Grant Goodall

The EPP in Spanish

One of the unsolved questions in current syntactic theory is why argument DPs that start out within the lexical layer of the clause (i.e., within vP or VP) must sometimes move overtly to a SPEC position within the inflectional layer. It is true that a relationship must be established between the DP and an inflectional head, in that the inflectional head must check a case feature on the DP and the DP must sometimes check phi-features on the inflectional head, but we know that this checking can be done even when there is no overt movement. Given the standard minimalist assumption that movement occurs only when necessary, we would then expect that the checking would always be done without overt movement. Since this does not appear to be true, we must say that certain features can only be checked through overt movement to the SPEC position of the head on which the feature appears (or, alternatively, through merger of an expletive in this position). Features that trigger this type of movement or merger are said to have the “EPP property” (Chomsky 1998).’

Accusative case in passives

Abstract The standard explanation for Ν Ρ movement in the passive construction has been that the N P must move into the nominative position because no accusative case is available. This paper examines the implications for this view of some double-object constructions in Mandarin Chinese and English that are ungrammatical as active clauses but improve significantly as passives. These facts are unexpected under the standard view of passives, but I suggest that they can be explained if we assume that the second object is not licensed for case in the active versions but is able to check accusative case in the passive version, thus arguing that accusative case is available in passive clauses.

Morphological complexity and cerebral lateralization

Fifteen agentive nouns, all with meanings derivable from the meaning of the stem verb, were presented tachistoscopically to right-handed subjects. Non-agentive nouns were also presented, and subjects were asked to produce the plural form in addition to the simple stimulus form. The results show a significant right visual field advantage for the agentive and plural nouns, but no significant advantage in either field for the simple nouns. These findings suggest that the left hemisphere is superior in processing nouns which are morphologically complex.

On case and the passive morpheme

Some recent analyses of the passive, such as Baker (1988) and Baker, Johnson, and Roberts (1989), claim that the passive morpheme is an argument and that the twin properties of ϑ-role absorption and Case absorption may be attributed to its argument status. Through an examination of passive constructions in several languages, we find that such analyses are unable to account for the ways in which Case absorption sometimes fails to apply. More generally, the facts examined provide important counterexamples to Burzios generalization and show that there is greater diversity in the Case properties of passive morphemes than was previously thought.

Wanna-Contraction as Restructuring

The structural conditions that govern that possibility of contracting the sequence want to into wanna have been widely discussed in the literature, and a number of analyses have been proposed. Here I will explore the hypothesis that wanna-contraction is the result of restructuring, in the sense of Rizzi (1982), and I will argue that such an approach offers significant advantages over previous analyses. Section 1 contains a review of some of these previous analyses, while section 2 presents the case for an analysis of wanna-contraction in terms of restructuring. Some issues in the learnability of this construction are explored in section 3, and a conclusion and summary are given in section 4.

The D-linking effect on extraction from islands and non-islands

“D-linked” wh-phrases such as which car are known to increase the acceptability of sentences with island violations. One influential account of this attributes the effect to working memory: the D-linked filler is easier to retrieve at the site of the gap and this leads to the amelioration in acceptability. Such an account predicts that this effect should occur in general with non-trivial wh-dependencies, not just in island environments. An experiment is presented here to test this prediction. Wh-questions with both D-linked and bare wh-phrases and with both island and non-island embedded clauses are presented to participants, who rate their acceptability on a 7-point scale. Results show that D-linking significantly increases acceptability in both island and non-island environments, in accord with analyses that attribute the effect to working memory. In addition, the increase in acceptability is uniform in both types of environments, suggesting that the island effect itself may not be attributable to working memory.

Islands and Non-islands in Native and Heritage Korean

To a large extent, island phenomena are cross-linguistically invariable, but English and Korean present some striking differences in this domain. English has wh-movement and Korean does not, and while both languages show sensitivity to wh-islands, only English has island effects for adjunct clauses. Given this complex set of differences, one might expect Korean/English bilinguals, and especially heritage Korean speakers (i.e., early bilinguals whose L2 became their dominant language during childhood) to be different from native speakers, since heritage speakers have had more limited exposure to Korean, may have had incomplete acquisition and/or attrition, and may show significant transfer effects from the L2. Here we examine islands in heritage speakers of Korean in the U.S. Through a series of four formal acceptability experiments comparing these heritage speakers with native speakers residing in Korea, we show that the two groups are remarkably similar. Both show clear evidence for wh-islands and an equally clear lack of adjunct island effects. Given the very different linguistic environment that the heritage speakers have had since early childhood, this result lends support to the idea that island phenomena are largely immune to environmental influences and stem from deeper properties of the processor and/or grammar. Similarly, it casts some doubt on recent proposals that islands are learned from the input.