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The research investigated the tonal system of the Hakka dialect spoken in the Aceh province of Indonesia. The aim of the research was twofold. First, it retranscribed the dialect’s tonal inventory and provided a comparison with Meixian Hakka and the inventory found in Chen’s (2007) research. Second, it analyzed the Shang Tone Sandhi Rule (STSR) of the dialect and its prosodic domain. The data were collected with a careful design based on the number of syllables, different prosodic structures, and a variety of tonal combinations. The data were collected from two informants, who were female Hakka native speakers that originated from Banda Aceh, Indonesia. The research used mainly an impressionistic approach with some support from Praat Version 6.2.14 to evaluate the pitch of the tones. As for the research’s transcription, the researchers opt for the simpler yet phonologically distinct three-level height system (H, M, L) rather than the five-pitch category of Chao. The research identifies that there are six tonal values in this dialect. The tonal alternation rule, i.e., STSR, operates in a multisyllabic domain, and only the tone at the end of a domain is intact from tonal alternation. The STSR is not sensitive to the syntactic domain c-command relation of the Direct Reference Hypothesis. It also behaves differently compared to the Guangxing dialect Yangping Tone Sandhi Rule. As for prosody, the hierarchical domain of the rule in Aceh Hakka is bounded within the Utterance (U), which is different from the Yinping tone sandhi domain in Meinong Hakka, in which tone sandhi is blocked by the I domain (intonational phrase domain). Therefore, the researchers postulate that the domain for Aceh Hakka Shang tone sandhi lies in the Utterance (U).

In the present study, we investigate if and how null and overt subject pronouns interpretation preferences in Italian can be influenced by two factors: (i) the presence of c-commanding antecedents (Rizzi 2018) and (ii) the ‘impatient parser’ (Sorace and Filiaci 2006; Fedele and Kaiser 2014). To disentangle the effects of c-commanding antecedents and of the ‘impatient parser’, we compare experimental conditions differing for only one of the two factors. The comparison demonstrates that c-commanding antecedents influence the interpretation of null pronouns but not the interpretation of overt pronouns, while no effect of the impatient parser is found for either null or overt pronouns. In addition, we found that external referent interpretation preferences are modulated by Principle C effects for null and overt pronouns, albeit to different degrees. External referent choices also increase when an

Reinhart (1983) proposed that quantificational binding is subject to a surface c-command condition. Her claim has been widely accepted in the literature on the syntax-semantics interface. However, Barker (2012) presented systematic counterevidence against the c-command requirement from English. The current paper addresses the role of c-command constraints in the grammar of three phenomena in German: relative quantifier scope, quantificational binding, and negative polarity. The results of a large corpus study are presented that demonstrate empirically that scope of one quantifier over another, quantificational binding, and the licensing of negative polarity items in German are systematically possible in structural configurations where surface c-command cannot reasonably be assumed to obtain. Further corpus evidence is produced which shows that the non-c-commanding quantifiers in the examples typically occur in contexts where the set they quantify over is discourse-old or easy to accommodate. The overall picture that emerges from the empirical evidence is that topicality motivates wide scope, and scope rather than c-command licenses negative polarity items and bound pronouns.

