Seth Cable

Expressives and Identity Conditions

EXPRESSIVES AND IDENTITY CONDITIONS Christopher Potts Ash Asudeh Seth Cable Yurie Hara Eric McCready Luis Alonso-Ovalle Rajesh Bhatt Christopher Davis Angelika Kratzer Tom Roeper Martin Walkow Müller, Gereon. 2004. Verb-second as vP-first. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 7:179–234. Nilsen, Øystein. 2003. Eliminating positions. Doctoral dissertation, OTS, Utrecht. Pafel, Jürgen. 1998. Skopus und logische Struktur. Arbeitspapiere des Sonderforschungsbereichs 340, Bericht 129. Tübingen/Stuttgart: University of Tübingen/University of Stuttgart. Reinhart, Tanya. 1983. Anaphora and semantic interpretation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sauerland, Uli, and Paul Elbourne. 2002. Total reconstruction, PF movement, and derivational order. Linguistic Inquiry 33: 283–319. Thiersch, Craig. 1985. Some notes on scrambling in the German Mittelfeld, VP and X-bar theory. Ms., University of Connecticut, Storrs, and University of Cologne.

Against the Existence of Pied-Piping: Evidence from Tlingit

I argue that pied-piping, as traditionally understood, might not exist. I reanalyze classic examples from English and other well-studied languages in light of new data from Tlingit, an understudied and endangered language of Alaska. I argue that the initial appearance of piedpiping in Tlingit is misleading and actually reflects structures where no true pied-piping occurs. I then show that a similar analysis is possible for putative cases of pied-piping in other, well-known languages. Consequently, both the phenomenon of pied-piping and the grammatical mechanisms introduced to derive it might be eliminable from the theory of grammar.

Pied-Piping: Introducing Two Recent Approaches

The term ‘pied-piping’ is used by linguists to refer to structures where a movement operation applies to a constituent that is in some sense ‘larger than expected’. More precisely, pied-piping occurs when a movement operation that usually targets expressions of a particular type (e.g. wh-words) instead targets a phrase that contains an expression of that type. Pied-piping structures have long been a deep and difficult puzzle for formal syntactic theory. This is the first of two articles that present and compare two recent approaches to pied-piping, those of Cable (2010a,b) and Heck (2008, 2009). These works offer two very different perspectives on the nature of pied-piping, and thus yield rather different analyses of specific sub-phenomena. Nevertheless, there is much overlap in their general predictions and in several core assumptions. In this article, I present the basic phenomenon of pied-piping, as well as general summaries of Cable (2010a,b) and Heck (2008, 2009). I also explain why these works eschew the mechanism of ‘feature percolation’, an operation which has until recently been a staple of much work on pied-piping.

Pied‐Piping: Comparing Two Recent Approaches

The term ‘pied-piping’ is used by linguists to refer to structures where a movement operation applies to a constituent that is in some sense ‘larger than expected’. More precisely, pied-piping occurs when a movement operation that usually targets expressions of a particular type (e.g. wh-words) instead targets a phrase that contains an expression of that type. Pied-piping structures have long been a deep and difficult puzzle for formal syntactic theory. This is the second of two articles that present and compare two recent approaches to pied-piping, those of Heck (2008, 2009) and Cable (2010a,b). These works offer two very different perspectives on the nature of pied-piping, and thus yield rather different analyses of specific sub-phenomena. Nevertheless, there is much overlap in their general predictions and in several core assumptions. In this article, I compare the empirical predictions of Heck’s and Cable’s accounts, noting especially those areas where both approaches are challenged. The phenomena we will examine include (i) the locality constraints on pied-piping, (ii) Heck’s ‘Edge Generalization’, (iii) the apparent optionality of some pied-piping structures, and (iv) so-called ‘massive pied-piping’.