Access to contextually-determined states in the interpretation of English stative participles

Stative passive participles (SPPs) differ in acceptability for different verbs: cf. The boxes are flattened/\#kicked. However, examples like those with kicked can be felicitous in very specific contexts, e.g. when box-kicking is an item to be checked off of a list: what will be called a \u27Job is Done\u27 (JiD) interpretation. An unresolved question in the prior literature is whether JiD is eventive or stative. This question takes on added significance in the context of recent work on the interpretation of SPPs. We argue that JiD is indeed stative, and show that this analysis has numerous  consequences for understanding the syntax and interpretation of SPPs

Causativization in Hupa

Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Role of Learnability in Grammatical Theory (1996

Movement Operations after Syntax

We develop a theory of movement operations that occur after the syntactic derivation, in the PF component, within the framework of Distributed Morphology.The theory is an extension of what was called Morphological Merger in Marantz 1984 and subsequent work.A primary result is that the locality properties of a Merger operation are determined by the stage in the derivation at which the operation takes place: specifically, Merger that takes place before Vocabulary Insertion, on hierarchical structures, differs from Merger that takes place post—Vocabulary Insertion/linearization.Specific predictions of the model are tested in numerous case studies.Analyses showing the interaction of syntactic movement, PF movement, and rescue operations are provided as well, including a treatment of Englishdo-support. </jats:p

Morphological Alternations at the Intonational Phrase Edge

This article develops an analysis of a pair of morphological alternations in K\u27ichee\u27 (Mayan) that are conditioned at the right edge of intonational phrase boundaries. I propose a syntax-prosody mapping algorithm that derives intonational phrase boundaries from the surface syntax, and then argue that each alternation can be understood in terms of output optimization. The important fact is that a prominence peak is always rightmost in the intonational phrase, and so the morphological alternations occur in order to ensure an optimal host for this prominence peak. Finally, I consider the wider implications of the analysis for the architecture of the syntax-phonology interface, especially as it concerns late-insertion theories of morphology

Unagreement is an illusion

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11049-015-9311-yThis paper proposes an analysis of unagreement, a phenomenon involving an apparent mismatch between a definite third person plural subject and first or second person plural subject agreement observed in various null subject languages (e.g. Spanish, Modern Greek and Bulgarian), but notoriously absent in others (e.g. Italian, European Portuguese). A cross-linguistic correlation between unagreement and the structure of adnominal pronoun constructions suggests that the availability of unagreement depends on whether person and definiteness are hosted by separate heads (in languages like Greek) or bundled on a single head (i.e. pronominal determiners in languages like Italian). Null spell-out of the head hosting person features high in the extended nominal projection of the subject leads to unagreement. The lack of unagreement in languages with pronominal determiners results from the interaction of their syntactic structure with the properties of the vocabulary items realising the head encoding both person and definiteness. The analysis provides a principled explanation for the cross-linguistic distribution of unagreement and suggests a unified framework for deriving unagreement, adnominal pronoun constructions, personal pronouns and pro

Intervention in two rhyme priming tasks

We report results from two experiments in which the effects of rhyme prime (RP) are investigated by manipulating the properties of the interveners between prime and target. Studies of visual priming report that interveners have differing effects depending on the types of processing they require; we extend this line of inquiry to the auditory domain. Results suggest that RP is affected by the types of processing required for interveners: intervening tones are less disruptive interveners than more complex nonwords. We relate this finding to the syllabic representations (or the process building them), and outline directions for further work