Romance s-Forms as Imposters

Abstract: In this blog post, I situate the results of Kayne’s (2018) in the imposter framework of Collins and Postal (2012) and Collins and Ordóñez (2021).

Romance s-Forms as Imposters

A Merge-Based Approach to the Syntax-Semantics Interface

These notes are based on a career of looking at issues in the syntax-semantics interface, including argument structure, anaphora, negation, quantifiers, coordination, and ellipsis.

Philosophy

1.

Be open to syntax.

Be open to radically syntactic approaches to traditionally semantic and pragmatic issues, no matter how authoritative or how widely adopted the semantic or pragmatic approach might be.

2. 

Semantic operations are defined in terms of syntactic structure. 

In other words, there is no semantics without syntax. As a consequence, all semantic analyses involve important assumptions about syntax. 

3.

Hypothesis: The correct syntactic analysis will have a semantic interpretation that is simple, transparent and uniform (in the sense clarified below in 4-8).

Specific Assumptions

Here are some specific assumptions that help to articulate the above hypothesis.

4.

Semantic operations are simple and limited in type (simplicity).

Semantic operations are as constrained as possible, perhaps only function application and predicate abstraction. Powerful semantic operations such as type shifting, function composition, existential closure and semantic coercion are not part of UG. If an analysis uses such operations, try to think about how to replicate their effects syntactically (e.g., using Merge) and then test the consequences.

5.

Semantic values are simple (simplicity).

The semantic values of lexical items are simple. The more complex a semantic value is, the greater the chance that it should be broken into several different morphemes each with its own simple semantic value. These morphemes will them be merged together in the syntactic derivation.

6.

Variables are represented syntactically (transparency).

If there is a variable x in the semantic representation, then there is a DP in the syntactic representation which is interpreted as the variable x. This constraint forces variables to be introduced into both syntax and semantics via Merge. A simple example is the passive. Since there is a variable representing the agent in the short passive, there must be a DP in the syntactic representation interpreted as that variable. See Collins 2024 for a discussion and references.

7.

Semantic interpretation is uniform (uniformity).

Semantic interpretation is uniform in the sense that a single syntactic structure is not interpreted in two different ways. A single syntactic structure has a single interpretation. 

For example, a DP in a position P, cannot be interpreted optionally as specific or non-specific. To get the two interpretations, something must be different, either the internal syntactic structure of the DP, or the syntactic position of the DP, or both.

8.

Semantic relations and predicates are directly represented in syntactic structure to the greatest extent possible (transparency).

For example, the scope of one quantifier phrase QP1 over another QP2 is represented syntactically in terms of asymmetric c-command at some point in the derivation (not in terms of type shifting one quantifier phrase to given it semantic scope over another). Another example is Rizzi 1997 use of FocP to syntactically represent the semantics of focus.

Of all the assumptions concerning the syntax-semantics interface, (8) is the vaguest and hardest to pin down since the notion of “semantic relations and predicates” is very broad. Furthermore, it may be that (8) follows from the other assumptions in (4-7).

Method

9.

Work out the truth conditions, entailments, presuppositions, scope and other semantic properties. Pay close attention to how the semantic properties vary with varying syntactic configurations. Are there important generalizations about how differences in syntax affect changes in interpretation? 

10.

Work out the syntactic analysis using Merge-based framework. 

(9) and (10) feed into one another. Semantic properties may suggest a particular syntactic analysis (in conformity with (4-8). And the syntactic analysis may suggest investigating certain semantic properties.

11.

Work out the compositional semantics based on assumptions 4-8.

Depending on the audience and venue, it is not always necessary to give the complete compositional semantics. But you should be confident about what the semantic properties of your proposed syntactic analysis are. Your syntactic representation should capture the semantic properties of the construction.

Evaluation

12.

Justify your syntactic analysis using traditional syntactic tests.

You don’t just get to propose syntactic structure free of charge. Since the assumptions in (4-8) are a hypothesis, you need to prove that your proposed analysis is correct or at least better than alternatives. Whatever representation you ultimately come up with, it should be consistent with standard syntactic tests (e.g., constituent structure tests, Binding Theory, islands, distributional tests, agreement, etc.). This is your opportunity to dig very deeply into the syntax of the construction.

13.

Justify your syntactic analysis using cross-linguistic comparisons.

For some topics, it might be easier probe syntactic structure and its semantic interpretation in a different language. In some languages, the morphosyntax of a construction clearly reflects its semantic properties. Investigating such languages can give important clues about the best syntactic analysis cross-linguistically. For example, it is much easier to investigate the syntactic and semantic properties of logophoricity in Ewe, which has a morphologically distinct logophoric pronoun.

14.

Look for the smoking gun.

Does the syntactic approach yield insights into any particular aspect of the problem? Are there interesting empirical predications? Is there a deep theoretical consequence? Try to find something that would convince a disinterested party, or even a skeptic. 

Acknowledgments: I thank Richard Kayne, Paul Postal and Gary Thoms for comments on a draft of this blog post.

