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UC Santa Cruz Asking the Right Questions: Essays in Honor of Sandra Chung

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UC Santa Cruz Asking the Right Questions: Essays in Honor of Sandra Chung UC Santa Cruz Asking the Right Questions: Essays in Honor of Sandra Chung Title Asking the Right Questions: Essays in Honor of Sandra Chung Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8255v8sc Publication Date 2017-03-01 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Asking the Right Questions: Essays in Honor of Sandra Chung Organized by Jason Ostrove Ruth Kramer Joseph Sabbagh Kirida Chi’lu-hu Sandy, Si Yu’us ma’åsi’ put i minaolik intension-mu para un istudiåyi yan para un ina i finu’ Chamorro. Ginin i istudiu-mu yan i ininå-mu nu i finu’ Chamorro, guaha på’gu senma’lak na kandit ni ha i’ina siha i håyi manintirisao tumungu put finu’ Chamorro, ispisiåtmenti gi halum i kulehu yan unibetsidåt siha gi halum Amerika, yan gi bula na lugåt siha gi tanu’. Man sen maguf ham todu nu i manfifinu’ Chamorro put i bidå-mu, ya un na’fanbanidosu ham lokkui’ ni Mañamorro. Sen bula na ayudu un nå’i ham gi difirentis na manera, ya ti bain fan maleffa lokkui’ nu esti. In kuenta ni manfifinu’ Chamorro, hu nånå’i hao ta’lu sen dånkulu na si Yu’us Ma’åsi — in agradesi i bidå-mu, ya in diseseha lokkui’ na un gagaigi ha’ gi såfu’ na manera, gi hinemlu’, gi trankilidåt, yan gi minaguf, todu i tiempu. Kon rispetu yan guinaiya, I chi’lu-mu as Manny INTRODUCTION We are delighted to present this collection of papers to Sandy Chung. We, the organizers and contributors, celebrate and honor her in her many roles: as mentor, as teacher, as researcher, as colleague, and as friend. It is our sincere pleasure to offer this collection of work inspired by her influence on our thinking and writing. The title of this festschrift, Asking the Right Questions, is inspired by Sandy’s ability to always know how to pose questions in a stimulating and insightful way. This manifests in her research so that her conclusions are profoundly insightful. We have experienced this in her teaching and advising so that one suddenly sees how the flailing and struggle fall into place. As a colleague, we have all experienced the moment in talks where she asks the linchpin question that, when expanded upon, can make one’s thinking seem less secure, while simultaneously providing a path to a deeper understanding. For each of these, we are truly grateful. Sandy’s work is perhaps best known for two things which, at first glance, seem unconnected, but upon further investigation, are interwoven. The first is the clarity of her writing. Many of us are proud converts to the “Chung School of Clear Writing.” This focus on clarity of form allows the ideas to blossom. At the same time, the insistence on thorough, careful prose often leads the work to unexpected places that provide connections one would not have seen otherwise. The second is the content of Sandy’s work, centering on the Austronesian family. While she has conducted research on a variety of languages, Sandy is perhaps best known for her in-depth, ongoing investigation of the phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics of Chamorro. As this description suggests, Sandy also tends to cover a uniquely broad range of topics in her research. This includes her Harvard dissertation on historical and comparative syntax, the semantics of incorporation in her 2003 LI monograph with Bill Ladusaw, the syntax-semantics of sluicing, the existence of lexical categories, the syntax of WH- movement and agreement, the morphophonology of Chamorro clitics, and ongoing groundbreaking psycholinguistics work. Surely there are more that we are forgetting. It is rare to see a scholar move so agilely and insightfully between so many subfields of theoretical linguistics. Although, perhaps, at the center of this disparate, influential body of work is Sandy’s dedication to the Chamorro language and the Chamorro people. As is evident in her 2008 LSA plenary talk, Sandy’s commitment to underprivileged languages informs much of how her work has been shaped. This connection goes beyond the theoretical. A major contributor to both the Chamorro dictionary project and the revised orthography, Sandy has managed to do what many academics only dream of: giving back in a tangible way. On a personal level, Sandy radiates a rare combination of calm, warmth, and openness that allows her students and colleagues to thrive. She can make you feel welcome in virtually any circumstance, whether she is asking you a tough question, or at her home, where she can certainly throw quite the shindig. We are all thankful to have worked with her and to have known her, and we all know that we are much better for it. Finally, but certainly not least, we would like to thank Maria Zimmer and the Linguistics Research Center for their help publishing, and Scarlett Clothier- Goldschmidt for the cover design. Jason Ostrove Ruth Kramer Joey Sabbagh February 2017 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Vera