This paper dwells on an interesting contrast between Romance (Romanian, Spanish a.o.) and Germanic languages (English, German a.o.) with respect to the syntax and the interpretation of the direct object (DO). One structural difference between these two groups of languages amounts to the fact that the former clitic double (CD) and differentially object mark (DOM) their direct objects while the latter do not. This leads to important interpretive consequences when it comes to phenomena such as Subject-Object binding dependences: Non-CD languages rely on the c-command configuration and surface word order in resolving binding relations (the antecedent must ccommand the element containing the bound pronoun. As a consequence, a natural way for the DO to bind into the Subject is to have it moved to the left, in a preceding, c-commanding position). As will be shown, in CD languages, the word order configuration is not decisive: the direct object may bind the subject without having to precede it at the same time. The paper draws a parametric difference between configurational languages (where binding is closely linked to the c-command configurations and is sensitive to surface word order) and nonconfigurational languages, where the same semantic properties can be derived from the internal structure of the direct object (through its featural specification). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Pragmalingüística is the property of Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, Universidad de Cadiz and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Pronouns can sometimes covary with a non c-commanding quantifier phrase (QP). To obtain such 'telescoping' readings, a semantic representation must be computed in which the QP's semantic scope extends beyond its surface scope. Non-native speakers have been claimed to have more difficulty than native speakers deriving such non-isomorphic syntax-semantics mappings, but evidence from processing studies is scarce. We report the results from an eye-movement monitoring experiment and an offline questionnaire investigating whether native and non-native speakers of German can link personal pronouns to non c-commanding QPs inside relative clauses. Our results show that both participant groups were able to obtain telescoping readings offline, but only the native speakers showed evidence of forming telescoping dependencies during incremental parsing. During processing the non-native speakers focused on a discourse-prominent, non-quantified alternative antecedent instead. The observed group differences indicate that non-native comprehenders have more difficulty than native comprehenders computing scope-shifted representations in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims at investigating the distribution of the possessive pronouns in Modern Standard Arabic. It shows that when the possessive pronouns are used as reflexives they have implications for the word order. The different positions occupied by the objects are determined by the presence of these pronouns and the binding relations within the c-commanding domain. Building on the basic assumptions of Binding Theory, possessive pronouns are best treated as normal pronominal elements which are subject to condition B. However, when they are used as anaphoric elements in certain contexts, they have to be c-commanded by their antecedents. Depending on the derivational level at which c-command relation is established between the reflexive possessive pronoun and its antecedent, movement of the possessive pronoun along with the phrase containing is optional in certain structures or, in other structures, the pronoun becomes frozen in the position in which it is base-generated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on subject-verb agreement production in SVO languages has shown that objects moved pre-verbally sometimes trigger attraction, i.e., erroneous agreement of the verb with the object rather than the subject. Moreover, objects c-commanding one of the agreement positions in the hierarchical structure were found to generate stronger attraction than those linearly preceding them. Evidence for the role of c-command comes from the observation that the accusative clitic in French triggers stronger attraction than the preverbal dative pronoun and the PP modifier (Franck et al. 2006; 2010). In this study, we report the results of an experiment in Persian (an SOV language) in which subject–verb agreement was elicited by presenting sentences in Rapid Serial Visual Presentation procedure (RSVP) followed by verb selection (Staub 2009; 2010). We compared attraction errors induced by pre-verbal accusatives versus datives in the canonical SOV word order as well as the OSV word order. Corroborating Franck et al. (2006; 2010), we found stronger attraction when the pre-verbal object occupies a c-commanding position in the hierarchical structure than when it simply precedes one of the agreement positions in the linear string. We also found stronger attraction in the OSV word order as compared to the canonical SOV word order. This finding is attributed to the real-time processes of erroneous structure building and/or erroneous controller selection during subject-verb agreement computation.

This article investigates the syntax of the phrase-final focus particles kuphela and qha 'only' in Zulu and Xhosa (Nguni; Bantu). We show that kuphela's and qha's associations with a focused constituent respect the complex topography of information structure in Nguni and, like English only, a surface c-command requirement. However, unlike English only, the Zulu and Xhosa particles typically follow the focus associate they c-command, a fact that poses a serious challenge for Kayne's (1994) antisymmetry theory. We demonstrate that the Nguni facts are incompatible with recent Linear Correspondence Axiom–inspired approaches to phrase-final particles in other languages and, after weighing the merits of several approaches, we conclude that kuphela is an adjunct and that syntax is only weakly antisymmetric: adjuncts are not subject to the LCA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Arts & Social Sciences (JASS) is the property of Sultan Qaboos University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

It is generally assumed that interpreting a co-referential or a syntactically-bound pronoun requires retrieving a representation of its antecedent from memory. Donkey pronouns (e.g., Geach 1962) are pronouns that co-vary in interpretation with non-c-commanding indefinite QPs in apparent violation of structural constraints on QP-pronoun relations (Reinhart 1976). Recent research (Moulton & Han 2018) has hypothesized that the real-time processing of donkey pronouns may not involve retrieval of the co-varying indefinite QP as an antecedent, because non-c-commanding QPs are assumed to be inaccessible to retrieval. We tested this hypothesis with a self-paced reading study that compared the processing of standard co-referential pronouns and donkey pronouns in Norwegian. Contrary to the hypothesis, our results indicate that donkey pronouns retrieve a feature-matching antecedent from memory in a manner analogous to how co-referential pronouns retrieve a referential antecedent. Our findings imply that retrieval of a feature-matching antecedent is a necessary step in the processing of all pronouns, irrespective of their ultimate interpretation. Moreover, retrieval does not uniformly ignore non-referential NPs that fail to c-command a pronoun. We briefly discuss the implications of these findings for psycholinguistic models of anaphora resolution and formal theories of donkey pronouns.

