Papers by Karen De Clercq
Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft
This paper discusses a theory of conversion (zero derivation) in terms of phrasal spellout. In th... more This paper discusses a theory of conversion (zero derivation) in terms of phrasal spellout. In this approach, there are no zero morphemes. Instead, the ‘silent’ meaning components are pronounced cumulatively within overt morphemes. As an empirical case, we discuss adjective/verb ambiguity as in narrow. As verbs, these roots have both an inchoative and a causative sense. Following Ramchand (2008), we assume that such deadjectival causatives contain three parts: the adjective denoting a state, a change-of-state component proc, and a causative component init. Adopting a Nanosyntax approach, we propose that verbs like narrow spell out a complex node with all these abstract heads. The ambiguity between the inchoative, causative and adjective falls out as a consequence of the Superset Principle (Starke 2009), which states that a lexical entry can spell out any subtree it contains. Since both the inchoative sense and the adjective sense correspond to proper parts of the causative one, we d...
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Jan 24, 2022
HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific re... more HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.
Linguistics in the Netherlands
There are three ways of deriving verbs in Dutch: through zero marking, through suffixation, and t... more There are three ways of deriving verbs in Dutch: through zero marking, through suffixation, and through prefixation. We focus on prefixed deadjectival verbs, contrasting two views. According to the first view, prefixed verbs are left-headed: the prefix is responsible for the change in category, i.e. [V ver [A breed]]. The second view holds that prefixed verbs are right-headed, and involve a zero verbalizing suffix, i.e. [V ver [V [A breed] ∅]]. We argue in this paper for a mixed, nanosyntactic, approach. We adopt Ramchand’s (2008) decomposition of the verb and argue that the prefix spells out part of the verbal structure and the verbal root spells out another part.
Cycles in Language Change
This chapter discusses the diachronic development of the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic negator lāw, w... more This chapter discusses the diachronic development of the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic negator lāw, which developed from the univerbation between the sentential negator and agreement morphology in negative clefts. Whereas the semantics of negative clefts is retained in the new negator, their biclausal structure is replaced by a monoclausal one with lāw merged in the clausal left periphery. The negator then takes propositional scope and expresses the meaning of external negation (‘it is not the case’). Syntactically, it is merged in SpecFocP in the extended CP-domain, argued to host English negative DPs/PPs and wh-words. Finally, the chapter extends the analysis to Sicilian neca, opening up the route to consider the development of an external negator from a negative cleft as a path of change that has hitherto been left unexplored. This chapter also demonstrates how a similar semantic interpretation associated with two different syntactic structures can be a trigger for syntactic reanalysis.
Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics, 2021
This article proposes a Nanosyntactic LateInsertion approach to root suppletion. We show that th... more This article proposes a Nanosyntactic LateInsertion approach to root suppletion. We show that this theory allows us to account for root suppletionwithin a strictlymodular theory of grammar, which makes no syntactic distinction between different roots. As a starting point, we first focus on the architectural difficulties that arise for amodular theory of roots in the DistributedMorphology approach. We then show how Nanosyntax circumvents these problems, and address two potential empirical issues for the Nanosyntactic treatment (multiple exponence and locality), showing that they in fact provide support for the approach proposed.
Antonymic pairs of gradable adjectives (e.g. tall-short) give rise to contrary opposition. This f... more Antonymic pairs of gradable adjectives (e.g. tall-short) give rise to contrary opposition. This fact has so far stood in the way of reducing this type of opposition to logical negation, which gives rise to contradictory opposition. We present an analysis of these antonymic pairs in terms of an underlying logical negation, and propose to derive the contrary nature of the opposition from the interaction of interval semantics with the presence of a contextual standard, which is known to be a part of the denotation of gradable adjectives. This analysis opens the way for a decomposition of negative adjectives as containing a logical negation with contradictory meaning.
iii thanks to Mansour Shabani and to Karimouy Mitra Heravi for their help with the Persian data, ... more iii thanks to Mansour Shabani and to Karimouy Mitra Heravi for their help with the Persian data, to Jakub Dotlačil and Radek Šimík for their help with Czech, to Adrienn Jánosi for many patient exchanges on Hungarian, to Marika Lekakou and especially Metin Bagriacik on Greek negative morphemes, to Hicham El Sghiar for his judgments on Moroccan Arabic and to Li Man for help with the Chinese data. Many thanks also to the informants whose data did not make it into the dissertation: I am keeping these data for further work. Thanks to Fatih Önder, Metin Bagriacik, Karsan Seyhun and Jorge Hankamer for useful discussion of Turkish, to Minjeong Son for her help with Korean and Reiko Vermeulen and Yasuhiro Iida for Japanese data. Apart from the people already mentioned above I had the opportunity to meet many nice linguists over the past years, whose comments, talks or lecture series inspired me, or with whom I had a great evening or a nice beer. I want to thank Kyle Johnson, Marcel den Dikken and Olaf Koeneman for a great time in Seoul. Many thanks to Jeroen van Craenenbroeck for an inspiring Syntax-course (Brussels, 2009), to Michal Starke for a lecture series on nanosyntax (Ghent 2011) that changed the entire content of this dissertation, to
We argue that the comparative head that enters into the mor- phologicalmakeupofthecomparative (Bo... more We argue that the comparative head that enters into the mor- phologicalmakeupofthecomparative (Bobaljik 2012) is to be split up into two distinct heads(see Caha 2016). Evidence for this claim comes from Czech comparative morphology, root suppletion, and the inter- action of Czech suppletion with negation. We further argue that the account for root suppletion that we provide captures the data better than a Distributed Morphology (DM) account.
