Papers

Clicking on the appropriate file will begin the download of a PostScript or Rich Text Format file. The former can be printed on any PostScript printer. The latter should be readable by Microsoft Word 5.1 and later versions. The papers are not listed here in any particular order.

Filename: thesis.rtf
1995 "Subjects, Events and Licensing"


Only the RTF version of my thesis is available for download. You may view the abstract here, and order a nicely bound copy from MITWPL
.

Filename:DMState_of_Article.GLOT.hqx
Filename: DMState_of_Article.GLOT.ps
1998 State of the Article: Distributed Morphology This is the Word 5.1 version of a position piece on Distributed Morphology which will appear in Glot International 4.4. Here, Rolf Noyer and I attempt to provide a broad overview of the framework of Distributed Morphology, a description and discussion of some of the key issues considered in the theory, and a comprehensive bibliography of work within the theory, as well as some related work in competing frameworks. The PalPhon font is used occasionally in this paper.
This version is a Postscript file which ought to be printable on any Postscript printer, again with the appropriate PalPhon font.


Filename:HarleyNoyer.RTF.hqx
Filename:HarleyNoyer.ps
Formal versus Encyclopedic Properties of Vocabulary: Evidence from Nominalizations.
This paper is under consideration for inclusion in a volume edited by Bert Peeters, from Elsevier Press, on the relationship between the Lexicon and the Encyclopedia. This version is an Office 98 Word RTF file, although the bulk of it ought to be readable by earlier versions of Word.
THIS version is a Postscript file, which should be printable on any Postscript printer.


Filename: HarleyNoyer.NELS28.rtf
1997 Mixed nominalizations, short verb movement and object shift in English, in "Proceedings of NELS 28", GLSA, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

This paper, co-written with Rolf Noyer, was presented at the North Eastern Linguistic Society's 28th meeting, in the fall of 1997 at the University of Toronto. It accounts for the failure of particle-shift in English verb-particle nominalizations ("look up the information/look the information up" vs. "the looking up of the information/*the looking of the information up", first noted in Chomsky 1971, "Remarks on Nominalizations"). In the non-lexicalist framework of Distributed Morphology, such failures must be ascribed to the syntax of the nominalization, rather than to a lexicalization of the nominal form, and we provide an account of this failure in terms of overt object shift and verb raising.


Filename: HarleyRitter.Oct98.hqx
Filename: HarleyRitter.Oct98.ps
1998 Meaning in Morphology: motivating a feature-geometric analysis of person and number, an updated version of a paper presented at the 1998 meeting of Generative Linguists of the Old World in Tilburg, the Netherlands. It is a BinHexed RTF Word 98 file; earlier versions of Word may be able to read it adequately, but ideally, after de-binhexing the file, open it with Word 98. In order to be able to read the geometric representations properly, you need the Arboreal font, available from Cascadilla Press.
This version is a Postscript file, which should be printable on any Postscript printer.


This paper, co-written with Elizabeth Ritter of the University of Calgary, applies the feature-geometric theory of morphosyntactic features outlined in my 1994 "Hug a Tree" paper (see description below). Here we provide considerable empirical coverage, dealing with pronominal paradigms from many different languages, and attempt a conceptual motivation of the feature geometry, claiming that subtrees of the geometry represent the grammaticization of (more global) natural cognitive classifications of the world.


Filename: Hug_a_tree.ps
1994 "Hug a tree: deriving the morphosyntactic feature hierarchy," MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 21, 289-320.

This paper proposes a morphological feature geometry, according to which subgroupings of morphological features correspond to subtrees of a universal geometry, acccounting for universals in feature distribution and realization. The view of morphological processes here is essentially that proposed by Noyer 1992, according to which morphological features are manipulated before being spelled-out by processes such as fusion, fission and (most significant here) Impoverishment, corresponding to delinking in the feature tree.

Filename: OIFinal.rtf
1996 (with Andrew Carnie) "VSO as raising to COMP: Some evidence from Old Irish". (An old version of this paper, with a third author, Elizabeth Pyatt, appeared in Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, Proceedings of the Formal Linguistics Society of the Midwest Meeting 5.)