Copyright of Journal of Arts & Social Sciences (JASS) is the property of Sultan Qaboos University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

• In three experiments, we study the processing of cataphoric reflexives. • We find that readers initially process cataphoric reflexives anaphorically. • We interpret this as evidence of pressure to interpret reflexives incrementally. • Anaphoric and cataphoric reflexives show differential sensitivity to syntax. English reflexives like herself tend to associate with a structurally prominent local antecedent in online processing. However, past work has primarily investigated reflexives in canonical direct object positions. The present study investigates cataphoric reflexives in fronted wh -predicates (e.g., The mechanic that James hired predicted how annoyed with himself the insurance agent would be). Here, the reflexive is encountered in advance of its grammatical antecedent. We ask two questions. First, will readers engage an anaphoric (backwards-looking) or cataphoric (forwards-looking) search for an antecedent? Two, how similar is this process to the retrieval process for direct object reflexives? In two eye-tracking experiments, we found that readers initially interpret a cataphoric reflexive anaphorically, and tend to associate the reflexive with the more recently encountered antecedent. We propose that structural guidance for reflexive resolution occurs only when the necessary configurational syntactic information is available when the reflexive is encountered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper, conducted within the framework of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky1995), considers aspects of the licensing relation which obtains between Negation (Neg) and N-words in Amazigh. By N-words, I mean elements like 'ħtta+NP' (no-one), which are licensed by Neg. The paper shows that the Neg-N-word relation in this language is one of feature checking, with Neg-features present on the N-word requiring to be paired with corresponding features on the functional head Neg prior to Spell-Out in the position they occupy, i.e. base generated in the c-command domain of Neg. It provides further evidence for the analysis of N-words from Moroccan Arabic, one which argues for a different view of feature checking/licensing from that proposed in Chomsky 1995. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there are very clearly some structural constraints on pronoun interpretation, debate remains as to their extent and proper formulation (Bruening 2014). Since Reinhart 1976 it has commonly been reported that bound-variable pronouns are subject to a c-command requirement. This claim is not universally agreed upon and has recently been challenged by Barker (2012), who argues that bound pronouns must merely fall within the semantic scope of a binding quantifier. In the processing literature, recent results have been advanced in support of c-command (Cunnings et al. 2015, Kush et al. 2015). However, none of these studies separates semantic scope from structural c-command. In this article, we present two self-paced reading studies and one off-line judgment task which show that when we put both c-commanding and non-c-commanding quantifiers on an equal footing with regard to their ability to scope over a pronoun, we nonetheless find a processing difference between the two. Semantically legitimate but non-c-commanded bound variables do not behave like c-commanded bound variables in their search for an antecedent. The results establish that c-command, not scope alone, is relevant for the processing of bound variables. We then explore how these results, combined with other experimental findings, support a view in which the grammar distinguishes between c-commanded and non-c-commanded variable pronouns, the latter perhaps being disguised definite descriptions (Cooper 1979, Evans 1980, Heim 1990, Elbourne 2005). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the processing of pronouns in Strong and Weak Crossover constructions as a means of probing the extent to which the incremental parser can use syntactic information to guide antecedent retrieval. In Experiment 1 we show that the parser accesses a displaced wh-phrase as an antecedent for a pronoun when no grammatical constraints prohibit binding, but the parser ignores the same wh-phrase when it stands in a Strong Crossover relation to the pronoun. These results are consistent with two possibilities. First, the parser could apply Principle C at antecedent retrieval to exclude the wh-phrase on the basis of the c-command relation between its gap and the pronoun. Alternatively, retrieval might ignore any phrases that do not occupy an Argument position. Experiment 2 distinguished between these two possibilities by testing antecedent retrieval under Weak Crossover. In Weak Crossover binding of the pronoun is ruled out by the argument condition, but not Principle C. The results of Experiment 2 indicate that antecedent retrieval accesses matching wh-phrases in Weak Crossover configurations. On the basis of these findings we conclude that the parser can make rapid use of Principle C and c-command information to constrain retrieval. We discuss how our results support a view of antecedent retrieval that integrates inferences made over unseen syntactic structure into constraints on backward-looking processes like memory retrieval.

