Klaus Abels
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 1498438 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Klaus Abels |
| PRENOMES | Klaus |
| SOBRENOME | Abels |
| ASSINATURA | ABELS K |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7663-0242 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 15 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 92 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 15 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2006 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Linear asymmetries and incremental parsing
Linear asymmetries pose a challenge for syntactic theory but may yield to an explanation in terms of sentence parsing, given the inherent left-to-right nature of this process. We therefore explore the option of a parsing-based account of Greenberg’s (1963) universal 20. Universal 20 describes a word-order asymmetry in noun phrases that can be captured if movement of the noun is exclusively leftward (Cinque 2005 and Abels & Neeleman 2012). Our acc…
On the Syntax of Multiple Sluicing and What It Tells Us aboutWh-Scope Taking
Across many languages, multiple sluicing obeys a clausemate constraint. This can be understood on the empirically well-supported assumption that covert phrasal wh-movement is clause-bounded and subject to Superiority. We provide independent evidence for syntactic structure at the ellipsis site and for locality constraints on movement operations within the ellipsis site. The fact that the distribution of multiple sluicing is substantially narrower…
On the distribution of scope ambiguities in Polish
Polish, an SVO language with relatively free constituent order, has a scope extending mechanism of quantifier raising that shows remarkable similarities to quantifier raising in English. The paper shows experimentally that SVO and OVS structures in Polish are scopally ambiguous. Furthermore, ditransitive structures are scopally rigid when the indirect object precedes the direct object but ambiguous when the direct object precedes the indirect obj…
Experimental evidence for the influence of structure and meaning on linear order in the noun phrase
Recent work has used artificial language experiments to argue that hierarchical representations drive learners’ expectations about word order in complex noun phrases like these two green cars (Culbertson & Adger 2014; Martin, Ratitamkul, et al. 2019). When trained on a novel language in which individual modifiers come after the Noun, English speakers overwhelmingly assume that multiple nominal modifiers should be ordered such that Adjectives come…
Resumption as a sluicing source in Saudi Arabic
This paper reports the results of three acceptability judgment experiments on Saudi Arabic elliptical questions (sluicing) with prepositional phrases. We show that in standard cases of merger type sluicing and contrastive sluicing there is no penalty for leaving out the preposition. Under an analysis of sluicing with syntactic identity between antecedent and ellipsis site, such examples require preposition stranding in the ellipsis site. We call …
Cross-linguistic evidence for cognitive universals in the noun phrase
Noun phrase word order varies cross-linguistically, however, two distributional asymmetries have attracted substantial attention. First, the most common orders place adjectives closest to the noun, then numerals, then demonstratives (e.g., N-Adj-Num-Dem). Second, exceptions to this are restricted to post-nominal position (e.g., N-Dem-Num-Adj, but not, for instance, Adj-Num-Dem-N). These observations have been argued to reflect constraints on cogn…
On “sluicing” with apparent massive pied-piping
This paper provides the first detailed description of a type of elliptical wh-question first noted in a footnote in Ross’s seminal paper on sluicing. Under certain, very restricted circumstances, sluicing appears to be able to tolerate wh-phrases with massive pied-piping. I propose to analyze this pattern in terms of (recursive) contrastive left-dislocation accompanied by clausal ellipsis. While it has long been known that contrastive left-disloc…
Phases
The minimalist notion of a phase has often been investigated with a view to the interfaces. 'Phases' provides a strictly syntax-internal perspective.If phases are fundamental, they should provide the grounds for a unifying treatment of different syntactic phenomena. Concentrating on displacement, the book argues that this expectation is borne out: there is an empirical clustering of properties, whereby the phrases that undergo pied-piping are als…
Linear Asymmetries and the LCA
Kayne (1994)was instrumental in putting linear asymmetries on the generative research agenda. His Linear Correspondence Axiom is seen as a restrictive, conceptually attractive proposal supported by a wealth of empirical evidence. In this paper, we take issue with this assessment. (i) We show that for every structure that violates the LCA, there is an LCA-compatible counterpart, including rightward movement structures and structures with rightward…