Gribanova Roots in Ellipsis and Multidominance 1-16 Louise McNally Scalar Alternatives and Scalar Inference Involving Adjectives: A Comment on Van Tiel, Et Al. (2016) 17-27 Eric Potsdam & Maria Polinsky A Preliminary Look at Exceptives in Tahitian 28-36 Ruth Kramer General Number Nouns in Amharic Lack NumP 39-54 Emily Manetta Syntactic Identity in Sluicing: Sprouting in Kashmiri Causatives 55-64 Grant Goodall Referentiality and Resumption in WH-Dependencies 65-80 Jim McCloskey New Thoughts on Old Questions – Resumption in Irish 81-102 Farrell Ackerman & John Moore Unselected Objects and the Argument/Adjunct Distinction 103-114 Scarlett Clothier-Goldschmidt & Matt Wagers Persons, Pronouns, and Processing Asymmetries 115-125 Maziar Toosarvandani On Reaching Agreement Early (and Late) 127-141 Judith Aissen Agent Focus and Passive in Tsotsil 143-161 Boris Harizanov The Interaction Between Infixation and Reduplication in Chamorro 163-177 ROOTS IN ELLIPSIS AND MULTIDOMINANCE* Vera Gribanova Stanford University [email protected] Recent research (Veselinova 2006, Siddiqi and Haugen 2103, Harley 2014) supports the conclusion that suppletion of roots is an empirical reality. This finding is consistent with the Late Insertion view of roots, wherein their phonological exponence is determined at a post-syntactic stage: roots can compete for lexical insertion (just like functional morphemes), yielding suppletion patterns. Here we compare the suppletive behavior of roots in two syntactic environments: verb stranding ellipsis in Irish and across-the-board movement in Bulgarian nominal phrases. While ellipsis permits suppletion between the root of a stranded verb and an antecedent verb, ATB- movement prohibits suppletive alternations where the ATB-moved element is a suppletive plural but its base positions require a singular form. Existing analyses lead to a paradox: the ellipsis case is consistent with a Late Insertion view of roots, while the ATB-movement cases seem to demand that roots undergo Early Insertion, their identity already determined in the syntax (Harizanov and Gribanova 2015). I present a re-ananalysis of the relevant ATB-movement cases in multidominance terms, wherein the ban on plural suppletion is a result of the observation that a multidominated root’s exponent is (Late) inserted only once, and the inserted form has to be consistent with all of the syntactic environments in which the root appears. 1. Introduction One of the more productive theoretical developments in recent years has been the idea that roots are morphosyntactically independent units, undergoing composition with other morphological material—categorizing heads, derivational and inflectional morphology—as part of a syntactic derivation (see Arad 2003, Marantz 2001 et seq.). According to one way of understanding this idea, roots have a special status as compared to other functional morphology, in that they are specified with phonological information throughout the derivation (i.e. Early Insertion) (Embick 2000, Embick and Halle 2005, Embick and Noyer 2007). An alternative view, which appears to be gaining more prominence in recent work for both theoretical and empirical reasons, takes roots to be equivalent to functional morphemes in having their phonological exponents determined at a point (post-spellout) quite late in the derivation (i.e. Late Insertion) (Marantz 1995a,b, Harley 2014, Haugen and Siddiqi 2013). * It is a great honor and pleasure to dedicate this work to Sandy Chung. As with most of my papers, this one has benefitted tremendously from her input and guidance, and was inspired in part by her consideration of related issues in Chung 2012. I have learned a great deal, and continue to be inspired by, the breadth, depth, and unusualness of Sandy’s insights. For discussion of the arguments presented here, I thank Pranav Anand, Boris Harizanov, Beth Levin, Jim McCloskey, Jason Ostrove, and the audience at the Roots IV workshop. All errors and deficiencies are the author’s responsibility alone. 1 The choice of either position on this question leads to radically different expectations about whether roots should ever undergo suppletion. On the Early Insertion view, one expects that roots should not undergo suppletion, as their phonological exponence is determined from the very beginning of the derivation and therefore should not be influenced by other material in their local environment. It follows from the Early Insertion view that any putative cases of root suppletion should be analyzable as suppletion of functional morphology; this is the view elaborated in Marantz 1997, who claims that suppletion of go vs. went in English is suppletion of light verbs (v), rather than roots. The Late Insertion view, by contrast, takes the phonological exponence of roots to be determined contemporaneously with that of functional morphemes; in Distributed Morphology (DM), this will take place via Vocabulary Insertion. This position predicts that—just like other functional morphemes—roots should be able to undergo suppletion.
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