Ken Safir

• Professor (Full) at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Two structure‐building operations are currently posited in minimalist theory: an operation forming sets (set merge), and an operation forming ordered pairs (pair‐merge). I argue that pair‐merge is sufficient to generate syntactic relations, so set merge, also called simple merge, should be eliminated from syntactic theory on grounds of simplicity....

Grano and Lasnik (2008) argue that phases should be extended if features are still unvalued on the complement of a phase head at the end of what would normally be a phase. Thus, if pronouns are bound variables with unvalued features, then the phase that matters for resolving the unvalued features is extended. However, the one case that their genera...

Weak crossover (WCO) effects may be described as arising in a syntactic configuration where pronouns cannot be interpreted as co‐construed with certain kinds of displaced or quantified antecedents. If it is correct to say that (i) the blocking of this co‐construal does not seem logically required, (ii) the effect is syntactically conditioned, (iii)...

The agglutinative morphology of verb stems poses many problems for theory and analysis, insofar as distinct theoretical commitments as to what counts as a linguistic unit do not always align. The verb stem morphology of Jóola-Eegimaa (Eegimaa, henceforth), an Atlantic language of the Niger-Congo family, poses just such a challenge. We argue that ou...

The novelty of this document is that the empirical support for the predictions it examines, predictions about the distribution and interpretation of transitive reciprocal constructions, will be different each time it is read. The evidence will change because this paper will only provide parameters for a search of the Afranaph Database (ongoing) and...

I argue that there is only one true anaphor in natural language, which takes many shapes. Building on the idea that some pronouns are constructed and others are ‘‘natural-born’’ with features, as suggested by Kratzer (2009), I suggest that all nonlocally anteceded bound variable pronouns that are traditionally bound (c-commanded) are the spell-out...

Hauser et al. (2002) suggest that the human language faculty emerged as a genetic innovation in the form of what is called here a 'keystone factor'—a single, simple, formal mental capability that, interacting with the pre-existing faculties of hominid ancestors, caused a cascade of effects resulting in the language faculty in modern humans. They ta...

  This essay argues that antecedent-anaphor and bound-variable relations (coconstrual relations) are formed outside of narrow syntax by an interpretive component that exploits the structures built by minimalist architecture. It is demonstrated that attempts to reduce coconstrual to the tree-building operations of narrow syntax (Agree, feature theor...

One of the great strengths of Sam Mchombo's The syntax of Chichewa is that it is more than just the syntax of Chichewa; it is also an excellent introduction to Bantu syntax from a theoretical linguist's point of view. Although the book is organized around the presentation of the major morphological and syntactic structures of Chichewa, the syntacti...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1982. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [500]-510). Photocopy.

This chapter argues that if intended coreference involves picking out the same referent, the same extension in the world of discourse, then it does not describe the class of coconstruals that existing theories of (intended) coreference address, or that they should address. It contends that there exist dependent identity readings which are not coref...

This book establishes the need for a competitive approach to the distribution and interpretation of anaphoric relations in natural language, and makes a particular proposal about the sort of competitive theory of anaphora that might be on the right track. Linguists are especially interested in anaphoric relations because they provide evidence for t...

It is argued that the indexicality of first person pronouns arises from a restriction on the pronouns themselves, as opposed to any operator that binds them. The nature of this restriction is an asyntactic constant function selecting an entity or entities from the context of utterance (following Kaplan 1989). Constant function pronouns do not requi...

Fiengo and May (1994) argue that what they call vehicle change, which permits copies of names to be evaluated as pronouns with respect to interpretive principles, plays a key role in accounting for reconstruction effects in ellipsis environments. It is argued here that the alleviation of Principle C violations (antire construction effects), where i...

It is argued that most anaphors have semantic content and that the semantic content of a given anaphoric atom plays an active role in determining both its distribution and the interpretation of the sentences in which it is employed. It is first demonstrated that semantic distinctions between semantically relational anaphoric atoms predict differenc...

The distribution of weak crossover (WCO) effects is shown to follow from a consistency condition on Ā-chains that prevents a single Ā-binder from simultaneously heading both representational and derivational chains. Chains with overt pronominal tails are always representational, whether or not the Ā-chain head is quantificational, but chains initia...

Aside from word order perhaps, there are very few aspects of linguistic typology that have been as closely studied as the null subject property, especially from the perspective of recent theoretical work within the principles and parameters framework initiated by Chomsky (1981). The appeal of the parametric perspective is that a variety of language...

In this essay I will explore the syntactic expression of the notion clause by focusing on some syntactic and semantic properties of bare infinitive (BI) complements to perception verbs in English. I shall argue briefly that perception BI complements must be clausal, and then turn in more detail to the issue of what sort of clause the BI complement...

The central challenge for modern linguistic theory is to develop a model of Universal Grammar that is, on the one hand, general enough to capture the universal features of natural language, and on the other, flexible enough to account for the variation among languages that is in fact observed. Moreover, insofar as Universal Grammar (UG) is assumed...

The development of a parameterized theory of Universal Grammar is still a very young idea, and so some fundamental questions are still very close to the surface: What counts as a parametric theory? What should such a theory explain? Wexler and Manzini (henceforth, W&M) provide us with a new approach to these issues, one which is sure to engender mu...