LINGUIST List 17.3640
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Fri Dec 08 2006
Diss: Ling Theories/Syntax: Kobele: 'Generating Copies: An investig...'
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1. Gregory
Kobele,
Generating Copies: An investigation into structural identity in language and grammar
Message 1: Generating Copies: An investigation into structural identity in language and grammar
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Date: 08-Dec-2006
From: Gregory Kobele <kobelelabri.fr>
Subject: Generating Copies: An investigation into structural identity in language and grammar
Institution: University of California, Los Angeles
Program: Department of Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2006
Author: Gregory M Kobele
Dissertation Title: Generating Copies: An investigation into structural identity in language and grammar
Dissertation URL: http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/grads/kobele/Diss
Linguistic Field(s):
Linguistic Theories
Syntax
Subject Language(s): English (eng)
Yoruba (yor)
Dissertation Director:
Edward L Keenan
Marcus Kracht
Edward P Stabler
Charles Taylor
Colin Wilson
Dissertation Abstract:
In this dissertation I provide a directly compositional semantics for
minimalist grammars, which allows us to view the derivation as the only
relevant syntactic structure, thereby eliminating all non-interface levels,
and obtaining a system similar in this respect to categorial grammar. I
give an explicit account of a fragment of English consisting of
passivization, raising, control, and expletive-it, which accounts for
quantifier scope ambiguities. The system is quite minimal; there are no
trans-derivational economy conditions, no preferences for merge over move,
no numerations, no lexical sub-arrays. Instead, all operations are feature
driven, and there is a single economy condition, the Principle of
Immediacy, which simply requires that features be checked as soon as the
appropriate configuration arises.
I add copy movement to the minimalist grammar system. I implement copying
in two ways. Once with multiple dominance, treating copies as being derived
only once, and once with synchronous derivation, treating each copy as
having been derived. Both approaches are strongly equivalent, and generate
only languages in P. Our semantics extends immediately to minimalist
grammars with copying.
I turn next to the West African language Yoruba, which has constructions
characterized by overt copying of VPs. As Yoruba also has serial verbs,
there is no principled upper bound on the size of the copied VP. I give an
explicit account of a fragment of Yoruba consisting of serialization and
relative clauses, both over predicates (the so-called relativized
predicate) and over nouns. Copying in Yoruba relativized predicates is not
a straightforward matter, with the copy relation sometimes rendered opaque
by other processes. However, our minimalist grammars with copying account
elegantly for the range of copy possibilities, and assign natural
structures to these copies, which no known mildly context sensitive
formalism is capable of doing.
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