SOUTH ASIA SYNTAX-SEMANTICS NEWSLETTER Volume 5, Number 1 - Spring, 1996 Volume 5, Number 2 - Fall, 1996 Published by Rutgers-The State University University of Pennsylvania 18 Seminary Place 619 Williams Hall New Brunswick, NJ 08903 Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305 USA USA Here we are in the fifth year of the newsletter. As you may notice, we have combined the Fall and Spring issues again. Given the amount of contributions and our other commitments, this seems to be the optimal solution. However, we are keeping the format of separate issues just in case we find we have enough material for two issues and the time to process it. You will also notice that the annual SALA conference was in Delhi this year. Though this is a welcome change, we hope that universities in the US will be able to host SALA in '98. Please let us know of this or other announcements which you think will be of interest to South Asianists. Thanks to all of you who sent in contributions. We hope you will continue to do so -- the more information we have about work in the field the better for all of us. We are considering starting an ftp/web archive site where papers/ manuscripts on SASSN related topics could be kept and made widely accessible. If you would like to make your paper listed here, please send email to bhatt@babel.ling.upenn.edu for further information. Ideally, we would prefer URL links, but if that is not feasible for someone, we will accept postscript files/ WORD disks. The newsletter can also be read on the web/printed as a postcript file at www.ling.upenn.edu . Veneeta Dayal Rajesh Bhatt Editor, SASSN Associate Editor, SASSN Dept. of Linguistics Dept. of Linguistics Rutgers University University of Pennsylvania 18 Seminary Place Room #619, Williams Hall New Brunswick, NJ 08903 Philadelphia, PA 19104 Phone: (908)-932-6903 Phone: (215)-898-0331 dayal@rci.rutgers.edu bhatt@linc.cis.upenn.edu Announcements Vyakaran VYAKARAN, the mailing list for all aspects of South Asian linguistics was started in October 1995 as an informal forum for all who are interested in the languages of South Asia, both modern and classical. It presently has around 125 members in 21 countries. The aim of this list is to further discussion among interested scholars in ALL aspects of South Asian languages, primarily but not only Indo-Aryan languages. Thus comments and questions on everything from historical linguistics to the modern Indo-Aryan languages, from socio-linguistics to morphology and syntax, from phonology and diglossia to Panini and the Hindi-Urdu question are welcome, just to name a few. It is also intended to supply scholars interested in South Asian linguistics with a forum for discussing new ideas with other interested scholars, as well as providing them with a way of making new contacts with other people interested in the same field. If you would like to join the list, send a message with the following contents at the address given below. The message should include the following: subscribe vyakaran, yourfirstname_lastname, email@address sent to the address gor05@rz.uni-kiel.d400.de and that's it. Do not forget to send your email address along as part of your message; the software doesn't trace your address - or even to reply to you directly. Once you've joined the group, you can send a message to everyone on the list by sending your post to vyakaran@email.uni-kiel.de and your post will be forwarded automatically to all the members on the list. To quit the list at any time, send a short note to the email address gor05@rz.uni-kiel.d400.de It is strongly recommended that new members briefly introduce themselves to the other members of the list but there's no requirement that you do so. If you have any questions, write to gor05@rz.uni-kiel.d400.de John Peterson, Institute for South Asian Studies, Kiel, Germany Call For Contribution: Yearbook of Southasian languages and Linguistics Editors: Chief Editor:Rajendra Singh,Universite de Montreal,Montreal Associate Editors: P.Dasgupta,University of Hyderabad,Hyderabad K.P.Mohanan,The National University,Singapore Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics,an important refereed annual to be brought out by Sage Publications,New-Delhi, will make its debut in Spring 1998.It will attempt to consolidate empirical and theoretical research in South Asian languages,and will serve as a testing ground for new ideas and approaches grounded in South Asian languages. Submissions(articles,review-articles,and reviews) are invited for the inaugural issue.Ordinarily,3 copies should be sent to the Chief Editor(LSA style-sheet,s.v.p.),but because of the shortage of time,this time around it would be more efficient to send each of the editors a copy--this would expedite matters.The editorial addresses are*: 1.R.Singh,Linguistique,U.de M.,C.P.6128,Succ."Centreville",Montreal H3C3J7 2.P.Dasgupta,Linguistics,U.ofHyderbad,Hyderabad 