A recent study questioned the adherence of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to a linguistic constraint on the use of reflexive pronouns (Principle A) in sentences like Bart's dad is touching himself. This led researchers to question whether children with ASD are able to compute the hierarchical structural relationship of c-command, and raised the possibility that the children rely on a linear strategy for reference assignment. The current study investigates the status of c-command in children with ASD by testing their interpretation of sentences like (1) and (2) that tease apart use of c-command and a linear strategy for reference assignment. (1) The girl who stayed up late will not get a dime or a jewel (C-command) (2) The girl who didn't go to sleep will get a dime or a jewel (Non C-command) These examples both contain negation (not or didn't) and disjunction (or). In (1), negation c-commands the disjunction phrase, yielding a conjunctive entailment. This gives rise to the meaning that the girl who stayed up late won't get a dime and she won't get a jewel. In (2), negation is positioned inside a relative clause and it does not c-command disjunction. Therefore, no conjunctive entailment follows. Thus, (2) is true if the girl just gets a dime or just a jewel, or possibly both. If children with ASD lack c-command, then (1) will not give rise to a conjunctive entailment. In this case, children might rely on a linear strategy for reference assignment. Since negation precedes disjunction in both (1) and (2), they might be interpreted in a similar manner. Likewise, children who show knowledge of c-command should perform well on sentences governed by Principle A. These hypotheses were tested in experiments with 12 Australian children with HFA, aged 5;4 to 12;7, and 12 typically-developing controls, matched on non-verbal IQ. There was no significant difference in the pattern of responses by children with HFA and the control children on either (1) and (2) or the Principle A sentences. The findings provide preliminary support for the proposal that knowledge of c-command and Principle A is intact in HFA children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hauser et al. (2002) suggest that the human language faculty emerged as a genetic innovation in the form of what is called here a ‘keystone factor’—a single, simple, formal mental capability that, interacting with the pre-existing faculties of hominid ancestors, caused a cascade of effects resulting in the language faculty in modern humans. They take Merge to be the keystone factor, but instead it is posited here that Merge is the pre-existing mechanism of thought made viable by a principle that permits relations interpretable at the interfaces to be mapped onto c-command. The simplified minimalist architecture proposed here respects the keystone factor as closely as possible, but is justified on the basis of linguistic analyses it makes available, including a relativized intervention theory applicable across Case, scope, agreement, selection and linearization, a derivation of the A/A’-distinction from Case theory, and predictions such as why in situ wh-interpretation is island-insensitive, but susceptible to intervention effects.

This article claims that some familiar properties of phrase structure reflect laws of form. It is shown that optimal sequencing of recursive Merge operations so as to dynamically minimize c-command and containment relations in unlabeled branching forms leads to structural correlates of projection. Thus, a tendency for syntactic structures to pattern according to the X-bar schema (or other shapes exhibiting endocentricity and maximality of ‘non-head daughters’) is plausibly an emergent epiphenomenon of efficient computation. The specifier-head-complement configuration of X-bar theory is shown to be intimately connected to the Fibonacci sequence, suggesting connections with similar mathematical properties in optimal arboration and optimal packing elsewhere in nature.

We propose that the antecedent of a donkey pronoun takes scope over and binds the donkey pronoun, just like any other quantificational antecedent would bind a pronoun. We flesh out this idea in a grammar that compositionally derives the truth conditions of donkey sentences containing conditionals and relative clauses, including those involving modals and proportional quantifiers. For example, an indefinite in the antecedent of a conditional can bind a donkey pronoun in the consequent by taking scope over the entire conditional. Our grammar manages continuations using three independently motivated type-shifters, Lift, Lower, and Bind. Empirical support comes from donkey weak crossover (*He beats it if a farmer owns a donkey): in our system, a quantificational binder need not c-command a pronoun that it binds, but must be evaluated before it, so that donkey weak crossover is just a special case of weak crossover. We compare our approach to situation-based E-type pronoun analyses, as well as to dynamic accounts such as Dynamic Predicate Logic. A new 'tower' notation makes derivations considerably easier to follow and manipulate than some previous grammars based on continuations. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.1.1 BibTeX info See also the interactive tutorial about the system in this paper

