Volume 21, Winter 1999
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Browsing Volume 21, Winter 1999 by Subject "Syntax"
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- ItemOpen AccessCalgary Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 21, Winter 1999(University of Calgary, 1999-01) Atkey, Susan; Belland, Jana; Rowsell, Lorna V; Strickland, MelanieThe editors of, this volume, Susan Atkey, Jana Belland, Melanie Strickland and Lorna Rowsell are pleased to present the twenty-first issue of the Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics published by the department of Linguistics at the University of Calgary. The papers contained in this volume represent works in progress and as such should not be considered in any way final or definitive.
- ItemOpen AccessEvent structure and syntax: German*(University of Calgary, 1999-01) Wilhelm, AndreaThis paper deals with the role of the lexicon versus the syntax in event structure by examining particle verb formation in German. There are two types of particles in German: Delimiting particles, which derive accomplishments or activities from activity base verbs, and nondelimiting ones, which leave the aspectual class of the base verb (activity) unchanged. A theory such as Ritter & Rosen (1998, to appear), which explicitly represents event structure in the syntax (e.g., through an FF-delimitation) is not able to account for the German facts, as it cannot explain the uniform morphosyntactic behavior of all particles. An analysis which combines syntactic structure (VP-shells, following Hale & Keyser (1994), Chomsky (1995)) and lexical features is adapted. It treats particles as heads of an empty PP in the lower VP. Delimiting particles are distinguished from nondelimiting ones through a lexical feature [+delim]. This analysis is also successful in providing homogeneous case-marking for all internal arguments. It questions Ritter & Rosen's purely syntactic analysis of event structure, where delimitation is assumed to be a grammatical primitive.
- ItemOpen AccessMultiple wh-movement and superiority effects in Czech(University of Calgary, 1999-01) Atkey, SusanThis paper examines multiple wh-movement in Czech. Rudin (1988) argues that Czech is a [-Multiply Filled Spec, CP] language in which only one wh-word appears in Spec,CP while the rest are IP-adjoined. It is argued that [-MFS] languages do not exhibit Superiority; however, recent research has shown Superiority to obtain in other [-MFS] languages such as Serbo-Croatian and Russian. I apply this research to Czech data to see if Superiority can be shown to account for the ordering of the multiply fronted wh-words. I conclude by showing that multiple wh-word order in Czech cannot be accounted for solely by the syntax. Rather, it is the complex relationship between syntactic and discoursal factors that determines wh-word order in Czech.
- ItemOpen AccessSplit INFL and the acquisition of Neg and Aux(University of Calgary, 1999-01) Hanson, RebeccaBecause child language is human language, it is important that proposed linguistic theories be able to account equally well for both child and adult speech. This paper examines a model of split-INFL, which was proposed for adult language, from the perspective of acquisition. With a focus on the acquisition of English negatives auxiliaries, I test the ability of this model to account for the earliest observed stages of child speech in these areas. Data from several children learning English is considered and the model is found able to predict and explain the common patterns. The hierarchical structure within INFL accounts for the word order in the first instances of negation, the relative order of appearance between negatives and auxiliaries, and the fact that the earliest auxiliaries were negated. The success in these areas suggests that a further, crosslinguistic look at the role of split-INFL in acquisition would be worthwhile.