500046,India 3.K.P.Mohanan,English,The National University,Singapore119260 **The last date for submissions for the inaugural issue:January 31,1997 **For additional information,contact singhr@ere.umontreal.ca Editoral Board Regional Editors: R.K.Agnihotri(Delhi),T.K.Bhatia(Syracuse),B.S.A.Khan(AlAin),R.Mesthrie(Cape Town),T.Nara(Tokyo),T.Rahman(Islamabad),I.Sachdev(London),A.P.Saleemi(Singapore),Udaya UdayaNarayan Singh(Hyderabad),E.Tiffou(Montreal),and K.V.Tirumalesh(Hyderabad Editorial Advisors: E.Annamali(Mysore),R.E.Asher(Edinburgh),B.Comrie(LosAngeles),W.Dressler(Vienna) A.Joshi(Philadelphia),A.Kelkar(Pune),P.Kiparsky(Stanford),E.F.Konrad Koerner (Ottawa),Bh.Krishnamurty(Hyderabad),J.Lele(Kingston),M.Minsky(Cambridge,Mass.) P.Muysken(Amsterdam),and N.S.Prabhu(Bangalore) Books Locality in WH Quantification: Questions and Relative Clauses in Hindi Author: Veneeta Dayal Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, Kluwer Academic Publishers This book argues that Logical Form, the level that mediates between syntax and semantics, is derives from S-structure by local movement. The primary data for the claim of locality at LF is drawn from Hindi but English data is used in discussing the semantics of questions and relative clauses. The book takes a cross-linguistic perspective showing how the Hindi and English facts can be brought to bear on the theory of universal grammar. Phenomena generally thought to involve long-distance dependencies at LF, such as scope marking, long-distance lists and correlatives, are handled by explicating novel types of local relationships that interrogative and relative clauses can enter into. A more articulated semantics is shown to lead to a simpler syntax. The book also takes a close look at the semantics of single and multiple wh constructions. It separates out plurality induced list answers from those dependent on a functional dependency among wh expressions. Proceedings of the Workshop on the Syntax and Semantics of Partial Wh-Movement Tuebingen, Germany. December 1-2 1995 U. Lutz and G. Muller (eds) Studies on Wh-Scope Marking. Arbeitspapiere des SFB 340. University of Stuttgart/University of T|bingen Dayal, Veneeta "Scope Marking: In Defense of Indirect Dependency" This paper maintains that the matrix wh in a scope marking structure sets the quantification in the question to be over propositional variables, but the restriction on this variable is provided by the complement CP. It departs on earlier formulations of the indirect dependency approach to scope marking in allowing cross-linguistic variation in the syntax though not in the semantics. Adapting a proposal of Reis (same volume) relating scope marking structures to parenthetical constructions, it argues for a range of options that languages may exercise with respect to subordination of the CP complement. Empirical evidence from English, Hindi and German is presented to argue for a three-way distinction. The paper ends with some predictions about scope marking structures that the indirect dependency approach makes. Mahajan, Anoop "Some Implications of Partial Wh-Movement in Hindi" and Gisebert Fanselow and Anoop Mahajan "Wh-expletive Constructions in German and Hindi", propose an alternative to the direct and indirect dependency approaches to scope marking. According to them, the embedded question is the complement of the scope marker, i.e. the underlying structure is something like [DP kyaa [CP who Mary will talk to]]. However, following Kayne's view that so-called SOV languages like Hindi are really SVO, they take such DP's to be generated to the right of the verb. The surface order is derived by movement of the scope marker kyaa to a position to the left of the matrix verb. At LF, kyaa moves to spec and the stranded CP also lands there, replacing it in the process. This approach shares with the indirect dependency approach the view that the scope marker originates in argument position and that the CP is associated with the scope marker in the same way that a common noun is associated with a determiner. But Mahajan and Fanselow make a crucial departure from that proposal in claiming that at LF, the matrix Q-operator can be co- indexed with the spec of its spec (i.e. with the embedded wh expression), thereby yielding a wide scope interpretation for the embedded wh expression. This brings in an element of the direct dependency approach into the picture. Other papers in the volume also discuss Hindi scope marking as does the introduction by Arnim von Stechow. Dissertation Abstracts Binding and Free Word Order Phenomena in Hindi and Urdu Ayesha Kidwai Thesis Supervisor: Anvita Abbi Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 1995 This dissertation explores the syntactic and semantic/pragmatic properties of Hindi and Urdu scrambling within the framework of Chomsky (1992). It argues for a uniform analysis of Hindi and Urdu scrambling as adjunction to XP, and formalizes the link between clause-internal leftward (CIL) scrambling and preverbal WH-focusing in Hindi and Urdu. It therefore departs from standard assumptions of scrambling as optional and/or semantically vacuous. Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical framework within which the phenomenon of CIL scrambling is investigated, and explores the problems that it poses for the minimalist program. Chapter 2 investigates the syntactic properties of CIL from the perspective of the theory of movement and finds that the movement involved in scrambling cannot be characterized as either movement for Case/agreement, WH-movement, Topicalization or (S-Structure) QR. Following Muller and Sternefeld (1993), the discussion here suggests that, crosslinguistically, scrambling can only be characterized as adjunction to XP. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the status of XP-adjunction in the minimalist program, and proposes that the theoretically optimal characterization of adjunction would be one which provided the operation with a morphological motivation -- i.e. one in which XP-adjunction would, like substitution, be feature-driven movement. Chapter 3 is designed to explain the facts in scrambled configurations, taken by Mahajan (1990) to be evidence for an A-movement analysis of the operation. Chapter 2 shows that the binding-theoretic evidence Mahajan presents is not only inconclusive with regards to an A-movement analysis, but also that if the binding facts in Hindi and Urdu default order are studied carefully, even Mahajan's data actually points in the direction of an adjunction analysis of CIL scrambling. Chapter 3 develops a Binding Theory that can explain the binding judgements obtained in scrambled configurations and still maintain CIL scrambling to be adjunction to XP. In this context, the structure of double object constructions in UG, the LF-raising approach to pronouns and reflexives, the theories of binding and coreference of Reinhart (1991) and Reinhart and Grodzinsky (1993), and the theory of reconstruction are examined and developed. The Binding Theory that emerges from these explorations is shown to have coverage beyond scrambling data, as it can provide an explanation for binding in double object constructions in a number of languages, as well as a principled distinction between Weak and Strong Crossover. With this last argument against an adjunction analysis of CIL scrambling dispensed with, Chapter 4 turns to a consideration of the related issues of morphological motivations for XP-adjunction in general, and CIL scrambling in particular. The chapter claims that scrambling is employed for focusing elements in the preverbal focus position. The thesis describes this position as a Focus Phrase projection immediately dominating VP, which is activated by the scrambled XP. The mechanisms of head-activation are hypothesized to involve a version of dynamic agreement (Rizzi 1991), by which the scrambled XP transmits an N-feature to the head of the Focus Phrase. By this account, scrambling is no longer characterizable as optional (since it must take place whenever the [+FOCUS] feature is involved), or semantically vacuous (since scrambling has an expressed LF-effect -- focusing). Chapter 5 considers the specificity effects noted in scrambled configurations. It suggests that with a few modifications to Diesing's (1992) Mapping Hypothesis, these facts can be explained by an adjunction analysis of scrambling. The chapter contradicts assumptions of a causal link between object agreement and specificity and makes some informal speculations regarding the sites of (in)definiteness in Hindi and Urdu. Chapter 6 concludes the dissertation with a brief consideration of the issues of rightward and long-distance scrambling. It is claimed that rightward scrambling is actually base-generated, and that long-distance scrambling across tensed clause boundaries is ungrammatical. Besides the issues surrounding scrambling, the dissertation offers some new theoretical and empirical proposals. In Chapter 2, an analysis of the Hindi and Urdu -to particle as a topic particle is offered; in Chapter 3 the impossibility of raising X-reflexives across tensed boundaries is explained in terms of Watanabe's (1993) layered Case theory. In the same chapter, a universal proposal for the structure of ditransitives in UG is developed, that maintains a strict version of UTAH and involves Case checking in a VP internal AGR-oP. Dative shift is argued to require IO Case checking in a broadly L-related position to this AGR-o. This is used to explain the binding and extraction facts in double object constructions in a number of languages, including Albanian, English and Italian. Dimensions of Reflexivity Jeffrey Lidz University of Delaware, 1996 Human languages make use of two mechanisms for the expression of