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Title:
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About Sharing
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Author:
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Martina Gracanin-Yuksek
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://alum.mit.edu/www/mgy
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Degree Awarded:
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
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Degree Date:
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2007
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Syntax
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Director(s):
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David Pesetsky
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Abstract:
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This thesis is about multidominance or sharing in syntax. The term sharing
is used in a technical sense, to refer to a situation where a syntactic
node has more than one mother. I assume that multidominance is allowed by
the grammar. I argue that sharing configurations are more diverse than it
has been proposed. I identify two kinds of sharing: bulk sharing and
non-bulk sharing. A string of multidominated material may be shared as a
single constituent, resulting in a bulk sharing structure or its subparts
may be shared individually, which results in a non-bulk sharing configuration.
I argue that all sharing structures are constrained by a single condition:
Constraint On Sharing (COSH). COSH is a filter on derivations, which
imposes an identity requirement on the sets of terminal nodes completely
dominated by horizontal mothers of any shared node. Horizontal mothers are
mothers that do not dominate each other. I propose that effects of COSH are
reducible to conditions that must be satisfied for a structure to be
linearizable.
Empirical evidence for COSH and non-bulk sharing comes from Bi-Clausal
Multiple Wh-questions (BMWs), which I investigate in English and Croatian.
In a BMW, two wh-phrases appear to be coordinated at the left periphery of
the clause: “What and where did Bob cook?”. I present arguments that these
questions are bi-clausal, with one wh-phrase belonging to each CP conjunct.
Next, I propose an analysis of BMWs that involves non-bulk sharing
constrained by COSH. I argue that this analysis explains the puzzling
properties that BMWs have in both languages.
I show that while English has only BMWs, in Croatian there is also a
construction that mimics a BMW in the surface string, but is actually a
result of a very different derivation, one that involves only one clause
with two coordinated wh-phrases. I refer to this structure as a Coordinated
Multiple Question (CMW). I propose that the placement of second-position
clitics in Croatian can disambiguate a BMW from a CMW.
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