Representing Language: Essays in honor of Judith Aissen

329 Pages·2011·7.61 MB·English

UC Santa Cruz
Representing Language: Essays in Honor of Judith Aissen
Title
Representing Language: Essays in Honor of Judith Aissen
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0vf4s9tk
ISBN
0-9836-9380-3
Authors
Gutiérrez-Bravo, Rodrigo
Mikkelsen, Line
Potsdam, Eric
Publication Date
2011-06-15
eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library
University of California

ISBN 0-9836-9380-3

The authors of the individual chapters in this volume retain copyright of their respective
contributions.
Published 2011 by
Linguistics Research Center
Department of Linguistics
1156 High Street
University of California
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
These papers are also available at the University of California eScholarship Repository:
http://escholarship.org/uc/lrc_aissen
Printed on demand by:
Booksurge Publishing
http://booksurge.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction v

Raúl Aranovich 1 – 14
Shifty Objects in Romance

Telma Can Pixabaj and Nora C. England 15 – 30
Nominal Topic and Focus in K’ichee’

Sandra Chung, William Ladusaw, and James McCloskey 31 – 50
Sluicing(:) Between Structure and Inference

Jessica Coon and Robert Henderson 51 – 67
Two Binding Puzzles in Mayan

Louis Goldstein 69 – 88
Back to the Past Tense in English

Colette Grinevald 89 – 104
The Expression of Path in Jakaltek Popti (Mayan): When Directionals Do It All

Rodrigo Gutiérrez-Bravo 105 – 119
External and Internal Topics in Yucatec Maya

Jorge Hankamer 121 – 135
Auxiliaries and Negation in English

Alice C. Harris 137 – 155
Clitics and Affixes in Batsbi

John B. Haviland 157 – 171
Nouns, Verbs, and Constituents in an Emerging ‘Tzotzil’ Sign Language

Brian D. Joseph 173 – 179
On Pronoun-Personal Affix Connections: Some Light from Algonquian

Vera Lee-Schoenfeld 181 – 197
From Clause Union to Restructuring to Beyond Coherence

Robert D. Levine 199 – 217
SGF Coordination in English: Light vs. Heavy Stylistic Inversion and the Status of pro
iv Table of Contents

John Moore 219 – 238
Judgment Types and the Structure of Causatives

David M. Perlmutter 239 – 256
On the Weak Expletive Paradigm in Germanic

Paul M. Postal 257 – 271
Variability Among English Raising-Determined Objects

Anne Sturgeon 273 – 286
The Middlefield in Slavic: Evidence from Czech

Alan Timberlake 287 – 304
Individuation in Russian and Spanish Differential Object Marking

Ellen Woolford 305 – 320
PF Factors in Pronominal Clitic Selection in Tzotzil
INTRODUCTION