reflexivity. Some languages use a verbal affix while others use a special anaphoric pronoun. These mechanisms are not mutually exclusive, however. The research in this thesis is driven by the question of how many systems are needed to account for this variability. Is the system governing the distribution of verbal reflexives completely independent of the system governing the distribution of nominal reflexives? If not, to what extent do these systems overlap or interact? I propose that the distribution of verbal reflexives is determined primarily by argument-structure representations while the distribution of nominal reflexives is determined primarily by syntactic representations. We do find, however, certain cases of overlap. In these cases, the existence of two systems is precisely what is required to achieve a level of explanatory adequacy. Chapter 2 begins with the observation that there is a systematic cross-linguistic ambiguity in verbal reflexives. The ambiguity stems from a single argument-structure representation which is compatible with a range of semantic and syntactic structures. As such, verbal reflexives provide compelling evidence for the existence of argument-structure as an independent level of representation providing an interface between syntax and lexical-semantics. This chapter relies heavily on data from Kannada, as well as many unrelated languages. Chapter 3 extends the analysis of Chapter 2 to cross-linguistically variable properties of verbal reflexives. Verbal reflexives used in antipassive, middle and impersonal constructions are shown to be consistent with the analysis of Chapter 2 and not with any of the other potential analyses of verbal reflexives. Chapter 4 turns to an outstanding problem for the binding theory. It is shown that the behavior of antilocal anaphors is not due to parameterization of the binding theory or to the featural content of the anaphors but rather to an interaction between the semantic content of the anaphors and Condition R, a principle of UG which forces semantic reflexivity to be expressed in the argument-structure. The binding theory is constant for all languages. What varies across languages is the semantic content of the anaphors. Only those anaphors which require complete identity with their antecedents are antilocal, their antilocality arising from Condition R. The other anaphors, which I call "near-reflexives" are not antilocal because they do not give rise to semantic reflexivity and thus do not interact with Condition R. Substratum Influence on Indo-Aryan Grammar Jeffrey Clark von Munkwitz-Smith Thesis Supervisor: Professor Indira Y. Junghare University of Minnesota, 1995 Section One is a history of the controversy over the influence of substrata -Dravidian and Munda, primarily -on Indo-Aryan, beginning with August Friedrich PottUs 1833 assertion that the Old Indo-Aryan retroflex consonants had their roots in Dravidian and finishing with Madhav Deshpande's 1993 work on the sociolinguistics of Sanskrit and Prakrit. Included in the discussion is the notion, first advanced by Murray Emeneau and taken up, more recently, by Colin Masica, of South Asia as a linguistic area. The conclusion is reached that, despite the somewhat convincing arguments advanced by Hans Hock and others against substratum influence, the sheer volume of evidence, though circumstantial, does point to early substratum - particularly Dravidian influence on Indo-Aryan. Section Two is a review of the evolution of the grammar of counterfactual statements in Indo-Aryan and an examination of the connection between the form used in those statements and that of past habitual statements in the South Asian linguistic area in light of Bruce Pray's 1980 assertion that the use of a single form for those two types of statements in the Dakhini Urdu-Telangana Telugu micro-linguistic area was the result of Telugu influence. The conclusion is reached that the use of a single form was most likely the result of internal development in Indo-Aryan that spread to several other languages, of various language families, in the South Asian linguistic area. Further, while not all languages in that linguistic area share the feature, it is sufficiently widespread to be considered a characteristic of the linguistic area. Grammatical Relations in Pali and the Emergence of Ergativity in Indo-Aryan John Peterson Kiel University, Kiel, Germany, 1996 In this study, control of various grammatical operations such as coreferential deletion, reflexivization, coordination, subordination, pronominalization and relativization are studied in the language of one small part of the Pali canon, i.e., three chapters (78 pages) of the Mahavagga of the Vinaya Pitaka, thereby limiting the study as much as possible to the language of one particular time and place and avoiding later influences. The basis of the study are the syntactic-semantic primitives A (transitive agent), S (intransitive subject) and O (transitive patient), as well as experiencer/experiencee. Also, Dixon's (1979, 1994) and Foley/Van Valin's (1985) somewhat differing concepts of 'pivot' are employed. It was found that all verbal categories, with the exception of the finite passive, treat A, S and O the same, irrespective of their case. The results can be summarized as follows: - Reflexivization and equi-NP deletion operate on a SEMANTIC PIVOT (i.e., agentive S and A); - Pronominalization is triggered by the TOPIC (whether this be a core or non-core noun); - Subordination involving clauses in the locativus absolutus construction operates on a purely SYNTACTIC PIVOT (i.e., S/A); - Main clause coordination operates along a PRAGMATIC PIVOT (core NP as topic occupying clause initial position), in which S and A may only delete a coreferential S or A, and O only a coreferential O, regardless of case; - Subordination involving a verbum absolutivum operates along a SYNTACTIC PIVOT (S/A) which is restricted to the PRAGMATIC PIVOT (core NP in clause-initial position of the clause it appears in). Also, it was found that word order in the Pali of our text sample is of grammatical significance, as it plays the decisive role in clause combining. The results also call the theory of the development of the modern-day ergative constructions from an originally passive one into question, as it was found that the transitive patient controls NONE of the grammatical operations under study which it should be expected to do in a passive construction. Also, as the periphrastic perfect in Pali marks S and O in the nominative and differently from A, this is already an ergative pattern in Pali, with the exception that the nominative is not unmarked morphologically, i.e., it is not identical with the absolutive. Hence, the periphrastic perfect is considered an "ergative-like" construction. Concerning the development of the periphrastic perfect: The PPP (and the gerundive) is considered in this study to have originally been a resultative verbal adjective, not (necessarily) passive. On the basis of this, and using the theory of grammaticalization as this applies to the respective verbal categories, a different development for the periphrastic perfect is given, one in which the development of the perfect of transitive verbs in many ways parallels that of the languages of western Europe. The functions assumed in these languages by the formally transitive verb 'have', i.e., above all possession and concomitance, are expressed by nominal phrases in Indo-Aryan. These two constructions directly influenced the syntax of the perfect of transitive verbs in Indo-Aryan. In the first construction, the PPP agrees with O in case, number and gender and A appears in the genitive, the same construction used to denote possession. In the second, more common, pattern, A appears in the instrumental, which was originally used alone to denote concomitance. In the perfect of intransitive verbs, S appears in nominative and the PPP agrees with it in gender, number and case. As of February / March, 1997 copies may be obtained from: Dekanat der Philosophischen Fakultaet Christian-Albrechts-Universitaet zu Kiel Olshausesnstr. 40 D-24118 Kiel Germany Papers Presented at Conferences Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting, San Diego, January 1996 Turkish influence on dying Romani dialects in Istanbul Peter Bakker (University of Amsterdam) Romani is a Neo-Indic language spoken throughout Europe and the Americas. The ancestors of Romani speakers, now known as the Gypsies, arrived in Europe from India in the 12th or the 13th century. All known modern day dialects underwent significant structural influence from Balkan languages, especially Greek. Nothing is known about pre-European Romani. Fieldwork on Romani as spoken in Turkey show that the language is dying out rapidly. All these dialects appear to conform to the Balkan sprachbund features like European Romani. The paper discusses the significant influence from Turkish on Romani dialects in four Gypsy neighbourhoods in Istanbul. Focus, adjacency, and nonspecificity Miriam Butt (University of Stuttgart) & Tracy Holloway King (Stanford University) The strong claim put forward by Horvath (1995) that structural focus is licensed by mechanisms which parallel structural Case assignment receives support from SOV languages like Urdu and Turkish. However, the case marking, position, and interpretation of objects do no yield the expected straightforward parallelism to focus licensing. In particular, a conflict arises with regard to the interpretation of the immediately preverbal position.: while preverbal focus forces a specific interpretation, unmarked preverbal objects are interpreted as nonspecific. Following Horvath, focus is associated with a functional head (Infl) and a lexical item (V) must raise to license focus; focus