This much enlarged and revised version of the paper argues that in addition to the V-to-I requirement of Modern Irish, Old Irish had movement to C of the verb, just in case C was not otherwise filled by a complementizer particle or preverbal particle. Evidence from the verb form (absolute in C, conjunct elsewhere) and the position of object enclitics, which we argue to adjoin to C, demonstrates that C in Old Irish required overt phonological material to fill it; a type of "weak-V2" hypothesis - weak because the specifier of CP cannot be filled with an XP.
(This paper is now under review at Oxford University Press as part of a volume of papers dealing with verb-inital languages, edited by Andrew Carnie and Eithne Guilfoyle; the proposed contents of the volume can be seen here

Filename: NomObjNELS.ps
1995 "Abstracting away from abstract case". To appear in Proceedings of NELS 25, Graduate Linguistics Students' Association, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

This paper demonstrates that nominative objects in dative-nominative experiencer subject constructions in Icelandic behave identically with accusative objects with respect to object shift and negative polarity item licensing, both of which phenomena demonstrate that despite the structural, agreement-triggering nominative case assignment on the object of the verb, that object stays within the scope of TP throughout the derivation and hence does not move to Spec-TP or Spec-AgrSP to get nominative case in the same way as subjects. This argues for a dependency analysis of case assignment, according to which the morphological realization of structural case is dependent upon the realization of other structural cases within a clause, rather than the standard approach according to which a particular structural case is associated with a particular position or case assigner.

Filename: CausativesCLA.ps
1996 "Sase bizarre: the Japanese causative and structural case," In P. Koskinen, (ed.) Proceedings of the 1995 Canadian Linguistics Society meeting, University of Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics

This paper provides a unified treatment of the various uses of the Japanese causative morpheme -sase within a Minimalist framework. The differences in case-assignment, numeral quantifier-float and passivization possibilities between the "make" and "let" uses of the causative are argued to fall out from the presence of a null P in the latter's structure which assigns case to an NP which controls an embedded PRO, while the former is essentially a raising-to-object structure. In addition, the lexical uses of sase can be subsumed under an approach where the CAUSE morpheme is present not only in the syntactic use but in the lexical use as well, implying that syntactic decomposition of lexical items is a reality at least in Japanese.


Filename: giveWCCFL.ps
1996 "If You Have, You Can Give", to appear in Proceedings of WCCFL XV, CSLI, Stanford, CA.


This paper outlines a decompositional approach to the syntax of eventive verbs, adducing in evidence a cross-lingusitic generalization according to which the decomposition of "give" in its double object use into "CAUSE + HAVE" is supported with data from Irish, Diné, Japanese, English, French and Italian. Languages without the HAVE preposition are argued to not contain double-object uses of "give", while languages which contain the HAVE preposition are shown to contain such uses. The breakdown of verbs into an upper VP shell representing eventiveness and a lower shell representing the aspectual and stative component of the verb's meaning provides the necessary structural representation to capture the generalization.

Filename: Event.ps
Ms. "Events, Agents and the Interpretation of VP-Shells"

 This longer paper elaborates on the view of the VP outlined in the WCCFL paper above and proposed initially in my dissertation. The upper part of a VP shell represents the eventiveness of an eventive verb, and this position is where all Agent arguments are generated, a proposal along the lines of Kratzer 1996. Late insertion of lexical items permits a unified treatment of Japanese syntactic and lexical causatives. Theta structure is argued to be epiphenomenal to event structure. Evidence from adverbs and psychological predicates also supports the decompositional view of verbs argued for here.

Filename: Bindingsquib.ps
1997 "Logophors, binding and the interpretation of have"
RTF version

A short (10-page) paper outlining an interesting fact about the possible readings of English "have". The interpretation of "have" is dependent upon the binding of a pronominal in its complement, and altering the pronominal element can be seen to alter the available readings of "have". This argues against a purely semantic treatment of the alternation of interpretations of "have", as such interpretations are dependent upon the syntactic binding of a pronominal element in the complement.

This paper has appeared in "Lingua", 103, pp 75-84.