We report three experiments on French that explore number mismatch effects in intervention configurations in the comprehension of object A’-dependencies, relative clauses and questions. The study capitalizes on the finding of object attraction in sentence production, in which speakers sometimes erroneously produce a verb that agrees in number with a plural object in object relative clauses. Evidence points to the role of three critical constructs from formal syntax: intervention, intermediate traces and c-command (Franck et al., 2010). Experiment 1, using a self-paced reading procedure on these grammatical structures, shows the enhancing effect of number mismatch in intervention configurations, with faster reading times with plural (mismatching) objects. Experiment 2, using an on-line grammaticality judgment task on the ungrammatical versions of these structures, shows an interference effect in the form of attraction, with slower response times with plural objects. Experiment 3 with a similar grammaticality judgment task shows stronger attraction from c-commanding than from preceding interveners. Overall, the data suggest that syntactic computations in performance refer to the same syntactic representations in production and comprehension, but that different tasks tap into different processes involved in parsing: whereas performance in self-paced reading reflects the intervention of the subject in the process of building an object A’-dependency, performance in grammaticality judgment reflects intervention of the object on the computation of the subject-verb agreement dependency. The latter shows the hallmarks of structure-dependent attraction effects in sentence production, in particular, a sensitivity to specific characteristics of hierarchical representations.

Our aim in this paper is to show that Chomsky's Minimalist Program brings in a new way to conceive the Language Faculty and, thus, the Universal Grammar as well. Therefore, it opens up a whole range of possibilities for the language acquisition field. Explanations have to be motivated by virtual conceptual necessity: either through bare output conditions imposed by the interfaces, or through economy conditions of the computational system. Our point is that it should work likewise for language acquisition. If economy conditions play a role in the Language Faculty, then they must be important for the language acquisition process. If interface levels are essential for the Language Faculty, then they must play a role in the acquisition process as well. In order to pinpoint such issues we will discuss some evidence from the asymmetry between the child's initial production of subject and object in different languages. Our guiding hypothesis is that the basic syntactic relation that is privileged by the child acquiring a language is c-command.