in these languages is assigned under government and adjacency, which is satisfied by right-adjunction at AspP, creating a preverbal position. In Turkish and Urdu, nominative objects can only be interpreted as nonspecific in immediately preverbal position; this adjacency requirement follows from Weak Case being assigned to the complement of V and forcing a nonspecific reading. Since focus requires V-raising, our account correctly predicts that WEak Case objects cannot occur with preverbal focus phrases; nominative objects which co-occur with preverbal foci always receive Strong Case and the corresponding semantic interpretation. Thus, we show that a unifying analysis for the crosslinguistic similarity of focus and Case follows from a combination of Horvath's general approach and the differentiation between Weak and Strong Case (de Hoop 1992). Unifying antipassive and reflexive: An argument structure approach Jeffrey Lidz (University of Delaware) Many languages (e.g. Diyari, Lithuanian, and Udmurt) mark the verb in a reflexive construction with the same morpheme as in an antipassive construction. Other languages like Kalkatungu, use one morpheme for reflexive and another for the antipassive. Still others lack a morpheme for one or the other of these functions. In this paper, I account for both the close connection between antipassive and reflexive as as the limited variation shown in languages with respect to these morphemes. Adopting a two-tiered theory of argument structure (Grimshaw 1990) I argue that reflexive morphemes arise when the most prominent element in the aspectual tier is unlinked (Lidz 1995). The antipassive morpheme arises when the least prominent element on the aspectual tier is unlinked. Thus, morphemes which indicate both antipassive and reflexive indicate that there is an unlinked element somewhere on the aspectual tier. This analysis is superior to one in which reflexive and antipassive morphemes are detransitivizesr because some verbs retain their transitivity when reflexive marked. Adverbial Subordination in the first language acquisition of Sinhala Nancy Goss (University of Delaware), James Gair & Barbara Lust (Cornell University) Shamitha Somashekar (Cornell University) In this paper we report the results of a new experimental study (an act out/toy moving task) which tested the interpretation of 41 children in the Kadawatha area of Sri Lanka (aged 2.6 to 6.5 in 4 age groups) on three types of complex sentences. Based on an analysis of Sinhala verbal morphology and syntax (e.g., Gair 1970), three connectives were tested, allowing test for dissociation of finiteness, tense, and semantic temporality, as well as test for generalization and replication of previous results (Gair et al., 1989). Results (measuring children's coreference and disjoint reference judgements in interpretation) showed that children differentiated all connectives in their interpretation, and were sensitive to both syntactic finitiness and semantic tense in their complex sentence interpretation, from earliest ages tested. Results are discussed in terms of a Strong Continuity Theory of first language acquisition, and a modularity theory of Universal Grammar. The case of the Telugu `anaphoric' predicate Rosanne Pelletier (Yale University) This paper focuses on case facts in `double reflexive' (DR) and reciprocal nominals in the Dravidian language Telugu, and demonstrates that these nominals must be classified as predicational rather than anaphoric. In addition to predicting the full array of case facts within the Telugu DR and reciprocal nominals -- case agreement of the head, ECM of the specifier -- the predication analysis also brings crucial evidence to bear on theoretical questions concerning nominal predication, including the internal structure of DPs. The analysis also augments our understanding of the typology of complex predication, as well as the typology of reflexive/reciprocal expression. Hindi and the typology of noun incorporation: An analysis with lexical sharing Michael T. Wescoat (Osaka University) Recently, T. Mohanan has posited the following four-class typology for noun-incorporation A B C D The incorporated noun is an argument NO YES YES YES Modifier stranding is allowed NO NO YES YES Doubling is allowed NO NO NO YES Class A includes Samoan, C Southern Tiwa, and D Mohawk; Mohanan adds class B to accommodate observations she makes about Hindi. She claims that class B necessitates a grammatical function based approach. I maintain that on a broader empirical examination, Hindi actually falls in class C; i.e., in rejecting stranded modifiers, Mohanan overlooks semantically more plausible data that lead to the opposite conclusion. The felicity of stranded modifiers suggests that (a) there must be an object NP in phrase structure, (b) the need for grammatical functions is obviated, and (c) the typology above may be simplified by dropping