Jezikoslovlje, 2018
We look at the internal structure of the English analytic comparative marker more, arguing that i... more We look at the internal structure of the English analytic comparative marker more, arguing that it spells out nearly all the features of a gradable adjective. When this marker is merged with an adjective in the positive degree, it creates a situation of feature recursion or overlap, where more duplicates certain features that are also present in the adjective that it modifies. We argue that such overlap must be disallowed as a matter of principle. We present an empirical argument in favour of such a restriction, which is based on the generalization that comparative markers which occur to the left of the adjectival root are incompatible with suppletion. This generalization can be shown to follow from a restriction against overlapping derivations. In order to achieve such nonoverlapping derivations, an Unmerge operation may remove previously created structure.
These proposals (or empirical generalisations) are inadequate for two reasons. First, they are re... more These proposals (or empirical generalisations) are inadequate for two reasons. First, they are restricted to affixal negation (explaining (1c)), but we shall show that the pattern in (1) can be observed both with morphological and syntactic negation. Second, we believe that it is not a coincidence that negative markers are excluded with negative adjectives. The facts in (1) to us suggest the existence of a ban on double negation within a local domain, not only with respect to affixal negation, but with respect to all kinds of negative markers. We shall argue that they are to be accounted for in terms of the following constraint on double negation:
This paper discusses the well-known dichotomies between sentence negation and constituent negatio... more This paper discusses the well-known dichotomies between sentence negation and constituent negation on the one hand and external negation and internal negation on the other hand. It explains how the notions differ and where they show overlap. Crucial in this discussion is the presentation and critical review of some of the most relevant tests for negation as discussed by Klima (1964). The discussion leads to the observation that both sentence negation and constituent negation are umbrella terms for multiple scopal types of negation. The paper further shows how a careful analysis of negative morphology can be insightful in putting up a more fine-grained classification that does better justice to the reality of negative markers than captured by the well-known
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2020
In this paper, we discuss a cross-linguistically rare pattern of comparative formation found in S... more In this paper, we discuss a cross-linguistically rare pattern of comparative formation found in Slovak. This pattern is theoretically interesting, because it violates a candidate universal on the relationship between the positive and the comparative degree. The universal, discussed in Grano & Davis (2018), says that the comparative is always either identical to, or derived from, the positive degree. This universal is violated by a number of adjectives in Slovak. These adjectives have a suffix -k in the positive degree, which is absent in the comparative. We capture this pattern in terms of a non-containment structure of the positive and the comparative degrees and the nanosyntax model of spellout (Starke 2009 et seq.).
Linguistics in the Netherlands, 2019
We present a case study in the marking of the negative prefix in French gradable adjectives, wher... more We present a case study in the marking of the negative prefix in French gradable adjectives, where the productive marker iN- alternates with a number of unproductive prefixes, like dé(s)-, dis-, mal-, mé(s)-. We treat this as a classical case of allomorphy, and present an account of the distribution of these allomorphs in terms of the nanosyntactic mechanism of pointers, by which lexical items may point to other, existing, lexical items in the postsyntactic lexicon. We claim that unproductive lexical items are not directly accessible for the spellout mechanism, but only indirectly, via pointers. We show how the analysis accounts for lexicalised semantics in derivations, as well as cases where the formal relationship between derivational pairs is not concatenative, but substitutive.
Studia Linguistica, 2019
The paper provides evidence for a more articulated structure of the comparative as compared with ... more The paper provides evidence for a more articulated structure of the comparative as compared with the one in Bobaljik (2012). We propose to split up Bobaljik's cmpr head into two distinct heads, C1 and C2. Looking at Czech, Old Church Slavonic and English, we show that this proposal explains a range of facts about suppletion and allomorphy. A crucial ingredient of our analysis is the claim that ad-* The authors are listed in alphabetical order. We wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for Studia Linguistica, Anna Szabolcsi, Edwin Williams, the ComForT research group at KU Leuven, as well as the audience at the 2018 Olinco conference in Olomouc for their feedback. Pavel Caha's work on this paper was supported by a grant from the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) number GA17-10144S. 2 Caha, De Clercq & Vanden Wyngaerd jectival roots are not a-categorial, but spell out adjectival functional structure. Specifically, we argue that adjectival roots come in various types, differing in the amount of functional structure they spell out. In order to correctly model the competition between roots, we further introduce a Faithfulness Restriction on Cyclic Override, which allows us to dispense with the Elsewhere Principle.
Volume 2, 2017
We present a novel account of root suppletion in comparatives and superlatives, and show how it a... more We present a novel account of root suppletion in comparatives and superlatives, and show how it accounts for the presence of ABB and ABC patterns, as well as the absence of ABA patterns. The account assumes that suppletive roots, despite appearances to the contrary, are not contextual allomorphs, but portmanteaus spelling out two distinct features, one belonging to the lexical root, and another one belonging to the comparative. The regular comparative affix then spells out an additional feature relating to the comparative domain. In other words, we show that the comparative (CMPR) head that enters into the morphological makeup of the comparative (Bobaljik 2012) is to be split up into two distinct heads, C1 and C2 (see also Caha 2016). We extend this idea to SPRL, which we show is likewise to be split up into S1 and S2, in order to account for suppletive ABC patterns. These four distinct heads receive empirical support from facts of the degree morphology in Czech and Latin. The new a...
Uploads
Papers by Karen De Clercq