Michael J. Houser

A defective auxiliary in Danish

category. In root clauses, all verbal elements can raise to T (and then onto C), while in embedded clauses they always stay in situ. This makes telling where a given element sits in the extended verbal projection a challenging task. We examine a verbal element in Danish, gre , that shows up when the verb phrase has been topicalized, elided, or pronominalized. Even though, from surface appearance, gre might appear to be of category T or v, it is located, we argue, right in the middle. It is an auxiliary. But, unlike other auxiliaries, gre is defective because it only subcategorizes for vPs that are pronominal.

Descent and Diffusion in Language Diversification: A Study of Western Numic Dialectology

The two branches of Western Numic are the Mono and Northern Paiute languages. We argue that this taxonomic structure did not arise as usually assumed in historical linguistics, through increased differentiation brought about by changes internal to each branch, but rather that diffusion between Western and Central Numic played a crucial role in forming the Western Numic family tree. More generally, we suggest that diffusion plays a greater role in language diversification than is usually recognized.

Nonsyntactic ordering effects in noun incorporation

Abstract Despite the importance of ordering phenomena in typology and the visibility of Bakers analysis (1988, 1996) of noun incorporation in generative syntax, his prediction (1996: 25–30) that in syntactic incorporation the incorporated noun will always precede the verb root has yet to be tested typologically. Here we fill this gap and survey the known cases of object noun incorporation. The predicted order proves to be strongly preferred crosslinguistically and warrants recognition as a strong statistical universal. However, it is strongest in unproductive and fossilized contexts, the opposite of what is expected if the position of the incorporated noun is determined solely by principles of syntactic movement. The universal must therefore be nonsyntactic, perhaps morphological, in nature and appears to involve a preferred position for heads and/or for noun and verb roots within words. The same principle also shapes other noun-verb combinations in addition to noun incorporation.

Mono Lake Northern Paiute

Northern Paiute is a member of the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It is spoken across the Great Basin in the western United States – from Mono Lake in California, on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, through western Nevada and into southeastern Oregon and southwestern Idaho, as well as in a discontinuous region in southeastern Idaho by the Bannock. There are, according to Golla (2011), about 300 first-language speakers of Northern Paiute. In this illustration, we describe the languages Mono Lake variety.