LINGUIST List 18.2656

Wed Sep 12 2007

Diss: Syntax: Gracanin-Yuksek: 'About Sharing'

Editor for this issue: Hunter Lockwood <hunterlinguistlist.org>


Directory         1.    Martina Gracanin-Yuksek, About Sharing


Message 1: About Sharing
Date: 12-Sep-2007
From: Martina Gracanin-Yuksek <mgracanimit.edu>
Subject: About Sharing
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Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Program: Department of Linguistics and Philosophy Dissertation Status: Completed Degree Date: 2007

Author: Martina Gracanin-Yuksek

Dissertation Title: About Sharing

Dissertation URL: http://www.mit.edu/~mgracani/Gracanin_2007_diss_corrected-TCS.pdf

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax
Dissertation Director:
David Pesetsky
Dissertation Abstract:

This thesis is about multidominance or sharing in syntax. The term sharingis used in a technical sense, to refer to a situation where a syntacticnode has more than one mother. I assume that multidominance is allowed bythe grammar. I argue that sharing configurations are more diverse than ithas been proposed. I identify two kinds of sharing: bulk sharing andnon-bulk sharing. A string of multidominated material may be shared as asingle constituent, resulting in a bulk sharing structure or its subpartsmay 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, whichimposes an identity requirement on the sets of terminal nodes completelydominated by horizontal mothers of any shared node. Horizontal mothers aremothers that do not dominate each other. I propose that effects of COSH arereducible to conditions that must be satisfied for a structure to belinearizable.

Empirical evidence for COSH and non-bulk sharing comes from Bi-ClausalMultiple Wh-questions (BMWs), which I investigate in English and Croatian.In a BMW, two wh-phrases appear to be coordinated at the left periphery ofthe clause: "What and where did Bob cook?". I present arguments that thesequestions are bi-clausal, with one wh-phrase belonging to each CP conjunct.Next, I propose an analysis of BMWs that involves non-bulk sharingconstrained by COSH. I argue that this analysis explains the puzzlingproperties that BMWs have in both languages.

I show that while English has only BMWs, in Croatian there is also aconstruction that mimics a BMW in the surface string, but is actually aresult of a very different derivation, one that involves only one clausewith two coordinated wh-phrases. I refer to this structure as a CoordinatedMultiple Question (CMW). I propose that the placement of second-positionclitics in Croatian can disambiguate a BMW from a CMW.