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The Syntax of Comparative Constructions : Operators, Ellipsis Julia Bacskai-Atkari The Syntax of Comparative Constructions Operators, Ellipsis Phenomena and Functional Left Peripheries Universitätsverlag Potsdam Julia Bacskai-Atkari The syntax of comparative constructions Julia Bacskai-Atkari The syntax of comparative constructions Operators, ellipsis phenomena and functional left peripheries Universitätsverlag Potsdam Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de/ abrufbar. Universitätsverlag Potsdam 2014 http://verlag.ub.uni-potsdam.de/ Am Neuen Palais 10, 14469 Potsdam Tel.: +49 (0)331 977 2533 / Fax: 2292 E-Mail: [email protected] Zugl.: Potsdam, Univ., Diss., 2014 Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Gisbert Fanselow, Department Linguistik, Universität Potsdam Prof. Dr. István Kenesei, Department English Studies, University of Szeged Datum der Disputation: 25.02.2014 Dieses Werk ist unter einem Creative Commons Lizenzvertrag lizenziert: Namensnennung 4.0 International Um die Bedingungen der Lizenz einzusehen, folgen Sie bitte dem Hyperlink: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/de/ Online veröffentlicht auf dem Publikationsserver der Universität Potsdam URL http://pub.ub.uni-potsdam.de/volltexte/2014/7125/ URN urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-71255 http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-71255 Zugleich gedruckt erschienen im Universitätsverlag Potsdam ISBN 978-3-86956-301-5 Acknowledgements This dissertation could not have been written without the funding pro- vided by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) through the Collaborative Research Centre SFB-632 (Information structure: The linguistic means for structuring utterances, sentences and texts) at the Linguistics Department at University of Potsdam, where I held a short- term PhD scholarship in 2012/2013 (working in project A1 in Potsdam and partially also in B4 at the Humboldt University of Berlin), and where I am currently employed as a research fellow (project Z). In add- ition, I also received financial support from two projects funded by the Hungarian National Fund: OTKA-78074 (Hungarian Generative Dia- chronic Syntax) and OTKA-100804 (Comprehensive Grammar Re- sources: Hungarian), both located at the Research Institute of Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. Although it is impossible to list all the people I think I owe many thanks to for helping me in various ways while I was working on my dissertation project, I will nevertheless try to enumerate at least some of them. First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, István Kenesei, who was always available for discussion, and who provided me with lots of inspiration in terms of how to proceed. I owe many thanks for his assistance in general and also for encouraging me to come to Potsdam/Berlin, which proved to be one of the best choices in my life. Many thanks go to Gisbert Fanselow, my instructor at the Uni- versity of Potsdam, for all the helpful feedback on my dissertation work and for providing me new insights during the project meetings. I would also like to thank Luis Vicente, for his inspiring remarks concerning my written work and for his classes that were characterised by fruitful dis- cussions. I owe special thanks to Katalin É. Kiss, in whose project I had the opportunity to investigate diachronic changes in Hungarian syntax, and who was always ready to provide helpful and critical feedback on my work. I would especially like to thank Gergely Kántor, who as my for- mer (MA) supervisor was the first person to encourage me to do lin- guistics, and who later became an excellent and inspiring co-author, a vi | Acknowledgements true friend, and not the least someone with whom I can apparently spend long hours on skype arguing passionately about the relation between PF- deletion and the copy theory of movement. I am indebted to my colleagues at the University Potsdam, for being such an inspiring scientific community and good company in general. Many thanks go to Marta Wierzba and Radek Šimík, my fel- lows from project A1 of the SFB-632, whose work has encouraged me to take new directions, and who have given me insights into various phenomena related to comparative clause formation in German/Polish and Czech, respectively. They also deserve extra thanks for initiating lunch calls. As I have been partially involved in project B4 at Humboldt Uni- versity, I received lots of ideas and feedback from my colleagues there too, in particular from Svetlana Petrova, who was the one to introduce me to life at Humboldt, and who has also made really helpful sugges- tions regarding my work on historical syntax. I also owe special thanks to the leader of the project, Karin Donhauser, who advised me on how to proceed in terms of my work on Germanic languages. I would like to thank Eva Schlachter and Marco Coniglio, who have always been very helpful and inspiring; in