Peter Sells

• PhD
• Professor at University of York

This volume presents a cross-linguistic investigation of clausal noun-modifying constructions in genetically varied languages of Eurasia. Contrary to a common premise that, in any language, adnominal clauses that share some features of relative clauses constitute a structurally distinct construction, some languages of Eurasia exhibit a General Noun...

This volume presents a cross-linguistic investigation of clausal noun-modifying constructions in genetically varied languages of Eurasia. Contrary to a common premise that, in any language, adnominal clauses that share some features of relative clauses constitute a structurally distinct construction, some languages of Eurasia exhibit a General Noun...

This volume presents a cross-linguistic investigation of clausal noun-modifying constructions in genetically varied languages of Eurasia. Contrary to a common premise that, in any language, adnominal clauses that share some features of relative clauses constitute a structurally distinct construction, some languages of Eurasia exhibit a General Noun...

Imagine how the discipline of linguistics would be if expert practitioners of different theories met in a collaborative setting to tackle the same challenging data—to test the limits of their model’s infrastructure and examine how the concrete predictions of their theories differ about the same data. This book represents the result of attempting to...

Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Grammar of Event Structure (1991), pp. 312-323

English Binominal NPs (BNP) (e.g., a hell of a problem) are of empirical and theoretical interest due to their complex syntactic and semantic properties. In this paper, we review some basic properties of the BNP construction, focusing on its headedness, semantic relations, and the role of the preposition of. We argue that these properties suggest a...

English Binominal NPs (BNP) (e.g., a hell of a problem) are of empirical and theoretical interest due to their complex syntactic and semantic properties. In this paper, we review some basic properties of the BNP construction, focus-ing on its headedness, semantic relations, and the role of the preposition of. We argue that these properties suggest...

The so-called Big Mess Construction (BMC) (e.g. so prominent a punctuation), introduced by a limited set of degree words, places an adjectival expression in the predeterminer position. In movement approaches, such idiosyncratic properties of the BMC have been attributed to the interaction of functional projections and movement operations, whereas i...

In this paper we present data from Korean in which the core arguments (subject and direct object) of a transitive clause may be suffixed with oblique postpositional markers rather than the usual nominative or accusative case markers. Unlike familiar cases of oblique arguments, such as dative subjects, we argue that the oblique case marking surveyed...

In some languages, case-marked adverbials may appear in the accusative case and indicate the boundedness of an event. In Korean, duration and frequency adverbials may show accusative or nominative case, with no apparent difference in their temporal or aspectual semantic contribution. We first discuss two main factors influencing case on adverbials,...

Comparatives in many languages are canonically classified into phrasal and clausal types, but each language employs its own morphological and syntac-tic ways to express these. Even though Korean also appears to have both phrasal and clausal types, there are empirical reasons to doubt this dual clas-sification, for this language. This paper raises t...

In this paper, we propose a lexicalist account of constructions which initially appear to be nominalisations of phrasal structures. We argue that lexical nominalisation of verbs preserves their form-selectional properties, creating nouns which select for dependents in exactly the way that the source verbs do. These properties hold in the ‘sub-phras...

Honorification in Korean recognizes the elevated social status of a participant in a clause with respect to the subject and/or the hearer. Honorific marking may be manifest as a nominal suffix, a special honorific form of a noun, an honorific case particle, an honorific marker on a verb, or a special honorific form of a verb. Previous accounts have...

Multiple nominative constructions (MNCs) in Korean have two main sub- types: possessive and adjunct types. This paper shows that a grammar allow- ing the interaction of declarative constraints on types of signs - in particular, having constructions (phrases and clauses) - can provide a robust and efficient way of encoding generalizations for two di...

This paper presents a formal analysis of the verb copy construction in Modern Chinese. Unlike the previous analyses, in which this construction is analyzed as a single-headed structure with the second VP as the head and the first VP as an adjunct, our analysis treats the verb copy construction as a coordinated VP, with each VP as a co-head. We furt...

Honorific agreement is one of the main properties of languages like Korean or Japanese, playing an important role in appropriate communication. This makes the deep processing of honorific information crucial in various computational applications such as spoken language translation and generation. We argue that, contrary to the previous literature,...

The so-called Internally Headed Relative Clause (IHRC) construction found in the head-final languages Korean and Japanese has received little attention from computational perspectives even though it is frequently found in both text and speech. This is partly because there have been no grammars precise enough to allow deep processing of the construc...

Honorification in Korean elevates the social status of a participant in a clause with respect to the subject and/or the hearer. Honorific marking may occur as a nominal suffix, a special honor-ific form of a noun, an honorific case particle, an honorific marker on a verb, or a special honorific form of a verb. Previous accounts have proposed a spec...

Abstract We argue here for a lexicalist analysis of the Korean copula (following Kim et al. (2004))), on the basis of different properties of sequ ences of noun- plus-copula, which shows word-like behavior, in contrast to noun and nega- tive copula, which are independent syntactic units. The interactions of these items with various copy constructio...

In this short review I address certain issues and predictions that arise from the position papers by Erteschik-Shir, and by Fox and Pesetsky. The two proposed analyses are radically different, so I have made no attempt to relate them in terms of their properties. In section 1 I discuss some underlying issues in the architecture of grammar assumed b...

Honorific agreement is one of the main properties of languages like Korean or Japanese, playing an important role in appropriate communication. This makes the deep processing of honorific information crucial in various computa-tional applications such as spoken lan-guage translation and generation. We argue that, contrary to the previous lit-eratur...

I consider some of the claims that have been made for and against the nature of the INPUT in OT syntax as developed within the assumptions of the Minimalist Program, leading to suggestions for further specification of the architecture of this approach. Comparing with the role of faithfulness in the OT approach developed from Lexical-Functional Gram...

