Papers by Samuel Jambrović
To appear in Proceedings of the 42nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 2024
In English and many other languages, third-person pronouns cannot appear in pronoun-noun construc... more In English and many other languages, third-person pronouns cannot appear in pronoun-noun constructions: "we linguists" versus "*they linguists". Although Spanish uses the definite article in these constructions, it exhibits the same third-person gap: "nosotros los lingüistas" 'we the linguists' versus "*ellos los lingüistas" 'they the linguists'. Moreover, the ungrammaticality of "*ellos lingüistas" 'they linguists' suggests that the issue is not simply due to the "-llos" component of "ellos" 'they' competing for the same structural position as "los" 'the' as the definite article. In this paper, I argue that third-person pronouns realize the entirety of the noun phrase and that they can only do so when the following heads are structurally adjacent: π, D, Div, and n. If third-person pronouns themselves spell out Div and n, it follows that they cannot appear with an overt noun, ruling out both "*ellos los lingüistas" and "*ellos lingüistas". This analysis also captures the inability of third-person pronouns to be modified by restrictive relative clauses: "*ellos los que son altos" 'they the ones who are tall'. Since restrictive relative clauses enter the derivation below DP, they disrupt the adjacency of D and Div and thereby prevent the noun phrase from being realized as a third-person pronoun.
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Proceedings of the 2023 annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association, 2023
The need for the definite article to express a singular kind ("the cat") in the Germanic language... more The need for the definite article to express a singular kind ("the cat") in the Germanic languages is predicted by Borer's (2005) structural approach to the mass-count distinction. Chierchia's (1998) down operator can apply to nPs to derive mass kinds ("rice") and to DivPs to derive plural kinds ("cats"), but there is no determinerless structure that exclusively denotes properties of atomic individuals to which this same operator can apply to derive singular kinds. The only alternative is the process that Chierchia proposes for plural kinds in Romance, where the definite article returns a maximal individual that can be intensionalized into a kind. In articleless languages like Mandarin, this account allows for a universal property-denoting denotation of nP and simultaneously captures the fact that singular kinds have the same distribution as mass kinds.
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Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, 2023
Focusing on the Silemānī variety of Central Kurdish, this paper explores the distribution of modi... more Focusing on the Silemānī variety of Central Kurdish, this paper explores the distribution of modifiers, possessors, and arguments within the noun phrase as well as the linking vowels that precede these elements. The position of modifiers and the form of the linker both differ in indefinite and definite noun phrases. In indefinite phrases, modifiers follow the plural and indefinite suffixes and appear with a linker of the form "-ī". In definite phrases, however, modifiers precede the plural and definite suffixes and appear with a linker of the form "-a". Since an "-a" linker is found in many compounds, we consider general issues of modification versus compounding in Central Kurdish as well. Finally, possessors and arguments do not show sensitivity to definiteness. In all noun phrases, possessors and arguments occur after number and definiteness morphology with a linker of the form "-ī".
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To appear in Proceedings of the 41st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 2023
In many Romance languages, including Italian and Spanish, unmodified nouns can appear without a d... more In many Romance languages, including Italian and Spanish, unmodified nouns can appear without a determiner in postverbal but not preverbal position (Suñer 1982, Contreras 1986, Longobardi 1994, Chierchia 1998). It has been claimed that such arguments are introduced by a phonologically null determiner that must be lexically governed, or c-commanded by a lexical head like V or P (Contreras 1986, Longobardi 1994). Two aspects of Spanish present issues for this analysis, neither of which has been addressed in the literature on bare nouns: proper names do not undergo N-to-D raising, and the plural form of the indefinite article ("unos/unas" 'some') seems to be exempt from Chierchia’s (1998) Blocking Principle. In this paper, I pursue a different approach to the distribution of bare nouns in Spanish, one where the position of the verb establishes the domain of existential closure, following Benedicto (1998), and where mass versus count behavior results from the absence or presence of NumP in the structure, following Borer (2005a). I propose that certain indefinite determiners presuppose a cardinality of one on the NumP that they select and show that definite determiners give rise to a systematic ambiguity between mass and count interpretation. For example, "el pato" 'the duck' could denote an atomic individual or a totality of duck "stuff" in a given context. I attribute the ambiguity of "el pato" to the lack of NumP in its structure and to the semantics of the maximality operator, a component of all definite determiners.