particular, extra thanks to Eva for organising my talk at the Humboldt (and for helping me come up with a not too enigmatic German title), and to Marco for his help with Italian data (and his willingness to speak Italian with me). Special thanks go to my current and former office mates in Pots- dam, whose presence was crucial in maintaining my motivation for work at a high level even during gloomy afternoons: Maria Shkapa, Emilio Servidio, Daniel Valle, Laura Bos, Nele Salveste, and Bernadette Samko. I would like to thank Masha also for her indispensable help with the Russian data and for introducing me to the game Rummikub, which I think anyone doing formal syntax should try. Extra thanks go to Emilio for providing me judgements for Italian data, for casting pessimistic looks on the sky that reminded me not to leave my umbrella in the of- fice, and for leaving me two teabags of extra strong back tea as a gift when he moved back to Italy, which helped me finish the conclusion earlier. I owe many thanks to Laura for proofing my Dutch test sen- tences and for distributing the questionnaire, and also for informing me about interesting places in Amsterdam and Leiden. I would also like to Acknowledgements | vii thank Nele for her help with the Estonian data, and for all the nice sweets we received from her. I am highly grateful to Malte Zimmermann for all his help and for his useful suggestions and questions I received from him after my presentations in Potsdam. I would also like to thank many of my col- leagues, with whom we usually met during the lunch breaks or attended each other’s talks, as they also provided lots of feedback on my work: Anne Mucha, Agata Renans, Mira Grubic, Claudius Klose, and Maria Balbach. They were also ready to counter-check my German data, ex- cept for Agata of course, who in turn demonstrated exceptional readi- ness to help me with Polish, and who has also been very enthusiastic about my progress with the dissertation. Extra thanks go to Anne for proofreading my first article written in German and for trying to help me find relatively meaningful German expressions for absolutely meaning- less English technical terms. I also owe special thanks to Mira for indir- ectly prompting me to spend one more day in Iceland. I have benefited a lot from the PhD course taught by Caroline Féry in Potsdam and from discussions with Kriszta Szendrői and Lyn Frazier, who were guests of the SFB quite recently. Special thanks to Marta Ruda, who gave me some useful insights into Polish. I would also like to thank Stella Gryllia and Jana Häussler for their help with organ- isational and scientific matters (and any combination of the two), Jutta Boethke for making my life easier in terms of administration, and many of my colleagues who generally kept good company, among them Susanne Genzel, Maja Stegenwallner-Schütz, Anja Kleemann-Krämer, Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss, Antje Sauermann, Lena Karvovskaya, Andreas Schmidt, Thuan Tran, Frank Kügler, Juliane Burmester, Nikos Engonopoulos and Konstantina Garoufi from Potsdam University, Beate Bergmann, Sophia Döring, Markus Egg and Sophie Repp from Humboldt University, and Elodie Winckel from the Free University. Indeed very special thanks go to Ralf Ditsch, for offering me valuable technical support whenever my IT interfaces seemed to fail and a nice cup of coffee when I did. Since I started my doctoral studies in Budapest, this incomplete list would be even more incomplete if I did not include my former col- leagues and professors there. I owe many thanks to my former col- leagues and/or office mates from the Research Institute for Linguistics, viii | Acknowledgements for all the inspiration and fun, and also for their readiness to provide me native judgements on Hungarian sentences (mostly involving the sad affair between an exceptionally fat cat and a cat flap that ultimately proved to be too small), and for proof-reading my texts written in Hun- garian (both language-wise and content-wise). So thanks go to Veronika Hegedűs, Barbara Egedi, Éva Dékány, Ádám Szalontai and Ágnes Bende-Farkas. I owe special thanks to Vera and Barbara, who were my closest colleagues and with whom we also had some splendid days in England. Many thanks go to Éva for proving to be an excellent co-au- thor of our joint chapter in the project volume. I would also like to thank my ex-almost-office mates Katalin Mády and Andrea Deme for all the fun; in particular, I am indebted to Andrea for helping me fight myself through certain administrative matters, for her valuable grammatical judgements, and also for sending me a picture that aptly represents the sad case of the fat cat and the somewhat undersized cat flap mentioned above. I also owe thanks to Balázs Surányi, Sylvia Blaho, Orsolya Tánczos, Krisztina Polgárdi, Diána Varga, Huba Bartos, Zoltán Bánréti, Judit Farkas, Adrienne Dömötör, Lea Haader and Éva Dömötör for all their help and encouragement.
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