In my list of teachers, I would like to include Dave Embick and Roumi Izvorski. Ch. 2 of this dissertation has benefitted from detailed discussions with Dave Embick. I would also like to thank Roumi Izvorski, Chung-hye Han, and Rashmi Prasad for comments on various parts of the dissertation. Thanks also to Karlos Arregi-Urbina and Martin Hackl for going through the chapters I gave them. I have enjoyed collaborating with the following people on various projects: Elena

Abstract. This paper provides a new analysis of the phenomenon of Long Distance Agreement in HindiUrdu and argues for a dissociation between case and agreement. Long Distance Agreement involves a verb agreeing with a constituent inside the verb's clausal complement. Long Distance Agreement and Object Agreement in Hindi-Urdu are shown to involve the same structural configurations. They both involve a head (T ¼ ) agreeing with an argument whose case-features T ¼ does not value. In particular it is argued the operation Agree of Chomsky (1998, 1999, 2001) needs to be reformulated to be able to handle the facts of Hindi-Urdu Long Distance Agreement. The analysis is largely motivated on the basis of evidence from Hindi-Urdu but is shown to extend to the Long Distance Agreement facts of Tsez (Polinsky and Potsdam (2001)) and Kashmiri (Subbarao and Munshi (2000)).

Harmonic Grammar (HG) is a model of linguistic constraint interaction in which well-formedness is calculated as the sum of weighted constraint violations. We show how linear programming algorithms can be used to determine whether there is a weighting for a set of constraints that fits a set of linguistic data. The associated software package OT-Help provides a practical tool for studying large and complex linguistic systems in the HG framework and comparing the results with those of OT. We first describe the translation from Harmonic Grammars to systems solvable by linear programming algorithms. We then develop an HG analysis of ATR harmony in Lango that is, we argue, superior to the existing OT and rule-based treatments. We further highlight the usefulness of OT-Help, and the analytic power of HG, with a set of studies of the predictions HG makes for phonological typology.

In this article, we propose that degree heads and degree clauses form a constituent not at the point where the degree head is merged, but after QR of the degree head and countercyclic merger of the degree clause. We derive a generalization originally outlined in Williams 1974 that the scope of the comparative degree quantifier is exactly as high as the site of attachment of the degree clause. This generalization is shown to follow from the derivational mechanism of countercyclic merger and a semantic property of the comparative degree head, namely, its nonconservativity.Keywords: comparatives, scope, interpretation of copies, antecedentcontained deletion (ACD), conservativity, extrapositionThe focus of this article is the place of degree clauses (i.e., than-/as-phrases) in the overall architecture of comparatives.1 We propose that degree clauses are merged late, after the degree head -er/as has moved to a scope position.2 The position where the degree clause merges is the position in which it is pronounced. Degree clauses do not move by themselves, nor do they move covertly with the degree head. The movement of the degree head is covert; it has no effect on how the generated structure is realized at PF. The covert nature of this movement is not the result of post-Spell-Out timing; temporally, it precedes the merger of the degree clause, which does affect PF. Rather, the movement of the degree head is covert because the lower copy of the chain is pronounced instead of the head of the chain. This may be so because of general properties of Quantifier Raising (QR), or it may be the result of morphological well-formedness conditions on the realization of the degree head affix.Our proposal allows us to refine-and, importantly, motivate-Williams's generalization with respect to degree constructions. Williams (1974) noted a correlation between the scope of the DP out of which a constituent has been extraposed and the adjunction site of the extraposed expression. Fox and Nissenbaum (1999) and Fox (2002) provide an analysis of extraposition that ensures that the scope of a source DP is at least as high as the attachment site of the extraposed We are specially indebted to Danny Fox and Irene Heim for extensive discussions. We would also like to thank our anonymous reviewers, Dave Embick, Sabine Iatridou, Kyle Johnson, Audrey Li, Ora Matushansky, Barry Schein, Philippe Schlenker, Bernhard Schwarz, Jean-Roger Vergnaud, and audiences at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Leiden, USC-UCLA syntax-semantics seminar, Colloque de Syntaxe et Sémantique à Paris (CSSP) 2001, MIT LingLunch, and the CUNY Syntax Supper.1 Although we do not discuss result clauses and the degree heads that license them here, as in (i), our general proposal extends to them too.(i) a. Julien is so crazy that he eats ants. b. Monica is too cool to care. 2 For ease of exposition, from now on we will refer to the degree head as -er, although the proposal is meant to apply to the equative degree head as as well.