We are pleased to present this collection of papers to Judith Aissen. Through them, the editors
and contributors celebrate Judith in her roles as colleague, mentor, teacher, researcher, and friend
and we offer this festschrift with great pleasure.
Judith is one of those rare scholars who moves comfortably between empirical and
theoretical domains of linguistics and makes contributions to both. Although her research
contributions to the field are too numerous to mention, we think that two characteristics stand
out.
First, Judith has made contributions to an extraordinary range of syntactic theories:
Transformational Grammar, Relational Grammar, Arch Pair Grammar, Government and
Binding, and Optimality Theory. The diversity of theories to be found in Judith’s research and
teaching reflects a belief that theories should be regarded not as gospel set in stone, but rather as
tools to investigate intricate and puzzling phenomena in language, with the theory being used to
make sense of these phenomena. This eclectic approach has secured a very large audience for
Judith’s work. Her research is cited in both the formal and functional literatures, in descriptive
and typological research, and in works specific to Mayan, Spanish, Amerind, and Romance
linguistics. In recent years, Judith has made seminal theoretical contributions in Optimality-
theoretic syntax, specifically in the areas of Harmonic Alignment and Constraint Conjunction: as
of today, it is probably fair to say that current typological theory on Differential Object Marking
is essentially based on her research.
Second, few things stand out more in Judith’s work than her crystal-clear elucidation of
complex and interesting language data. Judith’s research achieves this, we believe, through a
combination of effective use of different sources of data (elicitation, text examples, published
data) and insightful representations of these complex data. This particular hallmark of Judith’s
work can be found in her early work on causative constructions and clause union in Spanish,
through her work on Tzotzil, topic, focus, and the formal representation of Mayan clause
structure, and lastly in her more recent work on markedness, voice, and Differential Object
Marking. One consequence is that Tzotzil is currently one of the best studied Amerind
languages.
In addition to recognizing her intellectual contributions to the field, a perhaps even
greater pleasure of bringing together this volume in Judith’s honor is that it is a celebration of
Judith herself. Those of us that have had the privilege of working with Judith cherish her warmth
and generosity, combined in the best possible way with intellectual integrity. Judith is also an
outstanding teacher, mentor, and advisor. It is very clear to us that this is because Judith is
dedicated heart and soul to passing on to others the scientific knowledge that she herself has
acquired and developed throughout her long and fruitful career. This commitment to the people
around her is nowhere more visible than in her work with Mayan languages and the people who
speak them. Judith conducts syntax workshops in Guatemala and Mexico primarily for students
who are native speakers of Mesoamerican languages. These workshops play an important role in
the development of a cadre of professional native-speaker Mayan linguists, who in turn are
shaping Mayan linguistics and language preservation efforts. In these efforts, Judith is
generously giving back to the communities she works with.
vi Introduction
For these contributions, and more, we honor Judith. We hope that these papers reflect the
breadth of Judith’s work and its impact.
In closing, we would like to thank Maggie Bardacke and the Linguistics Research Center
for assistance with the web publishing, Jim Clifford for the cover photograph, and Anne
Sturgeon and Alexandra Martin for the cover design.

Rodrigo Gutiérrez-Bravo
Line Mikkelsen
Eric Potsdam

June 2011

SHIFTY OBJECTS IN ROMANCE
Raúl Aranovich
UC Davis
[email protected]
Across the Romance languages, impersonal reflexives vary with respect to which objects can
control agreement. This paper offers an account of such variation within Optimality Theory. In
languages that exclude accusative-marked objects from impersonal reflexives, a constraint favoring
agreement outranks those constraints responsible for differential object marking. The ranking is
the inverse one in languages that allow accusative objects. This results in a pattern in which only
the unmarked objects can control agreement.
1. Introduction: Shifty objects
Across languages, there are very strong implicational tendencies about which constituents control
verb agreement. If there is only one controller allowed in a clause, it is usually the subject. If
there is a second controller allowed, it is usually the primary object (Moravcsick 1988).
Exceptions to this tendencies, from languages as diverse as English, Southern Tiwa, Georgian,
and Tzotzil, are discussed in Aissen 1990. But in an earlier paper (Aissen 1973), she uncovers a
case of verb agreement controlled by an object in Spanish, a language that only allows for subject
controllers. The Spanish example in (1) is an impersonal reflexive sentence, in which the verb
agrees with the plural object apartamentos ‘apartments’.
(1) Se alquilan apartamentos.
SE rent.3PL appartments
‘Apartments are rented.’
Aissen refers to objects like apartamentos in (1) as ‘shifty objects’, because they appear to
behave like subjects. Her claim is that shifty objects control agreement by analogy with the
subjects they resemble. Some Spanish direct objects are marked in a way that makes them
formally distinct from subjects, and therefore different from those objects that can pass for
subjects in the impersonal reflexive. This phenomenon is known as Differential Object Marking
(DOM). These marked objects, Aissen notices, always fail to control agreement in the Spanish
impersonal reflexive.
In this paper, I revisit Aissen’s (1973) analysis of shifty objects, considering her recent
proposal for a formalization of DOM in Optimality Theory (Aissen 2003). I argue that the
agreement pattern in Spanish impersonal reflexives is the result of a ranking in which the
constraints that enable morphosyntactic marking of some objects outrank the constraint
responsible for object agreement. I also show that variation in the mutual rankings of these
© 2011 Raúl Aranovich. In Representing Language: Essays in Honor of Judith Aissen, eds. Rodrigo
Gutiérrez-Bravo, Line Mikkelsen, and Eric Potsdam, 1-14. Santa Cruz, Ca.: Linguistics Research Center.