Wholesale Late Merger: Beyond the A/Ā Distinction

Takahashi, Shoichi; Hulsey, Sarah

doi:10.1162/ling.2009.40.3.387

Cited by 75 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 34 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Their analysis accounts for the relevant reconstruction asymmetry because the adverbial clause has no copy of herself at any point of the derivation in (38b). This paper agrees with Agbayani and Ochi in that parasitic gaps are defective in some sense, but this insight is implemented in a different way in this paper, by extending a particular theory of Late Merger, which is proposed by Takahashi (2006) and Takahashi and Hulsey (2009) on independent grounds.…”

Section: Puzzlesupporting

confidence: 86%

“…Section 3 analyzes parasitic gap constructions in terms of multiple dominance and shows that major properties of the construction follow from the proposed analysis. Section 4 sketches an analysis of anti-reconstruction effects in parasitic gaps, which is originally attributed to Kearney (1983), by extending a particular theory of Late Merger, proposed by Takahashi (2006) and Takahashi and Hulsey (2009). Section 5 concludes the paper.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…Pursuing Fox's approach in the study of comparatives, Bhatt and Pancheva (2004) argue that a restrictor of an operator/determiner can undergo Late Merger. This type of Late Merger is referred to as Wholesale Late Merger (henceforth, WLM) by Takahashi (2006) and Takahashi and Hulsey (2009). They show that the WLM successfully captures the so-called A/A-bar distinction in reconstruction effects, which is a long-standing problem.…”

Section: Wholesale Late Mergermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Takahashi (2006) and Takahashi and Hulsey (2009) adopt the following procedure to interpret movement chains, which is a slightly revised version of Fox's (2002) (Chomsky (1993) As shown in (43b), the WLM approach allows only the determiner to merge with the predicate, which poses no problem in terms of interpretation, because the determiner ends up being interpreted as a definite description with no restrictor. Then the determiner undergoes successive cyclic movement alone in (43c).…”

Section: Wholesale Late Mergermentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Parasitic Gaps Under Multiple Dominance

Kasai

2010

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Puzzlesupporting

confidence: 86%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Wholesale Late Mergermentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Wholesale Late Mergermentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Parasitic Gaps Under Multiple Dominance

Kasai

2010

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…2 The Deg head presumably combines with the than-phrase via Late Merge as in Bhatt and Pancheva (2004), Takahashi and Hulsey (2008) but this is not crucial.…”

Section: -Place -Er and Phrasal Comparativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reduced and unreduced phrasal comparatives

Bhatt

Takahashi

2011

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Degree heads combine with individual (John is taller than [Mary]) as well as clausal arguments (John is taller than [Mary is]). Does the degree head have the same meaning in these two argument structures? Two kinds of answers have been proposed in the literature: i. there is a single meaning where the degree head combines with a degree predicate (2-placeer), with a reduction operation that derives the DP argument from a degree predicate denoting clausal argument, and ii. there are distinct meanings for each argument structure, one combining with an individual denoting DP (3-place -er) and the other with a degree predicate denoting clause (2-place -er). We show that languages vary in which of these answers they choose: English goes for option I and Hindi-Urdu and Japanese for versions of option II. Despite this surface variation, we argue that the crosslinguistic distribution of 2-place and 3-place -er is not in itself subject to crosslinguistic parametrization; they are just syntactic projections of the basic meaning of comparison. The differences between these languages are therefore derived from the morphosyntactic properties of 'than', considerations of directionality, and a preference for minimal structure. Multiple Routes to A Single MeaningNatural languages often provide instances where two distinct structures map to the same meaning. The much-studied operation of passivization could be taken to provide an instance of two structures, the active and the passive, mapping to the same meaning. In this paper we are interested in examining a similar pair from the domain of comparative constructions. Many languages allow comparative meanings to be expressed by means of a clausal comparative (1a) and a phrasal comparative (1b). These seem to have the same meaning but differ in the category of the constituent that than combines with. In the case of a clausal comparative, than combines with a clause that has undergone some reduction operation and in the case of a phrasal comparative, than combines with a DP. If we believe that the surface structures in (1) are directly the input to interpretation, we are led to the conclusion that the comparative degree head -er has a distinct semantic entry in the clausal comparative and the phrasal comparative. More specifically, if we assume following von Stechow (1984) that the clausal complement of than denotes a degree description, then the degree head in a clausal comparative combines with a degree description while the degree head in a phrasal comparative combines with an individual.(1) Comparison: a. Clausal Comparative: John is taller than [Bill is].-a degree head that combines with a clause 2-place -er: 2 arguments -the extent of John's tallness, the extent of Bill's tallness 1

show abstract

Reconstruction, Binding, and Scope

Sportiche

2017

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

There are mismatches found in movement constructions between surface syntactic structures and associated semantic interpretations, suggesting a failure of incremental compositionality: some moved phrases appear to behave interpretively as if they had not moved. The extent of this phenomenon, called reconstruction , is presented, and its treatments discussed in connection with the interpretive properties of binding and scope. We document that reconstruction effects are found in all types of phrasal movement with respect to both binding principles and principles of scope computation. We also document and discuss asymmetries with respect to reconstruction between pied‐piped complements and pied‐piped adjuncts, on the one hand, and between argument movement and predicate movement, on the other.

show abstract

Wholesale Late Merger: Beyond the A/Ā Distinction

Cited by 75 publications

References 34 publications

Parasitic Gaps Under Multiple Dominance

Parasitic Gaps Under Multiple Dominance

Reduced and unreduced phrasal comparatives

Reconstruction, Binding, and Scope

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About