Overview of Nanosyntax (from the Perspective of MaS) (November 11 2024)

Summary: Nanosyntax is a theory of syntax that assumes late insertion, and phrasal spell-out.

< /blikәt/ ⇔ [ZP Z [YP Y [XP X ]]] ⇔ BLICKET > (Baunaz and Lander 2018: 26)

Example: Russian accusative of ‘lip’ gub-ú (Caha 2020: 30, example (65))

[ACCP F2 [NOMP F1 [#P # [FEMP FEM REF]]]]

Discuss: Superset Principle, Elsewhere Principle, Cyclic Override Principle

Positives:

1. Minimalist (Merge), Cartography, LCA

2. One feature, one head (no bundling)

3. No Morphological Component (no impoverishment, no post-syntactic insertion)

Spellout-Driven Movement

1. Motivated by Spellout (in addition to syntactic movement)

2. Leaves no trace (needed for lexical insertion)

3. Spellout Algorithm/Lexicalization Algorithm (Caha et. al. 2024)

a. Merge F and lexicalize FP

b. If (a) fails, move the Spec of the complement of F, and lexicalize FP

c. If (b) fails, move the complement of F, and lexicalize FP

d. If (c) fails, go back to the previous cycle and try the next option for that cycle

Paval Caha (p.c.): “You need Spec movement before complement movement in all cases where an agglutinative form (derived by complement movement) could have been used, but never is, because there is a portmanteau morpheme.”

Worries:

1. Spellout driven movement seems like a second syntactic system (outside of regular syntax) needed for spell-out. In that way, it is similar to the operations of the morphological component (e.g., impoverishment, post-syntactic movement) in DM.

2. How does compositional semantics work in Nanosyntax?

a. Spell-out driven movement does not leave traces.

b. Lexical insertion introduces conceptual material at the phrasal level.

MaS and Nanosyntax:

Note: NS uses phrasal spell-out, where MaS uses empty elements. 

Hypothesis: For every NS proposal, it is possible to translate that proposal mechanically into an MaS proposal in the following way:

a. If in NS, a lexical item spells out a phrase with one head H as PHON, then in MaS, there is the lexical item {H, PHON}.

b. If in NS, a lexical item spells out a phrase involving two heads H1 and H2 (H1 c-commands H2) as PHON, then in MaS, there is the lexical item {H2, PHON}, and H1 is licensed as an empty element when occurring with H2.

A Singular Note on Singular-They/Them (Addendum)

 The following exchange is based on (with minor revisions) an exchange which took place on Facebook on November 6, 2024.

https://www.facebook.com/christhadcollins/posts/pfbid02m9SzEhAzGiWkXuhE3ModZdytKhf2h5Rbv8oTnyxFMfwWh6cZMVf5J2gUeETJxzqrl

Facebook Reader: 

Karlos Arregi & Matt Hewett noted this for singular 'they' and it-clefts in their recent NELS presentation at Yale. The handout is on the NELS website.

Response:

Thank you for your comment, which is very relevant. Based on your comment, I have now reviewed Arregi and Hewett. Here are a few observations. First, I had heard about Arregi and Hewett before I wrote my blog post. I even got their handout from Gary Thoms, but I had not read it, or even glanced at it. My recent blog post is based on completely original empirical observations by me, which stemmed intellectually 100% from reading John David Storment's thesis chapters, where he has lots of puzzles concerning agreement in inversion constructions with pronouns. I basically applied the kinds of tests that he is looking at to singular-they, and that led to my blog post. Second, they (Arregi and Hewett) only discussed it-clefts, which I did not discuss. I discussed there-constructions and inversion. So the empirical discoveries complement each other. I admit the patterns seem to be similar (in that, singular-they triggers singular verb agreement in all three constructions). But their explanation (based on the antecedent of a relative pronoun) will definitely not carry over to my data. In my data, there are no relative pronouns. Third, I am quite interested in their analysis of singular-they, based on imposters. It seems very promising (and very different from the usual DM analyses based on impoverishment, underspecification and late insertion). It seems to me to be real progress in understanding singular-they. Fourth, what is deeply ironic about their handout, is that with Paco Ordonez I proposed an imposter account of 'ustedes' (2PL) in Spanish to respond to claims about impoverishment in Latin American Spanish made by Arregi and Nevins. So in effect, we have come full circle in the development of these ideas: Arregi/Nevins --> Collins/Ordonez --> Arregi/Hewett --> Collins (blog post). What an interesting world we live in!

A Singular Note on Singular-They/Them

 Abstract: 

This squib shows that singular-them in expletive and inversion contexts only gives rise to singular verb agreement.

Keywords: singular-they/them, agreement, expletives, inversion

A Singular Note on Singular-They/Them

Biographical Notes (Technology Review, Class Notes, March/April 2025)

I wrote this for the Technology Review, Class Notes. It should appear in the March/April 2025 issue. There are also some pictures to accompany the text. They are pictures of me in the field. But I do not post them here.