Thursday, April 6, 2023

MA Scholarship: Khoisan Languages at MIT

This is a legitimate opportunity for those of you who are interested in promoting Khoisan languages in Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, Angola and Zimbabwe. Please take a look at the description and see if it is right for you. Linguistics background is not necessary.
 

Tuesday, March 7, 2023

Internet Searches as a Tool in Syntactic Research (third version)

Internet searches have turned out to be a revolutionary tool in syntactic research. In this blog post, I outline the general methodology.

Friday, March 3, 2023

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Friday, February 24, 2023

The Distribution of Particles in Quotative Inversion (Collins 2003)

In this paper , I revisit the analysis of Quotative Inversion (QI) presented in Collins (1997) (see also Collins and Branigan (1997), and see Doeleman 1998 and Suñer 2000 on QI in other languages). Based on the distribution of particles in QI, I will show that the […V Subj…] word order found in QI (quotative inversion) is the result of VP movement to a position c-commanding the in-situ Subj. The distribution of particles provides direct evidence against the verb movement analysis of QI given in Collins 1997.

The Distribution of Particles in Quotative Inversion


Friday, February 17, 2023

Head-Raising from Collins 2015 (Grammatical Analysis II)

 Here is a handout on the head-raising analysis of relative clauses, based on Collins 2015.

It just gives the tree diagram for a simple example.

Head-Raising Analysis