Paul Hagstrom

Implications of Child Errors for the Syntax of Negation in Korean.

Children around age 2 acquiring Korean as a first language are well known for producing an error in which VP-internal material intervenes between the negator an and the verb, an order which is strictly ungrammatical in adult Korean. Children at the same age acquiring other languages make errors with subject case and with tense or agreement inflections on the verb, which has been analyzed by Wexler (1998) as stemming from a constraint on child grammars that prevents the subject from moving to two functional projections. The proposal here is that the child Korean errors result from the same constraint. This leads to an analysis of negation in adult Korean under which the VP material is base generated between the negator an and the verb, moving leftward in adult Korean. The child errors are then a result of omitting object-related functional projections that would drive this movement, paralleling Wexlers analysis of Optional Infinitives in other languages. The analysis presented here not only offers an explanation of the child errors but also constrains the possible analyses for negation in adult Korean in ways that are not obvious from the adult data alone.

A Particle of Indefiniteness in American Sign Language

We describe here the characteristics of a very frequently-occurring ASL indefinite focus particle, which has not previously been recognized as such. We show that, despite its similarity to the question sign “WHAT”, the particle is distinct from that sign in terms of articulation, function, and distribution. The particle serves to express “uncertainty” in various ways, which can be formalized semantically in terms of a domain-widening effect of the same sort as that proposed for English ‘any’ by Kadmon & Landman (1993). Its function is to widen the domain of possibilities under consideration from the typical to include the non-typical as well, along a dimension appropriate in the context.

Differences Between Korean and Japanese Processing Overload

We report the results of a pilot questionnaire study which indicates a difference between Japanese and Korean in the processing of twice center-embedded transitive sentences. Babyonyshev and Gibson (1995) claimed that, in Japanese, these structures are significantly more difficult to parse than twice center-embedded intransitives. Our study showed that, in Korean, this difference in processing difficulty does not obtain. We suggest that the difference between Japanese and Korean processing should be attributed to short-term memory effects on repetition of case markers and to differences in the syntax of the two languages with respect to verb movement.

Particle Movement in Sinhala and Japanese

Along with strictly Sinhala-internal evidence, we will also consider evidence from Japanese, which (I will argue) shows the hypothesized particle movement in the surface syntax. That is, Sinhala and Japanese form a minimal pair with respect to whether the movement shown in (1) is “overt” (Japanese) or “covert” (Sinhala). The syntactic structure of the focus and question constructions in Sinhala have been discussed in the previous literature, as has the potential similarity to Japanese. This paper builds on these works to varying degrees, primarily on Gair (1983), Gair & Sumangala (1991), Sumangala (1992), Kishimoto (1991, 1992, 1997, 1998), and Whitman (1997), Yanagida (1995). Questions in Sinhala are generally formed with the use of the ‘question particle’ d\. Compare the declarative sentence in (2), the yes-no question in (3), and the wh-object question in (4). The yes-no question differs from the declarative only in that the yes-no question has a clause-final d\. As for the wh-question in (4), there are three things to notice. First, there is no obligatory movement of the wh-word; it appears in canonical object position. Second, the question word—which remains clause-internal—is followed by the question particle d\. Third, the verb in (4) appears in a special form, with a suffix that is glossed as ‘-E’.

Contextual metrical invisibility

k e r i ks μ μ μ μ Of note: • e is not dominated by a σ. • Stress falls on the penultimate σ antepenultimate vowel (7) W HAT YOU WILL COME TO BELIEVE: i. A metrically invisible vowel does not head a syllable. (Sec. 1-2) ii. Metrical invisibility is dissociated from epenthesis. (Sec. 3) iii. Syllables headed by “weak” vowels are avoided. (Sec. 4) iv. “Weak” vowels have deficient underlying prosodification (Sec. 5)