Pseudo noun incorporation and DOM: Definiteness agreement in DaakakaDefiniteness Agreement • December 13th, 2018
Introduction: In Daakaka (West Ambrym, Northern Vanuatu, Oceanic), so-called semitransi- tive (ST) verbs show definite agreement with their objects: While specific/definite objects trig- ger object marking on the verb, unspecific/indefinite objects are not cross-referenced (1)-(2) (von Prince 2015). Although this type of agreement has been widely observed in Micronesian and ‘Melanesian’ languages (e.g. Odango 2014, Franjieh 2012, Sugita 1973; cf. Næss 2013, Margetts 2008), a formal analysis is still pending. In this paper, I draw a connection between ST and Pseudo Noun Incorporation (PNI), a phenomenon well-established for Polynesian (Col- lins 2017, Chung & Ladusaw 2004, Massam 2001). Based on extensive corpus data (von Prince 2013) and own additional fieldwork, I present evidence that objects in both ST and PNI are subject to the same syntactic/semantic constraints which suggests a parallel analysis of both constructions. Adopting Massam (2001) on PNI, I assume that while definite ob
Definiteness Agreement in Hungarian Multiple Infinitival ConstructionsDefiniteness Agreement • June 29th, 2017
aEötvös Loránd University; Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary; bUniversity of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary
OBJECT AGREEMENT AND LOCALITYDefiniteness Agreement • February 22nd, 2017
Definiteness Agreement with PP ModifiersDefiniteness Agreement • June 22nd, 2008
DP complements of prepositions in Modern Hebrew often bear morphosyntactic definiteness marking that is triggered by the definite- ness value of the noun modified by the PP. Although reminiscent of definiteness agreement with attributive APs, the agreement observed with PPs is not always obligatory. This article argues that what dis- tinguishes modifiers that display obligatory definiteness agreement is that they denote properties. I propose that the morphosyntactic defi- niteness feature of property-denoting modifiers is uninterpretable and therefore it must be checked by agreement. Checking is made possible by the fact that PPs in Hebrew have the structure of a construct state, where definiteness features ‘spread’ from an embedded DP to a higher projection.
