Tai ngay!!! Ban co the xoa dong chu Merging Features This page intentionally left blank Merging Features Computation, Interpretation, and Acquisition Edited by J O S É M. B RU C A RT, A N NA G AVA R R Ó , A N D JAUME SO LÀ 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © 2009 organization and editorial matter José M. Brucart, Anna Gavarró, and Jaume Solà © 2009 the chapters their various authors The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2009 All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk _________________ ISBN 978–0–19–955326–6 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Contents List of figures vii List of tables viii Notes on contributors ix List of abbreviations xii 1 Merge and features: a minimalist introduction 1 José M. Brucart, Anna Gavarró, and Jaume Solà Part I Formal features 2 Probing phrases, pronouns, and binding 25 Fredrik Heinat 3 Wh-agreement and bounded unbounded movement 46 Patricia Schneider-Zioga 4 Universal 20 without the LCA 60 Klaus Abels and Ad Neeleman 5 What it means (not) to know (number) agreement 80 Carson T. Schütze 6 Number agreement in the acquisition of English and Xhosa 104 Jill de Villiers and Sandile Gxilishe 7 Variable vs.
consistent input: comprehension of plural morphology and verbal agreement in children 123 Karen Miller and Cristina Schmitt 8 Grammatical features in the comprehension of Italian relative clauses by children 138 Fabrizio Arosio, Flavia Adani, and Maria Teresa Guasti Part II Interpretable features 9 When movement fails to reconstruct 159 Nicolas Guilliot and Nouman Malkawi vi Contents 10 If non-simultaneous spell-out exists, this is what it can explain 175 Franc Marušič 11 Valuing V features and N features: What adjuncts tell us about case, agreement, and syntax in general 194 Joseph Emonds 12 The diversity of dative experiencers 215 György Rákosi 13 Homogeneity and flexibility in temporal modification 235 Aniko Csirmaz 14 The syntactically well-behaved comparative correlative 254 Heather Lee Taylor 15 Some silent first person plurals 276 Richard S. Kayne 16 From Greek to Germanic: Poly-(∗ in)-definiteness and weak/strong adjectival inflection 293 Thomas Leu 17 Acquisition of plurality in a language without plurality 310 Alan Munn, Xiaofei Zhang, and Cristina Schmitt References 329 Language Index 359 Subject Index 361 List of figures 6.1 Sample stimulus for the recorded sentence: /therabbitsnifftheflowers/ 107 6.2 Data on plural and singular subject agreement from two- to three-year-old Xhosa speakers 115 6.3 Tree diagram of derivation of subject agreement in Xhosa 119 7.2 Experiment 1: Sample target trial 130 7.3 Experiment 1: Percentage of plural responses 132 7.4 Experiment 2: Sample target trial 134 7.5 Experiment 2: Percentage of plural responses 136 8.1 Overall results from the picture selection task 149 17.1 Sample picture from Experiment 1 318 17.2 Sample picture from Experiment 2 323 List of tables 5.1 Age range and number of recordings for each Swahili child 88 5.2 Proportions of all indicative clause types for each child and for the adults in a subset of these files 91 5.3 Swahili children’s clause types as a function of age: Hawa 91 5.4 Swahili children’s clause types as a function of age: Mustafa 92 5.5 Swahili children’s clause types as a function of age: Fauzia 92 5.6 Swahili children’s clause types as a function of age: Hassan 93 5.7 Total number of object agreement markers produced 93 5.8 Distribution of MIT twins’ subject pronouns: twin pair I 96 5.9 Distribution of MIT twins’ subject pronouns: twin pair II 97 5.10 Distribution of MIT twins’ subject pronouns: twin pair III 97 5.11 Distribution of MIT twins’ subject pronouns: twin pair IV 98 5.12 Distribution of agreeing versus default verb forms as a function of subject phi-features for three French children 100 6.1 Number of utterances and number of samples ( ) by age band 114 6.2 Pilot studies of subject number agreement comprehension in Xhosa 121 9.1 Determiners and pronouns in French 169 17.1 Proportion of No responses 319 17.2 Proportion of No responses Experiment 1b (English) 321 17.3 Proportion of generic responses: discourse order 325 17.4 Proportion of generic responses: canonicity 325 Notes on contributors Klaus Abels received his PhD at the University of Connecticut in 2003. He has since held positions at the Universities of Leipzig and Tromsø and is currently lecturer in linguistics at University College London. He is interested in constraints on syntactic movement operations.
Flavia Adani is a graduate student at the University of Milano-Bicocca and she works in sentence comprehension in typically-developing children and children with language disorders. As an undergraduate, she studied at the University of Siena and at the University of Reading. Fabrizio Arosio is a research assistant at the University of Milano-Bicocca where he teaches in the Faculty of Psychology. He has worked in theoretical linguistics on the semantics of tense, aspect and temporal adverbials and on the processing of verbal agreement morphology in child language.