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NELS 52: Proceedings of the fifty-second annual meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, volume two, 2022
This paper contributes to the debate regarding the semantic type of singular referential names. A... more This paper contributes to the debate regarding the semantic type of singular referential names. According to one view, known as referentialism, names rigidly designate individuals (Kripke 1972, Abbott 2002, Leckie 2013, Jeshion 2015, Schoubye 2017). According to another view, known as predicativism, names designate properties of individuals (Burge 1973, Geurts 1997, Bach 2002, Elbourne 2005, Matushansky 2008, Fara 2015). Most predicativist accounts claim that bare names in English occur with a phonologically null determiner, a proposal that is based on languages like Greek where names require a determiner in argument position. Novel data from both English and Greek show that names can be nonrigid designators under modal operators ("Aristotle may teach Socrates") and bound variables under quantifiers ("in every set of twins, Helen is a musician"), challenging referentialism. As for rigidity, one possible source of this phenomenon is the proprial article, a name-specific determiner found in Catalan and other languages that may be null in English and homophonous with the definite article in Greek (Ghomeshi and Massam 2009, Muñoz 2019, Izumi and Erickson 2021). While much further research is needed, the data suggest that the proper analysis of names is grounded in predicativism rather than referentialism.
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Proceedings of the 2021 annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association, 2021
Second-language (L2) learners of Spanish often produce errors in verbal morphology. This corpus s... more Second-language (L2) learners of Spanish often produce errors in verbal morphology. This corpus study explores whether L2 speakers tend to substitute default feature values for marked feature values, such as third person for first person and singular for plural. In a novel contribution to the acquisition literature, we consider whether default-for-marked feature value substitutions are modulated by the morphophonological form of third-person singular agreement, which is overt in some tenses (habl-ó.3SG 's/he spoke') but null in others (habla-∅.3SG 's/he speaks'). Overall, our findings suggest that L2 inflectional errors stem from within the morphological component of the grammar and display a sensitivity to featural composition but not necessarily to morphophonological exponence.
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To appear in Proceedings of the 39th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 2021
Two phenomena have yet to be considered in the syntactic literature on names. First, names inflec... more Two phenomena have yet to be considered in the syntactic literature on names. First, names inflect differently than nouns that have the same root, such as "Childs" versus "children" (Kim et al. 1994, Marcus et al. 1995, Pinker 1999, Berent et al. 2002). Second, any individual can bear any name, regardless of the "content" that the name may express or its morphological form (Lyons 1977, Borer 2005, Coates 2006, Idrissi et al. 2008). Inspired by the semantic theory of predicativism, this paper argues that names, like nouns, are property-denoting expressions (Sloat 1969, Burge 1973, Geurts 1997, Thomsen 1997, Elbourne 2005, Matushansky 2008, Ghomeshi & Massam 2009, Fara 2015, Matushansky 2015). Name predicates are proposed to minimally consist of two nominalizers, one that generates the name itself and another that converts it into a predicate. The source of regularization is the second cyclic layer, which disrupts locality between the root and higher functional projections (Arad 2003, Embick & Marantz 2008, Embick 2010). Further evidence for two nominalizers is found in languages with grammatical gender, where names that are feminine or masculine in form can be borne by any individual. The lower nominalizer hosts the grammatical gender of the name, and the higher nominalizer is valued with the natural gender of its bearer.
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Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 2021
The terms "common noun" and "proper name" encode two dichotomies that are often conflated. This p... more The terms "common noun" and "proper name" encode two dichotomies that are often conflated. This paper explores the possibility of the other combinations—"common name" and "proper noun"—and concludes that both exist on the basis of their morphosyntactic behavior. In support of common names, inflectional regularization is determined to result from a "name" layer in the structure, meaning that common nouns that regularize are, in fact, common names ("computer mouses", "tailor’s gooses"). In support of proper nouns, there are bare singular count nouns in English that receive definite interpretations and seem to be licensed as arguments by the same null determiner as proper names ("I left town", "she works at home"). Not only does a four-way distinction between nouns, names, proper nouns, and proper names achieve greater empirical coverage, but it also captures the independent morphosyntactic effects of [PROPER] and [NAME] as features on D and N, respectively.
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Proceedings of the 2020 annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association, 2020
This paper examines two issues related to the inflection of derived nouns: proper nouns do not ne... more This paper examines two issues related to the inflection of derived nouns: proper nouns do not necessarily regularize in endocentric contexts ("Wonder Women"), and irregular common nouns may regularize in exocentric contexts ("computer mouses"). These phenomena indicate that exocentricity is the singular cause of regularization, suggesting a uniform analysis of nominal inflection. Within the framework of Distributed Morphology, I explore the possibility of distinct nominalizing heads for endocentric and exocentric nouns and consider the implications of such an approach.
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Papers by Samuel Jambrović