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This dissertation investigates the syntax and semantics of the verb ``say'' and clausal complementation involving the verb ``say''. Clausal complementation involving the verb ``say'' is among the most common strategies implemented across the world's languages and they exhibit morpho-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties that differ from other types of clausal complementation. The goal of this dissertation is to offer a syntactic analysis that offers an explanation for these differences. Each language that has ``say'' complementation also has a grammatical mechanism whose responsibility is to link verbs to form complex predicates. The null hypothesis in this dissertation is that ``say'' complementation does not involve a ``complementizer'', but instead involves a clause containing the verb ``say'' that adjoins to the matrix clause. The three questions taken up are as follows: (i) What are the morpho-syntactic and semantic properties of the verb ``say''?, (ii) What are the morpho-syntactic and semantic properties of the clause-linking mechanism, and (iii) Do ``say'' complementation structures exhibit the properties of ``say'' in a serialization structure? These questions are answered based primarily on data from Uyghur, English, and Avatime.Chapter One introduces discussion of the main puzzles, introduces background information about Uyghur and Avatime, and introduces a brief literature review that this dissertation builds on. Methodological information is also provided within the discussion of each language.Chapter Two introduces in-depth discussion of the verb ``say'' in English. Building upon intuitions presented in Grimshaw (2015), a morpho-syntactic analysis of the verb ``say'' as the overt realization of an abstract ``Light Verb'' SAY is provided. It is shown that ``say'' alternates between being stative and dynamic, which has effects on argument structure. More specifically, only dynamic ``say'' is capable of licensing a Goal argument and an Agent, whil

This dissertation investigates the interaction between syntax and Information Structure to account for the word order variations in Turkish. By examining the distributional and interpretive properties of Information Structural units, it proposes that semantically vacuous scrambling does not take place in Turkish. The dissertation brings in systematically built data sets from Turkish and argues that the long-lasting disagreements in the theory are due to the oversimplified nature of syntactic hierarchies. It puts forward that Turkish has five discourse-driven functional projections encoded in the syntactic structure-- three Topic projections: Aboutness, Contrastive, Discourse-Given and two Focus projections: Contrastive, and Informational. I specifically show that: (i) the left periphery of the clause structure is for the Aboutness/Contrastive Topic and the Contrastive Focus of the sentence, and (ii) the Discourse-Given Topic and the Informational Focus are below the IP domain (cf. Rizzi, 1997). I propose that all of the Topic projections as well as the Contrastive Focus trigger movement to the specifier of the relevant head, while the Informational Focus stays in-situ. The arguments supporting these claims result from a careful investigation of the interaction between scope-bearing elements and the Information Structure notions in Turkish.

This dissertation examines distributional and interpretive properties of complementizers and their surface complements, as well as prepositions and their surface complements in Greek. It establishes that (i) complementizer selection is sensitive to grammatical properties of the embedding verb, (ii) Greek complement clauses have different distributional properties than corresponding DPs: complement clauses obligatorily extrapose and they show striking subject-object asymmetries. Complement clauses also differ from corresponding DPs in that they have to reconstruct for binding purposes. The dissertation argues that these facts follow from where the complementizers enter the derivation, and how they get together with their complements. Concretely, it proposes that complementizers are merged in the matrix clause and that they are probes attracting their surface complements rather than merging directly with them (cf. Kayne 2000, 2005). The dissertation also shows that (functional) Ps and their complements come together in a similar manner. Like complementizers, prepositions are sensitive to grammatical properties of the verb they combine with. Furthermore, the complement of a preposition c-commands andbinds as a bare DP with the corresponding theta role. These two properties are amenable to an analysis in which prepositions select the verb they combine with, their surface DP complement is merged as a bare DP argument and is attracted by the preposition. Finally, the dissertation proposes a hierarchy of PPs strikingly similar to the one in Schweikert (2005). This hierarchy interacts with split wh-possessor constructions and provides new insights into their derivation.

