Julia Horvath

The status of 'Wh-expletives' and the partial Wh-movement construction of Hungarian

This paper explores the cross-linguistic status of the so-called Wh-scope-marker strategy of wide scope assignment through the study of its instantiation in Hungarian, assessing the role and distribution of the expletive-like Wh-element (wh). After establishing the existence of the construction in Hungarian via novel types of arguments, a variety of evidence is presented showing the inadequacy of the leading analysis of Wh-expletive constructions with overt partial Wh-movement: proposals based on the formation of a Wh-chain linking the scope-marking Wh-expletive in the higher Spec with the partially moved contentful Wh-phrase, in a way that mimics overt full Wh-movement chains (originating in McDaniels (1989) work on German and Romani, assumed subsequently, with some modifications, e.g. by Rizzi (1992), Brody (1993), McDaniel, Chiu and Maxfield (1995) and Müller (1995)). I motivate an alternative account, falling within the general framework of an indirect Wh-dependency approach proposed by Dayal (e.g. 1994, based on the in-situ Wh of Hindi). I argue that the scope-marker of Hungarian is not an A-bar expletive, but an expletive element generated in an A-position which has a CP as its associate, and which undergoes (overt) movement to an A-bar position due to being a Wh-morpheme. The construction is shown to arise as a by-product of independently motivated processes: (a) Wh-feature percolation from Spec, as in (clausal) pied-piping cases, and (b) an expletive-CP association, argued to be due to needs inherent to clausal complementation in the language and independent of any Wh-feature or scope-assignment. In spite of the shared indirect Wh-dependency concept and the assumption of CP being the ‘associate’, Dayals particular analysis (1994) is shown to be empirically distinct from mine, and to be untenable for Hungarian, as well as for German. An initial three-way comparison of Hungarian vs. Hindi vs. German suggests that (at least) the syntactic implementation of the Wh-expletive strategy is different in each of the three languages. So contrary to earlier conceptions, this phenomenon does not arise from some unitary parametric source, such as the availability of a Wh-expletive morpheme; rather it seems to be parasitic on independent syntactic properties exhibited by the individual languages.

Hebrew Idioms: The Organization of the Lexical Component

The paper argues that the empirical domain of idioms can shed light on the architecture of the mental lexicon and the nature of its building blocks whether roots or words. A corpus-based study of the distribution of various diatheses in verb phrase idioms in Hebrew was conducted. Its results reveal an intriguing discrepancy between the behavior of unaccusatives, transitives and adjectival passives on the one hand and verbal passives one the other. The findings are straightforwardly accounted for if the lexicon includes actual verbs – words not merely roots – under which verb phrase idioms are stored as sub-entries.

Reply to Bhatt and Pancheva's ''Late Merger of Degree Clauses'': The Irrelevance of (Non)conservativity

According to Bhatt and Pancheva (2004), two effects they attribute to degree constructions (obligatory extraposition effects and scope rigidity effects determined by the superficial position of degree phrases/clauses) can be given a unified analysis in terms of an extension of Fox and Nissenbaums (1999) analysis of extraposition in conjunction with the nonconservativity of (certain) degree words. We show that, under full preservation of Bhatt and Panchevas theoretical assumptions, their account faces at least three problems: (a) one of the phenomena they propose to unify, the one involving scope effects, does not exist; (b) (non)conservativity is irrelevant to obligatory extraposition effects; and (c) contrary to their tacit assumption, Trace Conversion is at most an optional procedure for DegP chains. We propose an alternative, nonsemantic treatment of obligatory extraposition effects, which subsumes them under an independently needed adjacency constraint on prehead modifiers. Furthermore, we note that the facts brought up here and in Bhatt and Pancheva 2004 call into question the quantificational approach to degree constructions.

VOICING ASSIMILATION AND THE SONORITY HIERARCHY: EVIDENCE FROM RUSSIAN, HEBREW AND HUNGARIAN

Cross-language studies of linguistic phenomena often reveal facts which are unknown to the linguist who is concerned with the study of one particular language or language family. Certain rules or processes repeat themselves in unrelated languages and this is expected, since all mankind is subject to the same neurological, physiological and psychological constraints upon his language. In phonology, for example, velar palatalization before high front vowels, word-final devoicing of obstruents and the assimilation of nasal stops in point of articulation to following consonants are commonly found and, if these processes vary from language to language, it is probably a matter of degree only. One such process will be examined here in some detail: voicing assimilation (VA). The starting point is the seemingly recalcitrant behavior of the voiced labio-dental fricative [v] in Russian. Evidence brought from a Finno-Ugric language, Hungarian, and from a Semitic language, Hebrew, shows that the intransigence of [v] in the Slavic language is also found in these two genetically unrelated languages. Implications will be discussed and an explanation, based on a sonority hierarchy, will be offered.