B. Now NI of types A and D can be handled lexically. The remaining type C can be analyzed with either head movement or else a technique called LEXICAL SHARING. In the latter case, one may give a uniformly lexical treatment of all three type of NI - A, C, and D. The 32nd meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society Object Shift and Specificity: Evidence from ko-phrases in Hindi Rajesh Bhatt, University of Pennsylvania and Elena Anagnostopoulou, Tilburg University In the literature, at least two ways of marking specificity have been proposed - either structurally by moving out of the VP (Diesing (1992)) or morphologically as in Turkish (Eng (1991)). We discuss data from Hindi which marks specificity in a way very similar to Turkish, by the postposition ko. We claim that while the presence of morphological marking of specificity is necessary, it is not sufficient. To be interpreted as specific, an NP/DP has to satisfy the structural condition and be morphologically marked. The crucial data supporting our claim come from double object constructions. In particular consider the obligatory scrambling: Ram-ne (Erg) Sita-ko (Dat) billi (cat) di-ii (give-Pfv) vs. Ram-ne (Erg) Sita-ko (cat-KO) Sita-ko (Dat) di-yaa (give-Pfv) (both `Ram gave the cat to Sita'). These data suggest a very restrictive shortest-move-obeying view of scrambling. We discuss the nature of the specificity-induced movement and the nature of the site in which specificity is licensed. Finally, we also discuss a connected alternation seen with the verb `send'. We extend our analysis of the specificity- ko to handle the dative- ko. Formal Linguistics Society of Middle-America, OSU, Columbus, May, 1996 The Matching Parameter and Correlatives Rajesh Bhatt, University of Pennsylvania In this paper, I argue that the requirement of matching and a certain morphological property of case clitics in Hindi conspires to rule out the existence of most kinds of free relatives in argument position. On the basis of these facts, I argue that matching does not belong to syntax and is either a morphological or phonological process. I show that information about morphological violations is not available for the purposes of economy computations in syntax (An earlier version of this paper was presented at CONSOLE 4 in Paris, December 1995) LFG Workshop: Grenoble, France, August 26-28, 1996 Structural Topic and Focus without Movement (Urdu, Turkish) Miriam Butt (University of Stuttgart) and Tracy Holloway King (Stanford University) We propose to analyze the free word order in Urdu and Turkish as base-generated possibilities which reflect differing information structures of a sentence. We propose that the varied word orders are optional from a purely syntactic point of view: they are not motivated by case or agreement. Instead, they are motivated both by semantic factors, such as specific vs. non-specific interpretations and discourse considerations, such as topic and focus. In particular, we investigate an intriguing interaction between preverbal structural focus and the nonspecific interpretation of preverbal objects in Urdu and Turkish. Semantic Representations in the Architecture of LFG (Malayalam) KP Mohanan and Tara Mohanan (National University of Singapore) Abstract NA Word Order and Locative Inversion: Implications for Argument Hierarchy Tara Mohanan (National University of Singapore) Abstract NA Unpublished Papers An Analysis of Tamil Verb Stems Bhavani Saravanan, SUNY Stony Brook In this paper, I argue that the tense inflection patterns of Tamil verbs are entirely predictable and that Tamil verb stems can be divided into stems that end in a consonant and stems that end in a vowel; the tense inflection patterns of the verbs in Tamil can be predicted based on this classification. I further propose that verbal stems like the participle and infinitive are built on the imperative stem and that the three tense stems are built on these three stems: the future on the imperative sten, the present on the infinitive and past on the participle stem. Here I do not mean to say that the future, present and past tenses are constructed on the actual infinitives, participles or imperatives itself, rather that the tense stems and the other stems are built on common , underlying (in the sense of Bloomfield (1933:209)) stems which I will refer to as the infinitive , participle and imperative stems. This proposal is built on Matthews` (1991) lexeme based morphology, developed further in Aronoff (1994) in which he argues that two (or more) semantically diametrically opposite stems may be formed on an underlying stem that is semantically (i.e. morphosyntactically) neutral. That is, the active and the passive may both be formed on the same underlying stem that is neither active nor passive. The paper focusses on data from the colloquial dialect of Tamil spoken by middle class Brahmins in Madras