LINGUIST List 17.3640
Fri Dec 08 2006
Diss: Ling Theories/Syntax: Kobele: 'Generating Copies: An investig...'
Editor for this issue: Hannah Morales
<hannahlinguistlist.org>
Directory
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
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 forminimalist grammars, which allows us to view the derivation as the onlyrelevant syntactic structure, thereby eliminating all non-interface levels,and obtaining a system similar in this respect to categorial grammar. Igive an explicit account of a fragment of English consisting ofpassivization, raising, control, and expletive-it, which accounts forquantifier scope ambiguities. The system is quite minimal; there are notrans-derivational economy conditions, no preferences for merge over move,no numerations, no lexical sub-arrays. Instead, all operations are featuredriven, and there is a single economy condition, the Principle ofImmediacy, which simply requires that features be checked as soon as theappropriate configuration arises.
I add copy movement to the minimalist grammar system. I implement copyingin two ways. Once with multiple dominance, treating copies as being derivedonly once, and once with synchronous derivation, treating each copy ashaving been derived. Both approaches are strongly equivalent, and generateonly languages in P. Our semantics extends immediately to minimalistgrammars with copying.
I turn next to the West African language Yoruba, which has constructionscharacterized 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 anexplicit account of a fragment of Yoruba consisting of serialization andrelative clauses, both over predicates (the so-called relativizedpredicate) and over nouns. Copying in Yoruba relativized predicates is nota straightforward matter, with the copy relation sometimes rendered opaqueby other processes. However, our minimalist grammars with copying accountelegantly for the range of copy possibilities, and assign naturalstructures to these copies, which no known mildly context sensitiveformalism is capable of doing.
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