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The Empty Noun Construction in Persian

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The Empty Noun Construction in Persian The Empty Noun Construction in Persian by SAEED GHANIABADI A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of The University of Manitoba in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Linguistics University of Manitoba Winnipeg Copyright © 2010 by Saeed Ghaniabadi Abstract This dissertation explores, within the general framework of Distributed Morphology, the licensing conditions of empty nouns in Persian, a Western Iranian language, and the issues that arise within this context for the distribution of plural marking and the insertion of the Ezafe vowel. With respect to the licensing of the empty noun, the proposal made in this thesis is along the lines of those that link ellipsis to information structure (e.g. Rooth 1992a, 1992b; Gengel 2007, among others). It is suggested that the Empty Noun Construction (ENC) is derived through the interaction between the following two information-structural features: (i) the E-feature, which ensures that the head noun is identical with its counterpart in the antecedent and specifies the head noun for non- pronunciation; (ii) the focus feature F, which specifies the remnant modifier as an element which is in some kind of contrastive relationship with its corresponding element in the antecedent. The interaction between these two features is implemented in the syntax in a phase-based derivation. Plural marking and Ezafe insertion in the ENC are accounted for within an articulated derivational model of PF (Embick & Noyer 2001; Embick 2003 et seq.; Pak 2008). It is proposed that the displacement of the plural marker in the ENC is motivated by the non-pronunciation of the head noun and is handled early in the PF derivation by Local Dislocation operation. Adopting Pak‘s (2008) model of syntax-phonology interface, the rule responsible for the insertion of the Ezafe linker -e is argued to be a phonological rule that applies at the Late-Linearization stage to connect [+N] heads to their following modifiers/complements. i Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere and deepest gratitude to Dr. Jila Ghomeshi, my supervisor. She has been the backbone of this entire process, and I could not have done it without her. Whenever I was feeling lost or doubting my research, I would schedule an emergency meeting with Jila because I knew that she would set me back on the right track by putting things in perspective and reminding me why my work was worthwhile. Besides shaping this dissertation in content and form, Jila mentored me intellectually, professionally, and personally. She is a model that I aspire to, not only as an academic but also as a person, and I thank my lucky stars that I have had the opportunity to work with her. I would also like to thank the other core members of my thesis committee, Dr. Kevin Russell and Dr. Chris Wolfart, for their valuable contributions to the thesis. Kevin was my phonology teacher. I learned many things in his phonology course including Optimality Theory. He supervised my first generals paper on m/p-echo reduplication in Persian which I wrote within the framework of OT. I am also thankful to him for providing constructive comments on my thesis and raising provocative questions that define further directions for my future research. My interest in working on plural marking in Persian started in Number Seminar with Professor Wolfart. Chris helped me shape my ideas into a presentable linguistic form. The course paper I wrote for that seminar served as the basis for the ideas pursued in my second generals paper on noun ellipsis and plural marking in Persian. The ideas in that paper were used as the building block of the present thesis. I am very grateful to Dr. Melanie Soderstrom and Dr. David Embick who joined my thesis committee later. Melanie contributed to the defense with thoughtful questions and comments. It was a great honor and privilege to have David as my external examiner. Most of the proposals I have made in this thesis are based on David‘s extensive theoretical contributions to Distributed Morphology. I could not have wished for a better person than David to read my work. He brought a very constructive perspective to the thesis. The influence of his report, comments, questions, and discussions goes far beyond the present thesis. My gratitude goes to Dr. Rob Hagiwara, my other linguistics teacher, with whom I had Intonation/Prosody Seminar and Field Methods. I particularly enjoyed the structure of his Field Methods course and learned a lot about language documentation. I would also like to thank other linguistics people at the University of Manitoba, Dr. Terry Janzen and Dr. David Pentland for their kindness and help throughout my time there. Thank you to Debbie Spindler, the administrator, and Arden Ogg, the technician, for their help when I most needed it. A big thank you to my first linguistics teacher Dr. Mohammad Dabir-Moghaddam to whom I owe much of what I learned about linguistics during my undergraduate and ii Master‘s studies in Iran. His passion for linguistics and his encouragement along the way made me more motivated to pursue linguistics at the graduate level. I should also thank Dr. Kourosh Safavi, my other long-term linguistics teacher in Iran, who was a constant source of inspiration, support, and encouragement. He was fun and made linguistics fun to study. Parts of this thesis have been presented in various conferences. I would like to thank the audiences at the 2007 ICIL2 meeting; the Mass/Count Workshop at the Univesity of Toronto; the University of Manitoba Linguistics Colloquium; and the 2009 CLA conference at the Carelton University for their comments and discussions. I gratefully acknowledge financial support from the I.R. of Iran‘s Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology for the first four years of my graduate work and numerous travel grants from the University of Manitoba Faculty of Graduate Studies, Faculty of Arts, Graduate Students‘ Association, UMSU, and Alumni Association. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, who have supported me my entire life and are undoubtedly excited that I can finally say ―I‘m done‖. To my mother, Aliye Saleki, and my father, Abbasali Ghaniabadi, thank you for making me the person that I am today. I am also greatly thankful to my parents-in-law, Naser Amini Salehi and Sedighe Afchangi, for their constant help and support throughout the time we were out of Iran and specifically during the three months before I completed my Ph.D. program. Thank you to my dearest sons Sajjad and Sina for being such good boys for me and their mom. I apologize to you for not being with you when you needed my presence and company. In the end, thank you most to my dear wife, Behjat Amini Salehi. You have been there every step of the way with me, and your unfailing love, support, and sacrifices have made me get through my graduate studies. This humble thesis is dedicated to you. iii Table of Contents Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………. i Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………….. ii Table of contents ………………………………………………………………………. iv List of abbreviations ……………………………………………………………………ix Chapter 1: Setting the scene............................................................................................. 1 1.0. Introduction .............................................................................................................. 1 1.1. Theoretical framework ............................................................................................. 4 1.1.1 Distributed Morphology ....................................................................................... 4 1.1.2 Phase Theory and cyclic spell-out ........................................................................ 9 1.1.2.1 What constitutes a phase? ........................................................................... 10 1.1.2.2 A derivational model of PF ......................................................................... 12 1.1.2.3 Local Dislocation ........................................................................................ 17 1.2. Main proposals in brief .......................................................................................... 19 1.3. Background: The Persian noun phrase structure in brief ....................................... 22 1.3.1 Prenominal position............................................................................................ 23 1.3.2 Postnominal position: the Ezafe domain ............................................................ 26 1.4. The syntax of Persian noun phrase ........................................................................ 29 1.4.1 Functional projections ........................................................................................ 29 1.4.2 The Ezafe Domain .............................................................................................. 31 1.5. Outline of the thesis ............................................................................................... 36 Chapter 2: Previous accounts of Empty Noun Constructions .................................... 40 2.0. Introduction ............................................................................................................ 40 2.1. The pro-based accounts.......................................................................................... 41 2.2. The PF-deletion accounts ....................................................................................... 48 2.2.1 Focus Condition on ellipsis
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