Coyote Papers 19 (2012) served as the proceedings for Arizona Linguistics Cirlce 5. ALC5 was held October 28-30, 2011. The themes for ALC5 were "Middle Eastern languages" and "Experimental Linguistics", and our invited speakers included Mark Aronoff (Stony Brook University), Hagit Borer (University of Southern California), and Natasha Warner (University of Arizona). Further information about ALC5 can be found at the conference website.

 

 

Key, Greg. The causative/inchoative alternation, and the decomposition of little v. [download]

 

Morphological evidence in causative/inchoative pairs in Turkish is analyzed to determine the derivational relationship between the transitive and intransitive members of the pairs. Three patterns are found: 1. The transitive member is derived from the intransitive; 2. The intransitive is derived from the transitive; 3. Both members are independently derived from a common base. For a complete explanation of the data, it is proposed that the verbalizing head little v decomposes into a verbalizer (little v proper) and a discrete ‘flavor’ morpheme (CAUSE, BECOME, etc.).

 

Miura, Kaori. The base-generation approach to the spray/load alternation in Japanese. [download]

 

This article presents a syntactic account of the spray/load alternation in Japanese (e.g., nuru ‘smear’, tsumeru ‘pack’, etc.,). Fukui, Miyagawa and Tenny (1985) claim that the alternation verbs show the double object structure under a single VP node; namely both the Material (i.e., something that is painted) and the Location (i.e., somewhere that is painted) participants are co-sisters of the verb. When the Material participant is affected, it will be realized as the direct object of the verb. On the other hand, when the Location is (completely) affected, it will be realized as the direct object of the verb. I build an account on their intuition that the Material and the Location elements are thematically connected with the lexical verb within the binary branching hypothesis (Kayne 1994, among others); thus, they are arguments of VP. But this structure is valid only for the ni-variant where the Material is the single sister of VP. In the structure of the de-variant, the Location is a single sister of VP but the Material element is a PP, merging above VP. Under this view, the two syntactic alternants are available because they are derived from different numeration arrays. The present analysis minimizes the burden on the syntax by eliminating the affectedness condition for determining argument distribution of spray/load verbs in Japanese.

 

Nurhayani, Ika. Javanese applicative construction. [download]

 

Javanese has an applicative suffix –ake, which serves to license a benefactive, instrumental or theme suffix as a core object. Each of them has a thematic paraphrase in which the applicative argument is contained in a PP. The multiplicity of –ake poses problems for Marantz (1993) with his single applicative head. First, the uses of the applicative morpheme –ake must be lumped together in a single applicative head. Second, there is no attempt at all to account for the relation between the applicative constructions and their thematic paraphrases. I argue that Bowers’s (2010) framework can solve the problems with multiple argument heads merged in accordance with a fixed Universal Order of Merge (UOM). There are three primary argument-types, Ag(ent), Th(eme) and Aff(ectee) and secondary argument-types of various kinds, including Instr(ument), Ben(eficiary), Source, Goal, and others. Any head can potentially host an applicative morpheme. In Javanese, the morpheme -ake can be associated with an Aff-head, an Inst-head or a Th-head. Furthermore, in each case, applicative construction and its thematic paraphrase are derived from virtually identical structures because the argument head may have more than one selectional possibility for a DP with unvalued case feature or a PP.

 

Reed, Sylvia L. Evaluating prospectivity in a Neo-Reichenbachian aspectual system. [download]

 

This paper pursues an analysis of prospective aspect and its similarity to the perfect. I adopt the term ‘prospective’ for any aspect whose semantics orders RT prior to ET, and propose a set of diagnostics for prospectivity. Then I discuss properties of perfects which might be shared by this aspect and propose tests for these properties within the prospective. Finally, I show that going to and about to in English, and a’ dol do and gu in Scottish Gaelic, pass tests for prospectivity and perfect-hood with varying degrees of success.

 

Stone, Megan Schildmier. Aspect in Cherokee nominals. [download]

 

In this paper I present evidence from Cherokee (Iroquoian, Southern Iroquoian) which refutes accounts of the distinction between process and result nominals based on the presence or absence of AspectP in the nominal’s functional structure. I argue that Cherokee has result nominals which contain aspect morphology, directly contradicting the proposal of Alexiadou (2001) that such nominals must lack an AspectP, and suggest that some other mechanism must be at play to account for the syntactic and semantic differences between result and process nominals.

 

Thompson, Ellen and Sawsan Werfelli. The position of the subject in spoken Saudi Arabic: A processing perspective. [download]

 

One of the most widely-discussed issues in Arabic syntax concerns the position of the subject. In this work, we investigate the processing of verb-initial and subject-initial structures in spoken Saudi Arabic in order to shed light on this debate. We examine the processing times associated with these constructions and argue that processing considerations provide evidence for a particular conception of Arabic syntax according to which VSO order is derived with the subject remaining in VP and verb raising over the subject, while SVO order is derived with the subject raising out of VP to Spec, TP, or to a higher Inflectional Phrase, and the verb raising to a position lower than the subject.