Jason Ostrove

University of California, Santa Cruz | UCSC · Department of Linguistics

This paper examines impersonal readings of pronouns in San Martín Peras Mixtec, an Oto-Manguean language of Oaxaca, Mexico. These readings are evaluated in the context of proposals and proposed universals from the literature on impersonals in (Indo-)European languages. I show that some proposals based on European languages hold in San Martín Peras...

San Martín Peras Mixtec, an Oto-Manguean language spoken by approximately 10,000 people in western Oaxaca and by large communities in California, differs from other Mixtec languages in having developed a process which I refer to as “nominal doubling.” In nominal doubling constructions, a morpheme that is morphophonologically identical to the regula...

Legate (2008) proposes that the postsyntactic component of the grammar plays an important role in morphological case phenomena. Therefore, it is predicted that postsyntactic processes like Linearization may affect morphological case assignment. I argue that this prediction is correct by demonstrating that prepositional case in Scottish Gaelic is as...

In studying the mechanisms that create portmanteaux, it is often difficult to distinguish structural constituency from linear adjacency. This paper examines the Irish verbal complex, the particular intricacies of which allow us to disentangle linear adjacency from morphosyntactic constituency. We observe that portmanteaux are formed between linearl...