An official website of the United States government
Recent work in subregular syntax has revealed deep parallels among syntactic phenomena, many of which fall under the computational class TSL (Graf, 2018, 2022). Vu et al. (2019) argue that case dependencies are yet another member of this class. But their analysis focuses mainly on English, which is famously case-poor. In this paper I present a TSL analysis of Japanese, which features a much wider range of case-marking patterns, adding support to the claim that case dependencies, and by extension syntactic dependencies, are TSL.
more »
« less
Typological Implications of Tier-Based Strictly Local Movement
Earlier work has shown that movement, which forms the backbone of Minimalist syntax, belongs in the subregular class of TSL-2 dependencies over trees. The central idea is that movement, albeit unbounded, boils down to local mother-daughter dependencies on a specific substructure called a tree tier. This reveals interesting parallels between syntax and phonology, but it also looks very different from the standard view of movement. One may wonder, then, whether the TSL-2 characterization is linguistically natural. I argue that this is indeed the case because TSL-2 furnishes a unified analysis of a variety of phenomena: multiple wh-movement, expletive constructions, the that-trace effect and the anti-that-trace effect, islands, and wh-agreement. In addition, TSL-2 explains the absence of many logically feasible yet unattested phenomena. Far from a mere mathematical curiosity, TSL-2 is a conceptually pleasing and empirically fertile characterization of movement.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1845344
- PAR ID:
- 10319448
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
- Volume:
- 5
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Extending prior work in Graf (2018, 2020, 2022c), I show that movement is tier-based strictly local (TSL) even if one analyzes it as a transformation, i.e. a tree transduction from derivation trees to output trees. I define input strictly local (ISL) tree-to-tree transductions with (lexical) TSL tests as a tier-based extension of ISL tree-to-tree transductions. TSL tests allow us to attach each mover to all its landing sites. In general, this class of transductions fails to attach each mover to its final landing site to the exclusion of all its intermediate landing sites, which is crucial for producing output trees with the correct string yield. The problem is avoided, though, if syntax enforces a variant of the Ban on Improper Movement. Subregular complexity thus provides a novel motivation for core restrictions on movement while also shedding new light on the choice between copies and traces in syntax.more » « less
-
This paper presents a subregular analysis of syntactic agreement patterns modeled using command strings over Minimalist Grammar (MG) dependency trees (Graf and Shafiei 2019), incorporating a novel MG treatment of agreement. Phenomena of interest include relativized minimality and its exceptions, direction of feature transmission, and configurations involving chains of agreeing elements. Such patterns are shown to fall within the class of tier-based strictly 2-local (TSL-2) languages, which has previously been argued to subsume the majority of long-distance syntactic phenomena, as well as those in phonology and morphology (Graf 2022a). This characterization places a tight upper bound on the range of configurations that are predicted to occur while providing parameters for variation which closely match the observed typology.more » « less
-
Deng, Dun; Liu, Fenrong; Liu, Mingming; Westerstahl, Dag (Ed.)Extending previous work on monotonicity in morphology and morphosyntax, I argue that some of the most important constraints in syntax can be analyzed in terms of monotonic functions that map specific kinds of syntactic representations to fixed, universal hierarchies. I cover the Ban Against Improper Movement, the Williams Cycle, the Ban Against Improper Case, and omnivorous number. The general method of analysis is remarkably similar across all phenomena, which suggests that monotonicity provides a unified perspective on a wide range of phenomena in syntax as well as morphology and morphosyntax. I also argue that syntax, thanks to extensive work in computational syntax, provides a unique opportunity to probe whether the prevalence of monotonicity principles in natural language is due to computational complexity considerations. Not only, then, is it possible to extend the purview of monotonicity from semantics to syntax, doing so might yield new insights into monotonicity that would not be obtainable otherwise.more » « less
-
Various aspects of syntax have recently been characterized in subregular terms. However, these characterizations operate over very different representations, including string encodings of c-command relations as well as tiers projected from derivation trees. We present a way to unify these approaches via sensing tree automata over Minimalist grammar dependency trees. Sensing tree automata are deterministic top-down tree automata that may inspect the labels of all daughter nodes before assigning them specific states. It is already known that these automata cannot correctly enforce all movement dependencies in Minimalist grammars, but we show that this result no longer holds if one takes into account several well-established empirical restrictions on movement. Sensing tree automata thus furnish a strong yet uniform upper bound on the complexity of syntactic dependencies.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
