OU - Faculty and Staff Publications

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Browsing OU - Faculty and Staff Publications by College/Department "College of Arts and Sciences::Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics"

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    The morphosyntax of number in Estonian numeral-noun constructions
    (2018-03) Norris, Mark
    The interaction of numerals and number-marking has generated much research in both morphosyntax and semantics in those domains. In this paper, I propose an analysis of number-marking in the numeral-noun constructions of Estonian. They are noteworthy for the existence of two morphosyntactic frames. In one, both the numeral and noun are singular, and the noun bears partitive case. In the other, both the numeral and noun are plural, and there is no assignment of partitive case. I propose an analysis whereby the head assigning partitive case is of the same syntactic category as the head introducing plurality: Borer’s (2005) Div. Previous accounts do not capture the generalization that the numeral always matches the noun’s number-marking. I propose it is another instance of the language’s already robust system of nominal concord.
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    Nominal structure in a language without articles: The case of Estonian
    (2018-03-23) Norris, Mark
    It is standardly assumed that nominals in the languages of the world are syntactically complex in the typical case, being made up of not just NP, but one or more functional projections, e.g., DP (Abney 1987). Recently, this assumption has been questioned, especially for languages without articles (Bošković 2005, et seq.). The alternative proposal holds that nominals in Serbo-Croatian (and more strongly, languages without articles in general) lack the DP projection, and that this difference has a variety of syntactic consequences. In this paper, I investigate the nominal extended projection of another language without articles, Estonian (Finno-Ugric). On the basis of a number of facts about Estonian’s system of adnominal genitives, I conclude that nominals in Estonian should not be given the same analysis as those in Serbo-Croatian. I propose instead that Estonian’s nominals are DPs. I then propose that indefinite pronouns and wh-determiners instantiate the category D0 in the language, arguing that DP does more cross-linguistically than host articles. I conclude that nominal structure in languages without articles can be just as complex as nominal structure in languages with articles.
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    Non-autonomous accusative case in Estonian
    (2018) Norris, Mark
    In Estonian, some objects of verbs show an alternation in case-marking that seems to be conditioned by morphological number: genitive when singular, nominative when plural. According to traditional descriptions (Erelt et al. 1993, 2000) and some recent research (Miljan & Cann 2013), these objects are genitive/nominative syntactically and morphologically. This paper argues against this approach, proposing instead that these cases are the morphological realization of a non-autonomous syntactic accusative case, on the basis of two novel arguments. First, although isolated words in the language have no unique accusative form, the pseudopartitive construction does exhibit a unique form in would-be accusative contexts. Second, the genitive form of the inanimate relative pronoun (mille) can be replaced by nominative/unmarked mis, but only when it is in an object position. Though it has been proposed in the literature that Estonian has an accusative case (Hiietam 2003, 2005, Caha 2009), neither of these arguments has been discussed, and they provide compelling morphosyntactic evidence in favor of the proposal. Possible paths to an analysis of the accusative’s pervasive syncretism are discussed in the framework of Distributed Morphology. It is proposed that an analysis making use of Impoverishment is superior to one without. The investigation here constitutes an additional case study in the divide between syntactic case and morphological case (Deal 2016, Goddard 1982, Legate 2008, 2014, Spencer 2006).
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    Opening Up Hispanic Literature: An Open-Access Critical Edition Assignment
    (2020) Ward, Julie Ann; Doyle, Madison
    Pedagogical research into cooperative learning and open educational resources supports an expectation for strong learning outcomes in both cases. This article is a guide to the implementation of a group assignment in a college introductory Hispanic literature course where students create critical editions of literary texts. The critical editions project described in this article focuses on team-building and training in group dynamics in addition to the skills of literary research. This project’s relationship to the Open Education movement is an important part of its success, in that it both uses Open Educational Resources (OER) through public domain literary texts as the objects of study in the course, and also asks students to produce OER through their critical editions of literary texts in the public domain. In this essay, we describe a group activity in which students in an introductory literature course research and create digital critical editions of literary texts, which are in turn collected and published online in an open-access anthology. Over the course of a semester, students are engaged in establishing and maintaining group dynamics, learning the basic skills of literary research, and presenting their research findings with the goal of creating a public good.
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    A typological perspective on nominal concord
    (2019) Norris, Mark
    This paper reports some of the results of the largest typological study of nominal concord to date. The sample contains 174 languages from 105 distinct families. Concord is found in 59.2% of languages in the sample. I demonstrate a number of tendencies among languages with concord: (i) number concord is the most common type, (ii) gender concord is common among languages with gender, (iii) case concord is relatively rare and almost never occurs alone, and (iv) it is more common to have concord on both adjectives and demonstratives than on just one or the other.
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    Unifying subject agreement across clause types in Estonian
    (2016) Norris, Mark
    Estonian negated indicative clauses show no agreement, whereas Estonian negated imperative clauses show agreement twice: once on the main verb and once on the negation word ära. This contrasts with affirmative clauses, where agreement appears only once. I propose a unified syntax for agreement across these clausal types, arguing that the there is one head which bears a φ-feature probe in all Estonian sentences. There is no agreement in negated indicatives because this head has only one suitable vocabulary item in this context: ei. Doubled agreement arises due to a rule of post- syntactic Feature Copying in imperative contexts. I argue that this analysis is superior to an analysis making use of multiple φ-feature probes in the syntax, as such analyses struggle to account for the optionality of doubling in first-person plural contexts. The proposed analysis makes predictions about the kinds of marking possible in negated imperatives, which appear to be borne out in related Uralic languages. This investigation supports a view of the morphosyntax of agreement whereby the syntax and morphology of agreement overlap but do not coincide.