Tone is widely reported as a prosodic feature of many African and Asian languages that contrasts meaning among words and sentential constructions. Hardly have any of the studies examined in detail the underlying syntactic principles which make it perform such functions. This article therefore investigates the principles which underlie the function of tone in the Igbo language, an East Benue Congo language, with particular emphasis on grammatical tone. This is done with the hope that the findings of the study can be inductively applied to other tone languages across the world. It answers such questions as: what are the principles which enable tone to perform its grammatical functions? What syntactic positions predispose tone to perform the grammatical functions? What are the grammatical realisations of tonal governance? The paper finds that tone is a constituent commander and governor. The principle of precede and constituent command (c-command) underlies tone governance. Just as in proper government, tone governs the lexical items, which it c-commands. The scope of tone and its domain of governance vary from one structure to another. The position of the governor determines its domain of governance and the kind of structure that is realised after governance. Such syntactic constructions as the negative, perfective, past tense, and serial verb constructions result from tonal government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal grammatical theories make extensive use of syntactic relations (e.g. c-command, Reinhart, 1983) in the description of constraints on antecedent-anaphor dependencies. Recent research has motivated a model of processing that exploits a cue-based retrieval mechanism in content-addressable memory (e.g. Lewis, Vasishth, & Van Dyke, 2006) in which item-to-item syntactic relations such as c-command are difficult to use as retrieval cues. As such, the c-command constraints of formal grammars are predicted to be poorly implemented by the retrieval mechanism. We tested whether memory access mechanisms are able to exploit relational information by investigating the processing of bound variable pronouns , a form of anaphoric dependency that imposes a c-command restriction on antecedent-pronoun relations. A quantificational NP (QP, e.g., no janitor ) must c-command a pronoun in order to bind it. We contrasted the retrieval of QPs with the retrieval of referential NPs (e.g. the janitor ), which can co-refer with a pronoun in the absence of c-command. In three off-line judgment studies and two eye-tracking studies, we show that referential NPs are easily accessed as antecedents, irrespective of whether they c-command the pronoun, but that quantificational NPs are accessed as antecedents only when they c-command the pronoun. These results are unexpected under theories that hold that retrieval exclusively uses a limited set of content features as retrieval cues. Our results suggest either that memory access mechanisms can make use of relational information as a guide for retrieval, or that the set of features that is used to encode syntactic relations in memory must be enriched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report three experiments on French that explore number mismatch effects in intervention configurations in the comprehension of object A'-dependencies, relative clauses and questions. The study capitalizes on the finding of object attraction in sentence production, in which speakers sometimes erroneously produce a verb that agrees in number with a plural object in object relative clauses. Evidence points to the role of three critical constructs from formal syntax: intervention, intermediate traces and c-command (Franck et al., 2010). Experiment 1, using a self-paced reading procedure on these grammatical structures with an agreement error on the verb, shows an enhancing effect of number mismatch in intervention configurations, with faster reading times with plural (mismatching) objects. Experiment 2, using an on-line grammaticality judgment task on the ungrammatical versions of these structures, shows an interference effect in the form of attraction, with slower response times with plural objects. Experiment 3 with a similar grammaticality judgment task shows stronger attraction from c-commanding than from preceding interveners. Overall, the data suggest that syntactic computations in performance refer to the same syntactic representations in production and comprehension, but that different tasks tap into different processes involved in parsing: whereas performance in self-paced reading reflects the intervention of the subject in the process of building an object A'-dependency, performance in grammaticality judgment reflects intervention of the object on the computation of the subject-verb agreement dependency. The latter shows the hallmarks of structuredependent attraction effects in sentence production, in particular, a sensitivity to specific characteristics of hierarchical representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses the issue of Visser's Generalization (VG), holding that Subject Control verbs are incompatible with the passive, and proposes a solution based on a combination of the passive seen as smuggling and Obligatory Control seen as A-movement (Hornstein 2001, Hornstein & Polinsky 2010). The smuggling-type passive is perfectly compatible with the behavior of Object Control verbs, while also showing that in the case of passivized Subject Control constructions the crucial c-command link between the controller and PRO is not preserved, thus inducing the VG effect. This solution leads to three expectations confirmed in the literature: (a) lack of object promotion, meaning no smuggling of the infinitive and PRO out of the c-command domain of the implicit Agent, does not disturb Subject Control (van Urk 2011); (b) PRO requires c-command by its controller at LF, which holds true once the apparently problematic cases of intraposition and extraposition in Super Equi and the concept of logophoric extension from (Landau 2001, 2010) are reconsidered; (c) the smuggled constituent including the infinitive does not reconstruct to its original position. Alternative proposals are also considered to show the empirical adequacy of the presented solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relation of c-command (Reinhart 1976, 1983) is widely believed to be THE fundamental relation in syntax, underlying such diverse phenomena as coreference (the BINDING PRINCIPLES), scope and variable binding, syntactic movement, and so on. Precedence is generally held to be irrelevant. This article argues that this view is mistaken. Syntax does not involve c-command at all, but rather a much coarser notion of command, PHASE-COMMAND, where only phasal nodes matter, not every node in the tree. Precedence also plays an important role. The article argues this point in detail for the binding principles, and shows that the relation that is required is PRECEDE-AND-COMMAND (Langacker 1969, Jackendoff 1972, Lasnik 1976), where command is phase-command. It revisits Reinhart's arguments for c-command and against precedence, and shows that those arguments do not go through. Finally, precede-and-command does not need to be stipulated, but follows from a view of grammar and processing where sentences are built in a left-to-right fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some version of the following claim is almost universally assumed: a quantifier must c-command any pronoun that it binds. Yet as I show, the evidence motivating this claim is not particularly strong. In addition, I gather here a wide variety of systematic counterexamples, some well-known, others new. I conclude that c-command is not relevant for quantificational binding in English (nor is any refinement or extension of c-command). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Chinese bi comparatives should be divided into two types: phrasal and clausal. In the former, the prepositional subordinator bi introduces as standard of comparison one syntactic constituent that does not involve comparative deletion; in the latter, however, a clause with more than one standard constituent is introduced and this clause obligatorily involves comparative deletion and a degree operator-variable binding relation in syntax. Among the conditions to which building a Chinese bi comparative is subject, two conditions interact to disallow comparative subdeletion: (A) the bi phrase occurs as an adjunct phrase adjoined to the left of the predicate of comparison and (B) the standard constituent must be minimally c-commanded by its corresponding main clause correlate. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]