Carson T. Schütze

The empirical base of linguistics: Grammaticality judgments and linguistic methodology

Preface Acknowledgments 1: Introduction 2: Definitions and Historical Background 3: Judging Grammaticality: The Nature of Metalinguistic Performance 4: Subject-Related Factors in Grammaticality Judgments 5: Task-Related Factors in Grammaticality Judgments 6: Theoretical and Methodological Implications 7: Looking Back and Looking Ahead References Index

On the Nature of Default Case

This paper presents arguments that Universal Grammar includes a notion of “default case” different from that which has generally been assumed in the literature. It comprises the case forms used to spell out nominals that do not receive a case specification by assignment or other syntactic means. As such, it does not interact with the Case Filter, which is argued to be a purely syntactic constraint as opposed to a morphophonological one. It is shown that diverse phenomena in the distribution of pronouns in English can be parsimoniously treated using default case, and further that English can thereby be assimilated to “richer” case languages such as German, rather than being analyzed with arbitrary language-particular rules. A sampling of phenomena from other languages demonstrates that evidence for default case is widespread, and moreover, that crosslinguistic differences in case patterns can often be reduced to the choice of a default case.

English expletive constructions are not infected

Sobin (1997) proposes an analysis of several “prestige” constructions of English under which they result from grammatical viruses. Counter to his claim, I argue that plural agreement in expletive constructions introduced by there results not from a virus but from the grammar of English, because it lacks signature properties of viruses. I show that the flat agreement seen in expletive constructions with conjoined associates can be explained as a processing effect. I then argue that singular agreement with plural associates represents a second alternative allowed within the grammar.Sobin (1997) proposes an analysis of several prestige constructions of English under which they result from grammatical viruses. Counter to his claim, I argue that plural agreement in expletive constructions introduced by there results not from a virus but from the grammar of English, because it lacks signature properties of viruses. I show that the flat agreement seen in expletive constructions with conjoined associates can be explained as a processing effect. I then argue that singular agreement with plural associates represents a second alternative allowed within the grammar.

Linguistic evidence and grammatical theory

This article surveys the major kinds of empirical evidence used by linguists, with a particular focus on the relevance of the evidence to the goals of generative grammar. After a background section overviewing the objectives and assumptions of that framework, three broad kinds of data are considered in the three subsequent sections: corpus data, judgment data, and (other) experimental data. The perspective adopted is that all three have their place in the linguists toolbox: they have relative advantages and disadvantages that often complement one another, so converging evidence of more than one kind can reasonably be sought in many instances. Points are illustrated mainly with examples from syntax, but often can be easily translated to other levels (e.g., phonology, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics). WIREs Cogni Sci 2011 2 206-221 DOI: 10.1002/wcs.102 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Synchronic and diachronic microvariation in English do

In this paper it is shown how an account of the English auxiliary system that has been independently proposed to deal with problems in standard analyses also provides a natural treatment of microvariation among varieties of English. The phenomenon is the use of non-emphatic periphrastic/dummy do in positive declaratives (Mary did visit her brother), here called spurious do, as found most famously in the English of the 1500s, but attested also in some modern dialects and registers and in child English, and closely related to the use of tun in colloquial German. The framework adopted dispenses with two standard but problematic claims about English INFL: the exceptional ability of be and have to raise to Tense, even across negation, and the existence of PF affix lowering. Instead it is claimed that English has overt verb raising and that finite be/have are base-generated in INFL, above negation; independent support for the latter is provided from VP ellipsis. The analysis of do is that it is an allomorph of the indicative value of the Mood head, whose other indicative allomorph is zero. Mood is above Tense and is where modals are base-generated. It is shown that this system cannot block the generation of spurious do, because this would require transderivational comparison. Thus, the narrow syntax makes spurious do freely available. Languages and dialects differ on the extent to which they make use of this option. All else equal, it should be dispreferred because it involves one more word than its counterpart without do, but numerous advantages, including processing and rhetorical benefits, can outweigh this. The conclusion is that do cannot be analyzed as a strictly last-resort device in the way proposed in Chomskys classic analysis

Parameterizing Passive Participle Movement

Parameterizing Passive Participle Movement* Ivano Caponigro and Carson T. Schutze Department of Linguistics UCLA Box 951543 Los Angeles, CA 90095–1543 capo@humnet.ucla.edu, cschutze@ucla.edu Thanks to the participants in the UCLA Fall 1999 seminar on A-movement, and to Adam Albright, Lisa Brunetti, Carlo Cecchetto, Dave Embick, Tom Ernst, Heather Robinson, Manola Salustri, Gianluca Storto, Tim Stowell, Harold Torrence, and two anonymous referees. Standard disclaimers apply. Portions of this work were presented in Schutze (2000) and at the 2002 LSA annual meeting. The second author was supported by a UCLA Academic Senate grant.

