Youssef A. Haddad

Copy Control in Telugu

The main purpose of this paper is to document a phenomenon of copy adjunct control in Telugu, a Dravidian language, and to provide a derivation of the relevant structures within the framework of the Minimalist Program. Copy adjunct control is a relation of co-identity between the subject in the matrix clause and the subject in an adjunct of the same structure. Both subjects are pronounced. I analyze Copy Control structures as instances of multiple copy spell-out derived via movement, whereby movement is understood as copy-plus-merge. Decisions concerning the pronunciation of copies are prepared for in the syntax, but they are made on the phonological side of the computation.

The syntax of Southern American English personal datives: An anti-locality account

Southern American English licenses personal dative constructions (Horn 2008), also known as coreferential dative constructions (Al-Zahre and Boneh 2010). The sentences in (1) are a few examples; they contain nonsubcategorized pronominal arguments that are obligatorily coreferential with the subject. These unselected pronouns are dative case-marked in languages like Hebrew and Arabic— thus the name personal dative—but they are not overtly dative in Southern American English.

Control into conjunctive participle clauses : the case of Assamese

Control is a relation of co-identity between a pronounced subject (or object) in a matrix clause and a usually unpronounced subject in a subordinate, non-finite clause. The volume investigates Adjunct Control in Assamese, a South Asian language, within the framework of syntactic theory. While Forward Control is a cross-linguistically common control pattern, Assamese also allows three less common types of control structures: Backward, Copy, and Expletive Control. The volume documents all four types, analyzes them within the most recent framework of syntactic theory and delineates the theoretical implications.

A non-stranding approach to resumption: Evidence from South Asia

Abstract Two types of resumption are argued for in the literature: (i) base-generated resumption and (ii) resumption as movement (Aoun et al., Linguistic inquiry 32: 371–403, 2001; Boeckx, Islands and chains: Resumption as stranding, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2003). The latter is analyzed as involving stranding. A DP merges in its base position with a resumptive element adjoined to it. Movement targets the DP, while the resumptive element is left behind – or stranded. This article presents evidence from Copy Control in Telugu to show that a stranding approach fails to account for movement-related resumption in this South Asian language. As an alternative, the article offers a non-stranding account and extends it to another South Asian language, Assamese.

Subject Anaphors: Exempt or Not Exempt?

Exempt positions are what Büring (2003) calls ‘‘noncomplementary’’ positions, where both reflexives and nonreflexives could be used; in other words, in such positions reflexives and nonreflexives are not in complementary distribution. If a reflexive is used, then it does not have a local binder—though, as Pollard and Sag hold, it may be subject to other, nonsyntactic constraints. In HPSG binding theory, subject anaphors are predicted to be inherently exempt anaphors. Apparently, however, the theory limits subject anaphors to subject positions of ‘‘non-finite (‘small’) clauses’’ (Pollard 2005:2). The reason is that originally the theory’s main focus was on English, where anaphors do not occupy the subject position of finite clauses. Pollard and Sag (1992:290) hold that ‘‘in English, anaphors simply have no nominative forms’’ and, thus, a sentence like (2) is ungrammatical.

Possessively Construed Attitude Dative Constructions in Lebanese Arabic

Possessive dative constructions—a subcategory of external possession constructions, similar but not identical to the English sentence She looked him in the eye —are a cross-linguistic phenomenon. These structures feature a nominal or pronominal element—in this case, him —that functions semantically as the possessor of a separate DP — eye —and syntactically as a dependent of the verb. Syntactic approaches to possessive dative constructions in such languages as Hebrew and German argue for a movement analysis in which the possessor starts out in the possessum DP before moving to a higher position. Semantic approaches to the same phenomenon in German and French, among other languages, analyze possessive dative constructions as instances of anaphoric binding; the dative undergoes first-merge outside the possessum DP and binds a variable in it. The present article documents and analyzes what appear to be instances of possessive dative constructions in Lebanese Arabic. I show that the possessive construal of the datives in these structures is not syntactically or semantically mediated, but rather pragmatically determined.