One of the main puzzles in English and Korean gerundive phrases (VGPs) is that they display a mix of nominal and verbal properties.

this paper is to argue that there are three separate notions related to the expression and interpretation of negation in Korean, which must be kept separate. They are the notions of a negative clause, of the surface c-command domain of a negative element, and of the semantic scope of a negative element. The main arguments derive from the interactio...

Introduction I will be concerned here primarily with Korean Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) of two types, as shown in (1). # I will devote most of this paper to evidence that shows that each type in (1) has at least two different interpretations. In order to distinguish the syntactic occurrence of these items from their interpretation, I will call t...

this paper I will look at some cases of apparent mismatch between the actual morphological forms of verbs and the intuitive syntactic and semantic content of those verbs. In the first case, a piece of the grammatical content in a clause is multiply-marked on verbal forms in the clause; in the second, a piece of the perceived grammatical content is...

this paper. One of the main ideas devel) ed here---word order freezing invo l es harmonic al( nment of morphosyntactic prominence hierarchies---was first proposed to me by PeterSel1L Special thanks and nobl)U for my use of their input, comments and suggestionsshoul go to Judith Aissen, Jane Grimshaw, Yukiko Morimoto, El(8 beth Traugott, two anonymo...

this paper is on the distribution of the type (a) expression. The type (b) expression is grammatical as long as inte c-commands/precedes the indefinite. The type (c) expression is always grammatical, but sometimes has a narrow scope constituent negation interpretation, rather than always expressing clausal negation. However, the existence of the ty...

this paper

In this paper I want to look at the conclusions one can draw from raising constructions about the relative position and nature of clause-level consituents in the Philippine languages. My data is largely taken from Cebuano (Bell 1979), Kapampangan (Richards 1971, Rowsell 1983), and Tagalog (Dell 1981, Kroeger 1993). The more familiar type of raising...

This paper focusses on the theory of clause structure in Icelandic, contrasting it along the way with that of another Scandinavian language, Swedish. I argue that LFG provides a very simple and appealing account of two distinguishing properties of Icelandic: (i) the presence of two apparent subject positions in the `Transitive Expletive' constructi...

Examples like ‘Can't nobody beat 'em.’ (‘Nobody can beat them.’) in African-American Vernacular English (aave) have the inverted form of questions but the falling intonation and sentence meaning of (emphatic) declaratives. Labov et al. (1968) concluded that this phenomenon of ‘negative inversion’ (ni) requires two overlapping but distinct syntactic...

StirlingLesley, Switch-reference and discourse representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp xv+354. - Volume 32 Issue 1 - Peter Sells

In this paper we give a reasonably comprehensive presentation of Korean inflectional suffixes, whose status has been somewhat controversial in the generative literature. We argue that nominal and verbal inflectional morphemes not only show phonological constituency with their hosts but also show evidence of lexical attachment, within the theory of...

Sells provides an introduction to the most important aspects of three major contemporary syntactic theories. A strong linguiustic background is not presupposed, and a brief introductory chapter is included for the nonlinguist. PETER SELLS is a postdoctoral research affliate at CSLI. 1/1/1985 ISBN (Paperback): 0937073148 ISBN (Cloth): 093707313X Sub...

Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1984. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 487-496).

An experiment was devised to investigate the effects that a variable camera‐angle may have upon the audience ‘rating’ of a television performer. An attempt was then made to quantify these effects in terms of probability of occurrence using Signal Detection Theory. Although the results were not conclusive, the application of this statistical theory...

of the entire clause; this would suggest that there are uses o f case marking which are defined within the clause but which may not be reducible directly to properties of some lexical or functional head within the clause, or which may not be associated with an identifiable thematic role such as Patient or Goal. In this paper we discuss examples fro...

Abstract In this paper, we examine the phenomenon of Preposition Incorporation (PI) in modern Mandarin. While the category PP is found in various positions within the clause, it is never found with VP. Instead, the P ‘incorporates’ into V, or else is absent. We argue that prev ious generative approaches have failed to provide a simple and consisten...

Abstract I argue here that the special distribution of the Icelandic e xpletive ˛a﷿, which restricts it to an intuitive ‘first position’, is due to the interaction of general constr aints on Icelandic clause structure and the pragmatic function of a clause containing an expletive. The expletive is not restricted to V2 finite clauses, but can appear...

In this paper we argue that Korean negative polarity items (NPIs) are interpreted above the scope of negation, in contrast to NPIs in English which are interpreted within the scope of negation. On the syntactic side, we argue that the grammar of Korean requires a syntactic licensing mechanism, to constrain the distribution of NPIs to only negative...

In this paper I consider the typology of forward and backward control and raising structures, and argue that structure-sharing based on the relation of subsumption rather than equality provides a stronger lin-guistic basis for the typology (cf. Zaenen and Kaplan (2002, 2003)). I also consider the points of contact and divergence between structure-s...

Submitted to the Department of Linguistics. Copyright by the author. Thesis (Ph. D.) -- Stanford University, 2000.

What does linguistic diversity tell us about the human mind? In the comprehensive volume Diversity in Language, a renowned team of contributors assess the intricacies of linguistic variation. From historical perspectives on Indonesian to apparent time change in Smith Island verbs, from unplanned spoken Russian to argument structure in the Pacific N...

Focusing on the descriptive facts of English, this volume provides a systematic introduction to English syntax for students with no prior knowledge of English grammar or syntactic analysis. English Syntax aims to help students appreciate the various sentence patterns available in the language, understand insights into core data of its syntax, devel...