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Syntax

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Doctoral Dissertations

Theses/Dissertations

2023

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

'You' Will Always Have 'Me': A Compositional Theory Of Person, Kaden T. Holladay Nov 2023

'You' Will Always Have 'Me': A Compositional Theory Of Person, Kaden T. Holladay

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the morpho-syntactic makeup of personful expressions
in natural language; special focus is given to referential uses of personal pronouns. The central thesis guiding the inquiry is that utterance contexts, which serve to fix the semantic values of person indexicals, are specifically a kind of centered situation. This treatment of contexts puts restrictions on what kinds of person features are definable, and the resulting inventory of such features (in conjunction with independently-motivated pragmatic constraints on the use of referential expressions) provides a novel explanation for the typology of person systems.


Long(Er) Object Movement In Turkish, Duygu Göksu Nov 2023

Long(Er) Object Movement In Turkish, Duygu Göksu

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on long object movement (LOM), which is a type of A-movement from the embedded object position inside an infinitive to the matrix subject position. In the literature, LOM is usually equated with restructuring. The dissertation demonstrates that LOM is not a uniform phenomenon in Turkish. Verbs that allow LOM fall into two types and exhibit distinct behaviors, with only one type counting as restructuring. The infinitival complements of one class of LOM verbs show dependency on the matrix domain for structural case-checking of an embedded object. These verbs are analyzed as restructuring LOM verbs selecting a reduced-size …