The Italian Left Periphery
In this article, I discuss the interaction of locality phenomena with the left periphery in Italian as elaborated in Rizzi 1997, 2001a, 2004b. It turns out that long-distance crossing possibilities fully predict the local orderings entailed by Rizzi's left-peripheral template. In fact, both descriptive gains (in terms of topic positions) and explanatory gains (regarding the position and behavior of topics and of Rizzi's (2001a) Int) can be made i…
Nihilism masquerading as progress
A unified approach to split scope
The focus marker in Kîîtharaka
Towards a restrictive theory of (remnant) movement
A restrictive theory of syntax needs both a restrictive theory of structures and a restrictive theory of operations.Much recent effort has gone into narrowing the class of allowable structures and a lot has been learned. This paper proposes that operations are linearly ordered on an essentially constituent by constituent basis. A universal constraint on the ordering of operations in language is proposed whose function is to fix the order in which…
Focus particle in Kîîtharaka
In this paper we argue that Kîîıtharaka in situ and ex situ object focus constructions are exhaustive. Sentences with a preverbal focus marker are argued to be nonexhaustive. Our conclusions are based on felicity in mention-some contexts, simple and multiple questions and entailment relations
Linear Asymmetries and the LCA
Kayne (1994)was instrumental in putting linear asymmetries on the generative research agenda. His Linear Correspondence Axiom is seen as a restrictive, conceptually attractive proposal supported by a wealth of empirical evidence. In this paper, we take issue with this assessment. (i) We show that for every structure that violates the LCA, there is an LCA-compatible counterpart, including rightward movement structures and structures with rightward…
The Italian Left Periphery
In this article, I discuss the interaction of locality phenomena with the left periphery in Italian as elaborated in Rizzi 1997, 2001a, 2004b. It turns out that long-distance crossing possibilities fully predict the local orderings entailed by Rizzi's left-peripheral template. In fact, both descriptive gains (in terms of topic positions) and explanatory gains (regarding the position and behavior of topics and of Rizzi's (2001a) Int) can be made i…
The focus marker in Kîîtharaka
A unified approach to split scope
On “sluicing” with apparent massive pied-piping
This paper provides the first detailed description of a type of elliptical wh-question first noted in a footnote in Ross’s seminal paper on sluicing. Under certain, very restricted circumstances, sluicing appears to be able to tolerate wh-phrases with massive pied-piping. I propose to analyze this pattern in terms of (recursive) contrastive left-dislocation accompanied by clausal ellipsis. While it has long been known that contrastive left-disloc…
On the Syntax of Multiple Sluicing and What It Tells Us aboutWh-Scope Taking
Across many languages, multiple sluicing obeys a clausemate constraint. This can be understood on the empirically well-supported assumption that covert phrasal wh-movement is clause-bounded and subject to Superiority. We provide independent evidence for syntactic structure at the ellipsis site and for locality constraints on movement operations within the ellipsis site. The fact that the distribution of multiple sluicing is substantially narrower…
Nihilism masquerading as progress
Focus particle in Kîîtharaka
In this paper we argue that Kîîıtharaka in situ and ex situ object focus constructions are exhaustive. Sentences with a preverbal focus marker are argued to be nonexhaustive. Our conclusions are based on felicity in mention-some contexts, simple and multiple questions and entailment relations
Towards a restrictive theory of (remnant) movement
A restrictive theory of syntax needs both a restrictive theory of structures and a restrictive theory of operations.Much recent effort has gone into narrowing the class of allowable structures and a lot has been learned. This paper proposes that operations are linearly ordered on an essentially constituent by constituent basis. A universal constraint on the ordering of operations in language is proposed whose function is to fix the order in which…
The focus marker in Kîîtharaka
Nihilism masquerading as progress
A unified approach to split scope
Phases
The minimalist notion of a phase has often been investigated with a view to the interfaces. 'Phases' provides a strictly syntax-internal perspective.If phases are fundamental, they should provide the grounds for a unifying treatment of different syntactic phenomena. Concentrating on displacement, the book argues that this expectation is borne out: there is an empirical clustering of properties, whereby the phrases that undergo pied-piping are als…
