On Unifying Antisymmetry and Bare Phrase Structure

The Antisymmetry of Phrase Structure from the Optimality Theoretic Perspective

Japanese Multiple Nominative Constructions: The View of Antisymmetry

This paper focuses on multiple nominative constructions (MNCs) in Japanese, pursuing the question of how nominative ga-marked phrases are syntactically licensed. MNCs in Japanese, in which more than one gamarked phrase can occur within a clause, have widely been studied by a number of linguists (e.g. Fukui, 1986; Heycock, 1993; Kuno, 1973; Takezawa, 1987; Tateshi, 1994; Vermeulen, 2005; Whitman...

Relative clauses and the noun phrase in Cantonese

A number of different formal analyses of relative clauses have been proposed over the years. For example, the adjunction analysis states that the relative clause is adjoined to the modified noun; the antisymmetry analysis (formulated in Kayne 1994) posits that the complementizer phrase (CP) is the direct complement of the determiner (the determiner being the head of the nominal projection), and...

Demonstratives and DP Structure in Formosan Languages

This paper studies the noun phrase structure of Paiwan demonstratives by examining in detail the typology of demonstratives, possessives and numerals in Formosan languages. Four main issues are addressed: in Formosan languages (A) whether the word order variation in nominals may be best accounted for along the lines of the antisymmetry condition in Kayne (1994); (B) whether demonstratives, poss...

Antisymmetry and the Conservation of C-Command: Scrambling and Phrase Structure in Synchronic and Diachronic Perspective

Holmberg’s Generalization (Holmberg 1986) was originally stated to describe the “object shift” phenomena found in the modern Scandinavian languages. This dissertation argues that object shift is merely a subcase of scrambling, a type of adjunction, and that Holmberg’s Generalization is a subcase of a universal constraint, the “Generalized Holmberg Constraint” (GHC), which prohibits leftward scr...