When is a verb not a verb

Changes are proposed to the categorial status traditionally accorded to Aux-related and verbal elements in the clause, and the new taxonomy is applied in implementing the old insight that be should be analyzed as the default, semantically empty verb. The central issue is when a verb-like element does (not) count as categorially a V for distributional purposes. The major proposals are: 1) to remove be and have from the category Aux and treat them as Vs; 2) to separate out participles from genuine tensed and bare verbs; 3) to group do with modals, rather than with have and be , into a category Mood that also includes a null indicative morpheme. This scheme is used to account for the entire distribution of the forms of be just by treating it as V with no properties. Be fulfills two requirements that cannot always be met by contentful verbs: first, it satisfies the syntactico-semantic need for Tense to c-command a clause-mate V (the “V Requirement”); second, it satisfies the morphosyntactic need for participial affixes ( -ing, -en ) to have hosts. It is shown how the former requirement derives the exceptionally high position of finite be by base-generating it above negation etc., rather than raising it across. VP-ellipsis data provide independent support for this treatment. Finally, some tentative suggestions are offered for how the V Requirement might be derived from deeper principles, while still allowing for the fact that it is apparently not fully enforced in languages with null copulas.

Productive inventory and case/agreement contingencies: a methodological note on Rispoli (1999)

Rispoli (1999) suggests that previous studies arguing for a contingency between the case of subject pronouns and the presence/absence of verbal agreement in the acquisition of English (e.g. Schütze, 1997) suffer from methodological problems, and presents new data that fail to support earlier findings. I show that Rispolis methodology unnecessarily biases his study against finding the predicted contingencies: it fails to take account of childrens productive lexical inventory of pronoun forms. As a result, syntactic versus morphological sources of error fail to be distinguished. I explain why this distinction is crucial within the AGR/Tense Omission Model, and clarify its predictions.

Different rates of pronoun case error : comments on Rispoli (1998)

Rispoli (1998) presents data to motivate a model of pronoun case errors in child English. His data consist of relative rates of occurrence of errors involving particular forms in the study of twenty-seven English children between the ages of 2.6 and 4.0. I show that his claim that overextensions of he and him are antagonistic cannot be maintained. I argue that his explanation for why her subjects are more frequent than other errors is insufficient, and suggest an account in terms of relative input frequencies. Finally, I demonstrate that the fundamental assumption underlying Rispolis model is untenable, and that his findings are not counterevidence for developmental syntax models such as that of Schütze (1997).

The prosodic structure of Serbo-Croatian function words: An argument for tied constraints *

The question of the proper treatment of clitics has received considerable attention in recent literature on the syntax-morphology and morphology-phonology interfaces (e.g., Marantz 1988, 1989, Zec and Inkelas 1992, Schütze 1994, Selkirk 1996, and references cited there). Selkirk (1996) proposes an elegant theory of the prosodification of clitic function words crosslinguistically, demonstrating that variation in the behavior of function words both within a language (English) and across dialects of a language (Serbo-Croatian) follows straightforwardly from re-rankings of universal constraints in an Optimality Theory (OT) framework (McCarthy and Prince 1993, in press; Prince and Smolensky in press). In this paper I argue that, in addition to strict re-rankings of constraints, tied constraints are also needed within such a system, in order to capture the Serbo-Croatian facts.1 I discuss three empirical shortcomings of her analysis, all involving optionality, and show how they can be remedied by appealing to a particular notion of what it means for constraints to be tied in rank. To the extent that Selkirk’s basic insights are correct, this supports the conclusion that tied constraints play an important role in OT accounts of the ways in which dependent and independent morphemes are combined into larger prosodic units. It adds to the growing evidence (cf. Anttila 1995, Reynolds 1994, and sources cited there) that a necessary part of OT theories of morphophonology is a particular notion of tied constraints or “crucial nonranking” (Prince and Smolensky in press), whereby separate tableaux are computed for each ordering of the relevant constraints and the output of each is a valid possibility in the language.