The dissertation is devoted to the formal mechanisms that govern the use of evidentials, expressions of natural language that denote the source of information for the proposition conveyed by a sentence. Specifically, I am concerned with putative cases of semantic variation in evidentiality and with its previously unnoticed semantic uniformity.An ongoing debate in this area concerns the relation between evidentiality and epistemic modality. According to one line of research, all evidentials are garden variety epistemic modals. According to another, evidentials across languages fall into two semantic classes: (i) modal evidentials; and (ii) illocutionary evidentials, which deal with the structure of speech acts. The dissertation provides a long-overdue discussion of analytical options proposed for evidentials, and shows that the debate is lacking formally-explicit tools that would differentiate between the two classes. Current theories, even though motivated by superficially different data, make in fact very similar predictions. I reduce the cases of apparent semantic variation to factors independent from evidentiality, such as the syntax of clausal complementation, and show that these cases do not resolve the modal-illocutionary debate. I further propose novel empirical diagnostics that would identify modal-hood and speech-act-hood.I then turn to the many traits that evidentials within and across languages have in common. I argue that evidentials belong to the class of subjective expressions, along with first-person pain and attitude reports, and attribute to them a unified semantics of first-person mental states. The subjectivity of evidentials is contributed by two components: (i) the first-person component that is part of the conventional meaning of evidentials, analyzed as indexicality; and (ii) the mental state component that is rooted in the properties of cognitive processes described by evidentials (and other subjective expressions), such as perception and int

The purpose of this thesis is to propose a mechanism of genitive Case assignment in Japanese in which both a determiner (D) and a complementizer (C) independently play a role. I propose that both D and C can basically assign genitive Case, but C can serve as a genitive Case assigner only when the clause contains a nonfinite T. The evidence for this claim comes from Accusative/Genitive Conversion in Kansai Japanese, which was reported relatively recently by Asano and Ura (2010). What is the most significant in Accusative/Genitive Conversion is that the pattern in which both a subject and an object are marked as genitive at the same time is observed in Kansai Japanese, and it gives us crucial evidence for the claim that two different ways of genitive Case assignment are involved in Japanese.

Across languages, there is variability in the surface realization of reflexivity, according to various sets of properties. For example, there are languages (e.g. Greek, Lakhota) that seem to treat some of their reflexive clauses as being in a non-active voice, similar to a passive. There are also languages (e.g. French, Kannada) in which reflexivity is encoded differently depending on whether the antecedent is the subject or not. In this way, English seems to be different: reflexivity is apparently realized in a homogeneous way - filling an argument position with an anaphoric expression like themselves - regardless of clausal voice or grammatical role of the antecedent.This homogeneity is an illusion. Despite using a single set of anaphoric expressions for reflexivity in various situations, reflexive anaphors in English fall into two classes: those that exhibit exceptional prosodic behaviors, and those that do not.This exceptionality can be directly observed in two domains: the distribution of "default" phrasal stress, and the distribution of a certain focal accent. From the results of expirments on speech production and perception, I show that the distribution of exceptionally behaving reflexive anaphors is structurally constrained. This implicates that there must a be syntactic account for these prosodic properties.Assuming that syntactic structure plays a near deterministic role in prosody (an assumption going back to even the earliest generative work on phrasal stress; Chomsky and Halle 1968:25), I argue for a more refined syntactic structure of reflexivity. Briefly, I demonstrate a sub-class of reflexive anaphors in English undergo a syntactic movement (to a reflexive VoiceP). This movement, along with independently motivated mechanisms for placement of phrasal stress and focal accents, derives the heterogeneous prosodic behaviors of reflexives in English. Crucially, this analysis does not require the prosodic component to have any stipulations for specific (cl

This dissertation presents a new theory of the relationship between vagueness, context-sensitivity, and adjectival scale structure. Based on both new and well-known data, I show that the following subclasses of adjectival predicates are empirically distinguished in languages like English and French based on these three phenomena: Relative Adjectives (ex. tall, short, expensive, cheap, intelligent, stupid, narrow, wide. . . ), Total Absolute Adjectives (ex. bald, empty, full, clean, smooth, dry, straight, flat . . . ), Partial Absolute Adjectives (ex. dirty, bent, wet, curved, crooked, dangerous, awake. . . ), and Non-Scalar Adjectives (ex. atomic, geographical, pregnant, illegal, dead, hexagonal. . . ). The main goal of this work is to develop an formal account of both the semantic and pragmatic similarities and differences between the four subclasses of adjectives. I propose that the patterns concerning the behaviour of relative adjectives like tall vs absolute adjectives like straight and bent are reflexes of a single underlying difference in the semantics of these lexical items involving (a certain kind of) context-sensitivity. Moreover, I show that the data concerning both vagueness and scale structure can be derived from the interaction between (lack of) context-sensitivity and tolerance/indifference relations associated with general cognitive categorization processes. Building on insights into the connection between context-sensitivity and scalarity from the work of Klein (1980) (among others) and insights into the connection between tolerance relations and the Sorites paradox from the work of Cobreros et al. (2011a) (among others), I propose a new logical framework that captures the intimate and complex relationship between these three aspects of adjectival meaning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1984., MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES., Bibliography: leaves 321-325., by Dominique Sportiche., Ph.D.