Aniko Csirmaz obtained a PhD degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005. Since then, she has been the recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship (at Carleton College), and is currently an assistant professor at the Univer- sity of Utah. Joseph Emonds has published four books on syntactic and morphological analysis: Transformational Approach to English Syntax (1976), Unified Theory of Syntactic Cat- egories (1985), Lexicon and Grammar: the English Syntacticon (2000), and Discovering Syntax (2007).
He is American but moved to England in 1992. He has also taught in France, Holland, Japan, Austria, and Spain. Maria Teresa Guasti is Professor at the Department of Psychology, Università di Milano-Bicocca. She held positions at the University of Siena, at the Department of Cognitive Science, San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, and at the University of Geneva.
She is author of one textbook on language acquisition and of several articles on theoretical linguistics, language acquisition, and language impairment. Nicolas Guilliot defended his PhD thesis, Reconstruction at the Syntax-Semantics Interface, in 2006 at the University of Nantes, and is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto (2007–09). Sandile Gxilishe is an Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town. His research is on child language development, second language acquisition and language in education.
He has published widely on these aspects and has also published educa- tional material in Xhosa, an indigenous language of South Africa. x Notes on contributors Fredrik Heinat received his PhD in 2006 from Lund University. The title of his thesis is “Probes, pronouns and binding in the minimalist program”. He currently holds a post-doctoral post at the University of Gothenburg, where he is involved in a project investigating the syntax and semantics of Germanic, and particularly Scandinavian, light verbs.
The approach is generative in broad terms. Kayne is Professor of Linguistics at New York University. He has written French Syntax (1975), Connectedness and Binary Branching (1984), The Antisymmetry of Syntax (1994), Parameters and Universals (2000), and Movement and Silence (2005), and is editor of the book series Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax. Thomas Leu is a graduate student in linguistics at New York University.
His work includes a novel analysis of the Germanic “what for” construction, a bi-nominal analysis of modified indefinite pronouns like “something strange”, and an analysis of the internal syntax of demonstrative determiners, closely related to the present contribution. Nouman Malkawi is a PhD student at the University of Nantes and his thesis on resumption in Jordanian Arabic should be defended in 2008. Franc (Lanko) Marušič was awarded his PhD from Stony Brook University in 2005, when he joined the University of Nova Gorica as an assistant professor. His main areas of interest are Slovenian syntax, comparative Slavic syntax, and syntactic theory.
He has published papers in various journals (including Linguistic Inquiry and Natural Language and Linguistic Theory) and co-edited the volume Studies in Formal Slavic Linguistics. Karen Miller is Assistant Professor in Spanish at Calvin College. She obtained her PhD from Michigan State University in 2007 and the title of her dissertation is “Variable Input and the Acquisition of Plurality in Two Varieties of Spanish”. She is director of the Calvin College Language Studies Lab.
Her research focuses mainly on first language acquisition. Alan Munn is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Michigan State University. He received his PhD in 1993 from the University of Maryland, College Park. He has taught at the University of North Carolina, the University of Missouri, and Harvard University.
He co-directs the Michigan State University Language Acquisition Lab. Ad Neeleman is Professor of Linguistics at University College London. He obtained his PhD from Utrecht University in 1994 (cum laude). He is co-author of two monographs—Flexible Syntax (1998, with Fred Weerman) and Beyond Morphology (2004, with Peter Ackema)—and has published articles on syntax, morphology, PF, and information structure.
György Rákosi is a lecturer in linguistics at the University of Debrecen in Hungary. He defended his PhD thesis Dative experiencer predicates in Hungarian in 2006 at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics. He has an interest in argument structure and related Notes on contributors xi phenomena in general, and he has published articles on experiencer, reflexive, and reciprocal predicates, and on anaphoric dependencies. Cristina Schmitt is Associate Professor in Linguistics at Michigan State University.
She works mainly on the syntax-semantics of noun phrases, aspect, and first language acquisition. Patricia Schneider-Zioga is a lecturer in the Department of English, Compara- tive Literature, and Linguistics at California State University, Fullerton. Recent works include “Anti-Agreement, Anti-Locality and Minimality: the Syntax of Dislocated Subjects” (2007) and “Dyslexia: the temporal-spatial disordering hypothesis and its metrical reflex” (2007). Schütze is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles.
He is author of The Empirical Base of Linguistics (1996) and entries on methodology in three encyclopedias. He has published articles on syntax in Linguistic Inquiry, Lingua, Syntax, and The Linguistic Review, on language acquisition in Journal of Child Language and Language Acquisition, and on psycholinguistics in Journal of Memory and Language and Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. Heather Lee Taylor is currently finishing her PhD studies at University of Mary- land, College Park. Her research concentrations are in syntactic theory and second language acquisition.
Within these subdisciplines she has investigated comparative and degree syntax and semantics, wh-in-situ, A′ -movement and island effects, age effects in learning, and implicit learning. Jill de Villiers is a Professor at Smith College in Psychology and Philosophy. She received a BSc degree from Reading University and a PhD from Harvard University, both in psychology.