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AGREEMENT in the CONTEXT of COORDINATION HINDI AS a CASE STUDY by ARCHNA BHATIA DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment Of View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship Repository AGREEMENT IN THE CONTEXT OF COORDINATION HINDI AS A CASE STUDY BY ARCHNA BHATIA DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Elabbas Benmamoun, Chair Assistant Professor Karlos Arregui-Urbina (University of Chicago) Professor Peter Nathan Lasersohn Professor Hye Suk James Yoon ABSTRACT Agreement is a prevalent phenomenon observed across languages. It helps us identify which elements in the sentence are linked or should be interpreted together (Bock et al 1999). This property of agreement may imply that the PF would always be faithful to syntax/ LF, i.e. it would always show features of the element with which syntax establishes agreement relationship. However, when we look at agreement in the context of coordination, we find that this is not the case. We can get Closest Conjunct Agreement in addition to the Full Agreement with the whole coordinated phrase. One way to account for the Closest Conjunct Agreement is to assume an underlying clausal coordination with conjunction reduction. I show that the constructions involving Closest Conjunct Agreement should not be analyzed as involving clausal coordination based on various theoretical as well as empirical factors. Another way to account for Closest Conjunct Agreement, especially looking at head initial languages, may be to assume that the structure of coordination plays a role in Closest Conjunct Agreement. Using the data from head final languages (mainly Hindi), I have shown that the structure of coordination is not involved in the Closest Conjunct Agreement constructions always. Based on various empirical facts, such as CCA asymmetry based on the word order as in Arabic, CCA asymmetry based on the verb types as in Hindi, the presence of both First Conjunct Agreement and the Last Conjunct Agreement within the same language, the requirement in some languages for strict adjacency for Closest Conjunct Agreement, mixed agreement facts, etc., I present an alternative analysis of Closest Conjunct Agreement which assumes the role of syntactic agreement relations as well as PF relations of linear proximity/ adjacency. I show that this analysis is generalizable across languages with different word orders. Also I show how this analysis is applicable to different ii types of constructions, such as local Closest Conjunct Agreement as well as Long Distance Closest Conjunct Agreement. The proposed analysis represents a compositional view of agreement, i.e. it assumes that agreement takes place in two stages: first the agreement relationship is established in syntax, and then the agreement features are spelled out in the PF component. Hence it suggests that, in an agreement relation, not only syntax but also the PF component of grammar plays a role. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to many people who over the years have helped me in uncountable ways. I will not be able to name them all here, but I sincerely thank them all. I am especially thankful to my advisor Elabbas Benmamoun for his constant encouragement, support, guidance, and patience. I am also thankful to him and to the other members of my committee, Karlos Arregi, Peter Lasersohn and James Yoon for meeting with me whenever I needed, for the useful discussions and the valuable comments and suggestions. I especially want to thank Yamuna Kachru for accepting to be the non voting committee member after all her time, her continuous feedback, very helpful discussions and her valuable comments and suggestions so that my defense does not have to be postponed. I would like to thank Silvina Montrul for providing me the chance to work on an interesting language acquisition project and learn the processes involved in a good experimental work. Designing and conducting the experiment for the Hindi adjectival predicates with Heidi Lorimor also helped me as she guided me every step of the way what she had learnt in her previous experiences with the experimental psycholinguistic work. I thank professors Elabbas Benmamoun, Eyamba Bokamba, Silvina Montrul, and the Linguistics department for providing me the funding and let me experience and practice other aspects of being an academician. I also thank Martha Palmer and Bhuvana Narasimhan for providing me the wonderful opportunity to work on the Hindi Treebank project, which helps me learn not just to use various computational tools, but also to work with huge corpora, interact with the experts to discuss various issues, and learn how they approach the problems. I also thank Masha Polinsky for the fruitful collaboration with me and my advisor which led to the head final languages paper, and a part of research for iv this dissertation. I thank Roxana Girju for helping me learn aspects of computational linguistics research, if I have not done much with it yet, it is my own limitations, but I hope to use the knowledge gained so far to learn more in the future. I thank Veneeta Dayal and Roger Schwarzschild, and Christiane Fellbaum for providing me the resources at Rutgers and at Princeton respectively for me to be able to work there. I thank my teachers who first introduced me to linguistics and with whom I used to discuss my various concerns about linguistics- Professors Ramakant Agnihotri, Tista Bagchi, Prem Singh, and K.V. Subbarao. I especially want to thank Tista Bagchi who taught us syntax in such a way that I loved it right away. I thank my language consultants, most of whom are my friends and family – some of whom have consistently been providing me with the data I need and some who I have bothered with my data questions every once in a while- Amit, Papa, Chetna, Puneet, Alka, Vandana, Rajesh, Mala, Yamuna Ji, Hina, Kalpa, Mithilesh, and many more. I thank my friends, Adriana, Damaris, Dayna, Diya, Lucia, Seema, Sonia & Ben Slade, Vandana for the good times. Most importantly, I want to thank my family for the numerous things they have done for me that keeps motivating me to persevere. I am deeply thankful to my husband Amit Yadav for many things: the refreshing walks and runs we used to have together, for helping me not be overwhelmed with and learn programming, for the intellectual speeches about the future of technology, and especially for the support during the last few months of writing the dissertation. Last but not least, I cannot express how grateful and strengthened I feel for getting the most loving, caring and accepting parents and siblings. I deeply thank my parents Chander Mohini and Om Parkash Bhatia, my sister Chetna and my brother Puneet for always being there to support me no matter what, for believing in me and always encouraging and motivating me. v TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ......................................................................................................vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................1 1.1. The problem of agreement in the context of coordination....................................2 1.2. Theoretical Framework.........................................................................................6 1.3. Relevant Notions.................................................................................................10 1.4. Plan for the rest of the theses...............................................................................19 CHAPTER 2: THE LANGUAGE OF FOCUS: HINDI ...............................................................21 2.1. The grammatical structure of Hindi....................................................................21 2.2. An outline of the proposal to derive the CCA and FA in the context of coordination.........................................................................................................43 2.3. Data Collection....................................................................................................45 CHAPTER 3: THE STRUCTURE OF COORDINATION IN HINDI ........................................46 3.1. CCA as a Diagnostic for the Structure of Coordination......................................48 3.2. Other Diagnostics for the Structure of Coordination..........................................55 3.3. The Structure of Coordination in Hindi: Head Initial Asymmetric Structure..............................................................................................................62 3.4. Presence of other head initial phrases in head final Hindi..................................72 3.5. Summary.............................................................................................................74 CHAPTER 4: ANALYSES FOR AGREEMENT IN THE CONTEXT OF COORDINATION ................................................................................................76 4.1. Clausal (/Propositional) Coordination.................................................................77 4.2. Phrasal Coordination.........................................................................................116 4.3. CCA as a Result of Phrasal Coordination with Agree in Syntax and Influences from PF: A Compositional View of Agreement..............................178 4.4. Summary...........................................................................................................214
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