Elizabeth A. Cowper

A Note on Number

A NOTE ON NUMBER Elizabeth Cowper University of Toronto Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. In Step by step: Essays on minimalist syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik, ed. by Roger Martin, David Michaels, and Juan Uriagereka, 89–155. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Jeong, Youngmi. 2003. The landscape of distransitives. Ms., University of Maryland, College Park. Koizumi, Masatoshi. 1995. Phrase structure in minimalist syntax. Doctoral dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. Lasnik, Howard. 1999a. Chains of arguments. In Working minimalism, ed. by Samuel David Epstein and Norbert Hornstein, 189–215. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Lasnik, Howard. 1999b. Minimalist analysis. Oxford: Blackwell. Lasnik, Howard. 2003. Minimalist investigations in linguistic theory. London: Routledge. Lee, Ju-Eun. 2004. Ditransitive structures and (anti-)locality. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. McGinnis, Martha. 2003. Variation in the phase structure of applicatives. Linguistic Variation Yearbook 1:105–146. Miyagawa, Shigeru, and Takae Tsujioka. 2004. Argument structure and ditransitive verbs in Japanese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 13:1–38. Postal, Paul M. 1974. On raising. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Pylkkänen, Liina. 2002. Introducing arguments. Doctoral dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.

Pied Piping, Feature Percolation and the Structure of the Noun Phrase

Ross (1967) showed that in relative clauses, not only may the WH-phrase be fronted, but an NP or PP containing the WH-phrase may also be fronted, as shown in (1): (1) a. This is the child [who] i I’ve been hearing stories about t i . b. This is the child [about whom] i I’ve been hearing stories t i . c. This is the child [stories about whom] i I’ve been hearing t i . (1) Ross called this phenomenon “pied piping”. His statement of the pied piping convention is given in (2). (2) Any transformation which is stated in such a way as to effect the reordering of some specified node NP, where this node is preceded and followed by variables in the structural index of the rule, may apply to this NP or to any non-coordinate NP which dominates it, as long as there are no occurrences of any coordinate node, nor of the node S, on the branch connecting the higher node and the specified node. (1967:114) Notice that Ross’s statement applies to any transformation moving an element over a variable. Thus, the prediction is that WH-questions and relative clauses should behave similarly with respect to pied piping. This is not the case, as pointed out by Bresnan (1976:37). Questions seem to be much more limited in what can be pied piped than are relative clauses.

The Simple Present Tense in English: A Unified Treatment

This paper provides a unified account of the matrix uses of the English simple present. The differences between eventive and stative sentences in the simple present, as well as reportive, futurate and habitual uses of eventive sentences are shown to derive straightforwardly from a single constraint on grammatical tense systems: the Principle of Non-Simultaneity of Points. The analysis supports a view of speech time as a moment, rather than an interval, in the unmarked case, and also supports the purely Davidsonian view that only eventive sentences contain an event-denoting element.

Are phonosyntactic rules necessary

Selkirk (1986) proposes that rules of the phrasal phonology apply to a structure called P-structure that is derived from, but not isomorphic to, syntactic structure. While Selkirk claims that most rules of external sandhi fall into the category of P-structure rules, there are three rules that she suggests may still require direct reference to syntactic structure. These are Mende Consonant Mutation (Conteh et al. 1986), Kimatuumbi Vowel Shortening (Odden this volume), and ‘perhaps even rules like English wanna contraction’ (Selkirk 1986: 374). Selkirk says that these rules ‘appear to be sensitive to a richer array of syntactic conditions than would be expressible via the translation of syntax into P-structure’.

The features and exponence of nominal number

This paper proposes a pair of morphosyntactic number features, [Discrete] and [Non-Atomic], and shows how they can contribute to an understanding of how grammatical number is expressed cross-linguistically. Starting with English, where mass nominals pattern syncretically sometimes with plural count nominals and sometimes with singular ones, we use these features to improve upon a previous account (Cowper & Hall 2002), and then extend the analysis to mass–count syncretisms in Lingala and Manam and to classifiers in Western Armenian and Mandarin. We account for the crosslinguistic variation using a consistent set of features and a highly constrained theory of morphological exponence, and argue that the variation arises from differences in the syntactic structures in which the features appear and the paradigmatic systems of contrast in which they participate.