Mark C. Baker

Thematic Roles and Syntactic Structure

One central task for any theory of grammar is to solve the so-called “linking problem”: the problem of discovering regularities in how the participants of an event are expressed in surface grammatical forms and explaining those regularities.

Theta theory and the syntax of applicatives in Chichewa

Abbreviations used in the glosses in this article are: A, gender agreement; ABS, absolutive; APPL, applied affix; ASP, mood morpheme; EX, exclusive; HAB, habitual tense; OP, object prefix; PASS, passive; PRES, present; RECIP, reciprocal; SP, subject prefix; SUF, suffix. Glosses of pronominal agreement consist of a number indicating person, a lower case letter indicating number (singular or plural), and an upper case letter indicating grammatical function (subject or object). Noun classes are not indicated in the glosses, but certain agreement relationships are shown by highlighting. The notation...*(B)...means that the structure is grammatical only if B is included;...(*B)...means that it is grammatical only if B is not included. Tone is not marked.

On the Structural Positions of Themes and Goals

A central concern of linguistic theory is to account for how the arguments of a given lexical item are associated with positions in a syntactic structure. Many theorists hold that this mapping is mediated by a so-called thematic hierarchy. In Principles-and-Parameters style theories this typically works as follows. A verb selects arguments with certain thematic (θ-) roles. These θ-roles are ranked by the thematic hierarchy, and phrase structure is constructed according to the rankings. This mapping obeys a constraint like the one given in (1).

On some subject/object non-asymmetries in Mohawk

This article considers certain differences between subjects and objects in English that are not found in Mohawk, a nonconfigurational language with extensive agreement morphology. In particular, disjoint reference effects, island conditions, and weak crossover phenomena are investigated in some detail. Facts from these domains motivate a theory of Mohawk clause structure in which most NPs are generated in adjunct positions, along the lines proposed by Jelinek (1984) and others. Clausal arguments, however, do show standard subject-object asymmetries, unlike NPs. This motivates a Case-driven theory of nonconfigurationality, and shows that it is correct to attribute configurational representations to Mohawk after all.The data presented in this article is a representative subset of the data collected by the author on these topics; fuller paradigms are available upon written request.Mohawk examples are given in the practical orthography described in Deering and Delisle (1976), with the following four changes: (i) the mid unround nasal vowel is written [v] instead of [en]; (ii) the back round nasal vowel is written [u] instead of [on]; (iii) [y] is distinguished from [i]; (iv) stress and vowel length are not marked, these being predictable. Complex sound changes often happen at morpheme boundaries in Mohawk; in some cases the forms given are closer to underlying representations, in other cases they are closer to surface representations.The following abbreviations are used in the glosses: fact, factual mode; fut, future mode; punc, punctual aspect; hab, habitual aspect; rev, reversive; stat, stative aspect; srfl, semireflexive; dup, duplicative; cis, cislocative; trans, translocative; sim, simultaneous; opt, optative; part, partitive; neg, negative; Q, question particle; iter, iterative. Glosses of agreement include indication of person/gender (1, 2, M, F, N), number (s, d, or p), and series (S (roughly subject), 0 (roughly object), or P (possessor)).The research reported here was generously supported by The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, grants #410-89-0207 and #410-90-0308, and by FCAR of Quebec, grant #91 -ER-0578. It has been presented to audiences at MIT, Northwestern University, University of Illinois, Princeton University, University of Maryland, University of Stuttgart, University of Geneva, and the Montreal Linguistics Circle. In addition to these audiences, I also wish to thank Jose Bonneau, David Pesetsky, Lisa Travis, Dan Everett, Adriana Chamorro, Edward Ikeda, Ken Hale, Eloise Jelinek, Peggy Speas, Juan Uriagereka, and Paul Postal (as NLLT reviewer) for their comments, suggestions, and help in various ways.

