David Pesetsky’s research while affiliated with Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other places

This paper describes and offers an analysis of a kind of relative clause acceptable to some English speakers that we call a wh-which relative, e.g. the snowmen whom (of) which the children loved. We propose that these relatives involve the movement of a phrase headed by an element that we call R, analogous to the Q posited by Cable (2010a, 2010b) for interrogatives — the optional of in the example above being an overt form of a special variant of R. The syntax of this variant resembles particularly closely the variant of Q proposed by Coon (2009) for Ch’ol interrogatives in triggering movement to its specifier — but with a puzzle that has a parallel in Finnish, for which we propose a tentative solution. The analysis thus supports the overall explanatory landscape for pied-piping phenomena proposed by Cable, but presents a challenge to his broader claim that all pied-piping phenomena can be explained in this way. If correct, it provides yet one more instance of the "unity in diversity" of syntactic structures across the world’s languages.

Perlmutter observed that English wh ‐movement obeys a puzzling constraint: an asymmetry between subject extraction and non‐subject extraction that interacts with the complementizer system. While wh ‐extraction of a non‐subject from a finite embedded clause is compatible with the presence or absence of the word that introducing the clause, extraction of the subject is possible only when that is omitted: a. ✓ Who do you think that Sue met ____?/ ✓ Who do you think Sue met ____? b. * Who do you think that ____ met Sue?/ ✓ Who do you think ____ met Sue? The effect has come to be known as the “ that‐ trace effect,” a member of a family of possibly broader sets of phenomena, all called “complementizer‐trace effects.” A strong poverty of the stimulus argument makes it clear that these phenomena are rooted in innate properties of human language. The discovery of these effects in multiple diverse and unrelated languages reinforces this conclusion, especially when coupled with the availability of independently supported explanations for the absence of similar effects in other specific languages. On the other hand, quite distinct accounts have been offered for complementizer‐trace effects, and there is no consensus yet as to which of these approaches is most likely to prove correct. Linear accounts have been proposed that specifically bar extraction from positions right‐adjacent to elements of the complementizer system; these accounts are supported by claimed interactions with the presence/absence of prosodic boundaries between the two. Alternative structure‐based accounts that have proved influential include structural locality requirements on extraction sites that occupy particular syntactic positions – as well as proposals that take an opposite approach, banning movement that is too local. Thus, although the importance of complementizer‐trace effects for linguistic theory is clear, the deeper source of these effects remains a matter of controversy.

The volume is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Noam Chomsky's groundbreaking Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.

Levinson 2013 (L13) argues against the idea that ‘recursion, and especially recursive center-embedding, might be the core domain-specific property of language’ (p. 159), citing crosslinguistic grammatical data and specific corpus studies. L13 offers an alternative: language inherits its recursive properties ‘from the action domain’ (p. 159). We argue that L13’s claims are at best un-warranted and can in many instances be shown to be false. L13’s reasoning is similarly flawed— in particular, the presumption that center-embedding can stand proxy for embedding (and clausal embedding can stand proxy for recursion). Thus, no support remains for its conclusions. Furthermore, though these conclusions are pitched as relevant to specific claims that have been published about the role of syntactic recursion, L13 misrepresents these claims. Consequently, even an empirically supported, better-reasoned version of L13 would not bear on the questions it claims to address.

This paper investigates novel evidence from Russian Verb-Stranding Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VVPE), and argues for its use as a probe into the syntactic structure of morphophonologically inseparable but morphosyntactically complex verbs. The first step is to distinguish internal argument drop from VVPE, because they appear identical on the surface. I present novel evidence that Russian internal argument drop is illicit in syntactic islands, while VVPE is licit. Once this bifurcation established, it allows us to explain previously obscured differences in the syntactic licensing of subject vs. internal argument drop in Russian. The second step uses the verb matching requirement on the stranded verb in Russian VVPE to establish which parts of the verbal complex originate inside the domain of ellipsis, and which parts orig-inate outside. A surprising finding is that the verb matching properties of the Russian VVPE construction do not align with what has been demonstrated to hold of other languages in which VVPE is available. Unlike the strict matching requirement of Hebrew (Goldberg, 2005a,b) or Irish (McCloskey, to appear) VVPE, the matching requirement in Russian VVPE appears to be sensitive to discourse factors, at least for certain speakers. This last discovery results in a significant contribution to our understanding of the nature of the identity requirement in ellipsis licensing. Keywords: verb phrase ellipsis & verb-stranding & Russian & verb movement & argument drop & clause structure * This project has a long history, originating as part of my dissertation and evolving very significantly as a result of extensive input from some very generous people. I am deeply grateful to Jim McCloskey, Jorge Hankamer, Sandy Chung, and Maria Polinsky especially for their mentorship and extensive comments. I am thankful for the very constructive comments of Marcel den Dikken and two anonymous NLLT reviewers. Thanks to for discussion of the Russian data. All errors are my own.

Evans & Levinson (E&L)advocate taking linguistic diversity at "face value". Their argument consists of a list of diverse phenomena, and the assertion that no non-vacuous theory could possibly uncover a meaningful unity underlying them. I argue, with evidence from Tlingit and Warlpiri, that E&L's list itself should not be taken at face value — and that the actual research record already demonstrates unity amidst diversity.

Linguistics Version of Record

Everett (2005) has claimed that the grammar of Pirahã is exceptional in displaying 'inexplicable gaps', that these gaps follow from a cultural principle restricting communication to 'immediate experience', and that this principle has 'severe' consequences for work on universal grammar. We argue against each of these claims. Relying on the available documentation and descriptions of the language, especially the rich material in Everett 1986, 1987b, we argue that many of the exceptional grammatical 'gaps' supposedly characteristic of Pirahã are misanalyzed by Everett (2005) and are neither gaps nor exceptional among the world's languages. We find no evidence, for example, that Pirahã lacks embedded clauses, and in fact find strong syntactic and semantic evidence in favor of their existence in Pirahã Likewise, we find no evidence that Pirahã lacks quantifiers, as claimed by Everett (2005). Furthermore, most of the actual properties of the Pirahã constructions discussed by Everett (for example, the ban on prenominal possessor recursion and the behavior of WH-constructions) are familiar from languages whose speakers lack the cultural restrictions attributed to the Pirahã. Finally, following mostly Gonçalves (1993, 2000, 2001), we also question some of the empirical claims about Pirahã culture advanced by Everett in primary support of the 'immediate experience' restriction. We conclude that there is no evidence from Pirahã for the particular causal relation between culture and grammatical structure suggested by Everett. Linguistics Version of Record

1. Truth in unpackaging In his paper, den Dikken argues that several syntactic and semantic phenomena provide evidence for a package of proposals that includes the following four claims: (1) Phase Extension “Syntactic movement of the head H of a phase α up to the head X of the node β dominating α extends the phase up from α to β; α loses its phasehood in the process, and any constituent on the edge of α ends up in the domain of the derived phase β as a result of Phase Extension”. (den Dikken's (3)) (2) Phase Impenetrability Condition as in Chomsky (2000, passim) [PIC] “[I]n phase α with head H, the domain [of H] is not accessible to operations outside α, only H and its edge are accessible to such operations”. (den Dikken's (1)) (3) Adjunction Prohibition “[A]djunction to meaningless categories is disallowed.” (den Dikken's (18)) (4) Inherent Phase “[A]n inherent phase is a predication (subject–predicate structure).” (den Dikken's (2))