted linguistic sample in closely related languages one finds three different grammatical options for the expression of the same conceptual transition. Our findings suggest an analysis of coercion as a genuinely semantic phenomenon, located on a level of semantic representations that serves as an interface between the conceptual and the grammatical systems and takes into account inter- and intralinguistic variations.Work on this paper was supported by NSF award BCS-0080377 to Boston University. The material is based in part on work done while the second author was serving as Director of the Linguistics Program at the U.S. National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this material are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. National Science Foundation. For comments on an earlier version, we would like to thank two anonymous JGL reviewers.

Publisher Summary This chapter presents a simple argument for subject gaps. Relative clauses have figured prominently in the research on real-time language processing. The assumption that wh-movement always has the same structural effect regardless of the extraction site, may be considered the null hypothesis. This preposing of nonfinite verb forms applies only in clauses which lack subjects. The relevant question, then, is whether it can apply to clauses in which the subject has been questioned or relativized. There are certain adverbial phrases which can be fronted to clause-initial position, but which cannot occur between the subject and the finite verb. The fact that the relative pronoun must precede the fronted adverbial phrase indicates that wh-movement not only can, but must move the subject NP (noun phrase) from its underlying position to a position to the left of the fronted adverbial, a position which under current theoretical assumptions is identified as [Spec,CP]. It seems clear, therefore, that syntactic representations must allow for string-vacuous movement. Even subject relatives contain a relative gap which must be filled by the moved wh-constituent.

We argue that in Germanic languages, predicate NPs always receive case structurally. In some languages (English, Frisian, Danish and Norwegian), the copula verb is itself an accusative case assigner; in other languages (Icelandic, Swedish and German), case features from a higher case-assigner are able to penetrate into the VP containing the predicate NP. Under this view, any apparent case `agreement’ between subject and predicate NP is epiphenomenal, due not to a rule of agreement under coindexation, but rather to the fact that both NPs are dependent on I for case, through Spec-head agreement on the one hand, but under government on the other. The hypotheses that predicate NPs are caseless or that they receive default case are shown to be untenable. The Structural Case Hypothesis is shown to provide a simple account of some complex case alternations in Icelandic.

By far the most striking aspect of reflexivization in modern Icelandic is that it is not clause-bounded (Thrainsson 1976a, Maling 1982, 1984). But the purpose of this paper is to show that even clause-bounded reflexivization is not nearly as simple as the description of Icelandic reflexives in the literature would indicate (see, e.g., Thrainsson 1979, Harbert 1981).1 The distribution of reflexive pronouns within finite clauses shows clearly that any framework which does not recognize predication relationships cannot hope to account for the differences between various kinds of simplex sentences with respect to reflexivization. Furthermore, since there are phrasal complements which cannot plausibly be derived from full clauses but which nonetheless exhibit the same pattern of reflexives as infinitival complements, the reflexive facts alone cannot be taken to justify a clausal analysis of infinitives.

Various linguists working within the theory of Government and Binding (e.g. Hornstein & Weinberg (1981), Kayne (1981)) have attempted to provide a unified account of preposition-stranding. This article uses evidence from Icelandic to show that preposition-stranding is not a unified phenomenon. Although Icelandic freely allows preposition-stranding in wh-movement constructions, it lacks prepositional passives in which the prepositional object of an active verb corresponds to the grammatical subject of a passive verb. Various syntactic tests which distinguish between grammatical subjects and topicalized NPs are used to demonstrate this. Our conclusion is that while lexical reanalysis is needed to account for prepositional passives, no such reanalysis is warranted for preposition-stranding due to wh-movement; hence, an adequate theory of preposition-stranding must allow for two separate parameters.

This paper is an investigation into the criteria for establishing syntacitc categories, and more specifically, into the problem of distinguishing between the categories of Adjective and Preposition. I will argue that in the history of English, at least two adjectives, like and worth, were reanalyzed as prepositions. Two questions come to mind: Why did the categorial reanalysis take place? What were the grammatical consequences of the reanalysis, i.e. what change(s) in the words’ use followed as a result? The answers to these questions provide evidence as to the grammatical function of complements of different syntactic categories. They also show how very little of the evidence traditionally used by linguists to establish categories is strictly syntactic in nature.

0.0 The aim of this paper is threefold: (i) to present data from Scandinavian languages that any general theory of island constraints must account for; (ii) to describe these data in the framework being developed in Gazdar (this volume), Sag (this volume), Gazdar, Pullum and Sag (1980), and to show that while a straightforward extension of the framework to cover the Scandinavian data is possible, it leads to an increase in generative capacity of the theory so that it no longer provides grammars only for context-free languages; and (iii) to sketch a theory of island constraints that transfers some of the burden of explanation from the syntax to processing mechanisms on the one hand and to discourse organization on the other.