On the relationship of typology to theoretical syntax

Abstract In these remarks on the relationship between typology and theoretical (morpho) syntax, we touch briefly on three issues: what is their relationship in practice now, what relationship should one in principle expect given the founding goals of each enterprise, and what kind of research could help connect the two fields in a more productive way in the future.

On the Absence of Certain Quantifiers in Mohawk

One characteristic of the Mohawk language1 from a comparative standpoint is that it does not have a set of quantified NPs found in English. In particular, Mohawk has no elements directly comparable to ‘everyone’ and ‘everything’, ‘nobody’ and ‘nothing’ — nominal elements which cannot be interpreted as referential. It will be suggested that this gap in Mohawk can be derived from general structural properties of the language. Mohawk is, in the terminology of Jelinek (1984), a “pronominal argument language”. In such languages, the relations among the parts of a sentence are established by pronominal coreference rather than by direct complementation. From this it follows that non-referential NPs are not allowed in such languages. The relevant principles must, however, be stated with some care so that they do not rule out similar structures which are found in Mohawk, including indefinite NPs, quantificational adverbs, sloppy identity constructions, and constituent questions.

Building and Merging, Not Checking: The Nonexistence of (Aux)-S-V-O Languages

Standard views about the factors that determine verb position and subject position predict that there should be Subject-Verb-Object languages in which tense and aspect are indicated by a particle or auxiliary that comes before the subject. Juliens (2000) large-scale survey of the languages of the world, however, indicates that this word order is never found. This striking gap suggests that the theory of how verbs are related to tense needs to be rethought. I suggest that the gap can be explained by abandoning Chomskys (1993, 1995) checking theory, in which the relationship between the T node and the inflected verb can be established abstractly. The correct word order typology follows if the computational system of human language can combine tense and verb only by overt head movement (Baker 1988, Pollock 1989) or by the PF merger of morphemes under adjacency (Marantz 1988, Bobaljik 1994).

On the Relationship of Object Agreement and Accusative Case: Evidence from Amharic

This article shows that accusative case and object agreement are not closely related in Amharic, a language in which both are morphologically overt. This suggests that it is wrong to generalize Chomsky’s claim that agreement and case are both manifestations of the same Agree relation from subjects to objects across the board. I show that object agreements in Amharic are the true manifestations of Agree (not pronominal clitics), whereas accusative case is assigned independently, to the lower of two nominals in the same domain. The relationship between case and agreement can thus vary parametrically.

Mapping the Terrain of Language Learning

This article explores how linguistic typology-the study of the variation found in human languages-can contribute to the study of language learning. All features that differentiate human languages must be acquired by their speakers, which suggests a concrete lower bound on what is learned. I discuss how the notion of the parameter explains observed implicational universals. I review some established parameters, and then I explore the idea that these parameters are logically ordered in a way that well-designed language learners can exploit to structure the learning process efficiently. Finally, I survey the literature on the acquisition of parameter settings by children, which suggests that children learn these settings in exactly the order predicted. Linguistic typology thus provides a precise linguistic map of the language-learning process.

Pseudo Noun Incorporation as Covert Noun Incorporation: Linearization and Crosslinguistic Variation

Pseudo noun incorporation (PNI) constructions in Sakha and Tamil obey a strict linear adjacency condition, such that not only the noun phrase (NP) but its head noun must be adjacent to the verb at phonological form (PF). I argue that this adjacency condition can be explained if the head of the NP adjoins to the verb to create a unit interpreted as a complex predicate at logical form (LF). The resulting structure can be linearized at PF if and only if no syntactic expression comes between the two copies of the noun, forcing adjacency on the construction. I also discuss two sources of variation in the syntax of pseudo noun incorporation: the fact that pseudo-incorporated nominals are invisible for case and agreement in some languages (Tamil and Sakha) but not others (Hindi and Hungarian), and the fact that the adjacency condition is canceled in languages like Hindi, where Verb-to-Tense movement serves to break up the verb-noun phrase (V-NP) cluster.