Browsing by Author "Windsor, Joseph W"
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- ItemOpen AccessThe distribution of Irish locatives (seo, sin, siúd): DP, AP, or other?(University of Calgary, 2014-09) Windsor, Joseph WThis paper presents phonological and syntactic evidence from Irish demonstratives to argue for phrasal structure and an addition to the syntactic hierarchy of projections in the nominal domain – the demonstrative phrase (DemP). Previously in the literature, demonstratives have been analyzed as belonging to the same category as adjectives (Leu 2008), or as belonging to the same category as determiners (Wiltschko 2009). In this paper, I explore the predictions made by these analyses by extending them to Irish. The Irish data refutes both of those analyses because of obligatory co-occurrence with determiners, and a lack of adjective agreement. Phonological evidence (consonantal weakening effects) further allow me to argue that, unlike what is proposed by Cinque (2005) or Roberts (to appear), the demonstrative projection is not low in the nominal structure, but is actually external to the determiner projection and very high in the structure. I conclude this paper by making cross-linguistic predictions which are briefly extended to English demonstratives and outlining avenues for future research in applying these hypotheses to unrelated, non-Indo-European languages.
- ItemOpen AccessOn the boundaries of Irish prosodic words(University of Calgary, 2011-09) Windsor, Joseph WThis study uses the facts of Irish lenition, gemination processes and stress placement constraints to refute the theory of the syntax-phonology interface proposed by Truckenbrodt (1999) where it is claimed that the only structure visible to phonology at the interface is that of phrases. I use these same facts in support of Match Theory (Selkirk 2009; to appear) which allows a direct 1:1 mapping between syntactic and phonological structure at the word, phrase and clausal levels. Further, I go on to propose strength conditions on the boundaries of prosodic words dependant on whether those words are maximal, or non-maximal recursive word structures. I conclude that while *STRUC constraints eliminate redundant word bracketing structure, it does not target recursive word bracketing provided that that bracket contain at least some segmental information. This fact will account for Geminate Inalterability (Ní Chosáin 1991; Green 2008) found in Irish coronal clusters as well as secondary stress placement present only in recursive word structure. These facts can only be handled by a theory that allows a direct mapping of all types of syntactic structures to prosodic structure and not just syntactic phrases to phonological phrases.