Linear Asymmetries and the LCA
Kayne (1994)was instrumental in putting linear asymmetries on the generative research agenda. His Linear Correspondence Axiom is seen as a restrictive, conceptually attractive proposal supported by a wealth of empirical evidence. In this paper, we take issue with this assessment. (i) We show that for every structure that violates the LCA, there is an LCA-compatible counterpart, including rightward movement structures and structures with rightward…
The Italian Left Periphery
In this article, I discuss the interaction of locality phenomena with the left periphery in Italian as elaborated in Rizzi 1997, 2001a, 2004b. It turns out that long-distance crossing possibilities fully predict the local orderings entailed by Rizzi's left-peripheral template. In fact, both descriptive gains (in terms of topic positions) and explanatory gains (regarding the position and behavior of topics and of Rizzi's (2001a) Int) can be made i…
Cross-linguistic evidence for cognitive universals in the noun phrase
Noun phrase word order varies cross-linguistically, however, two distributional asymmetries have attracted substantial attention. First, the most common orders place adjectives closest to the noun, then numerals, then demonstratives (e.g., N-Adj-Num-Dem). Second, exceptions to this are restricted to post-nominal position (e.g., N-Dem-Num-Adj, but not, for instance, Adj-Num-Dem-N). These observations have been argued to reflect constraints on cogn…
On “sluicing” with apparent massive pied-piping
This paper provides the first detailed description of a type of elliptical wh-question first noted in a footnote in Ross’s seminal paper on sluicing. Under certain, very restricted circumstances, sluicing appears to be able to tolerate wh-phrases with massive pied-piping. I propose to analyze this pattern in terms of (recursive) contrastive left-dislocation accompanied by clausal ellipsis. While it has long been known that contrastive left-disloc…
Experimental evidence for the influence of structure and meaning on linear order in the noun phrase
Recent work has used artificial language experiments to argue that hierarchical representations drive learners’ expectations about word order in complex noun phrases like these two green cars (Culbertson & Adger 2014; Martin, Ratitamkul, et al. 2019). When trained on a novel language in which individual modifiers come after the Noun, English speakers overwhelmingly assume that multiple nominal modifiers should be ordered such that Adjectives come…
Resumption as a sluicing source in Saudi Arabic
This paper reports the results of three acceptability judgment experiments on Saudi Arabic elliptical questions (sluicing) with prepositional phrases. We show that in standard cases of merger type sluicing and contrastive sluicing there is no penalty for leaving out the preposition. Under an analysis of sluicing with syntactic identity between antecedent and ellipsis site, such examples require preposition stranding in the ellipsis site. We call …
On the distribution of scope ambiguities in Polish
Polish, an SVO language with relatively free constituent order, has a scope extending mechanism of quantifier raising that shows remarkable similarities to quantifier raising in English. The paper shows experimentally that SVO and OVS structures in Polish are scopally ambiguous. Furthermore, ditransitive structures are scopally rigid when the indirect object precedes the direct object but ambiguous when the direct object precedes the indirect obj…
On the Syntax of Multiple Sluicing and What It Tells Us aboutWh-Scope Taking
Across many languages, multiple sluicing obeys a clausemate constraint. This can be understood on the empirically well-supported assumption that covert phrasal wh-movement is clause-bounded and subject to Superiority. We provide independent evidence for syntactic structure at the ellipsis site and for locality constraints on movement operations within the ellipsis site. The fact that the distribution of multiple sluicing is substantially narrower…
Linear asymmetries and incremental parsing
Linear asymmetries pose a challenge for syntactic theory but may yield to an explanation in terms of sentence parsing, given the inherent left-to-right nature of this process. We therefore explore the option of a parsing-based account of Greenberg’s (1963) universal 20. Universal 20 describes a word-order asymmetry in noun phrases that can be captured if movement of the noun is exclusively leftward (Cinque 2005 and Abels & Neeleman 2012). Our acc…
Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (14 obras) · Computer Science (11 obras) · Linguistics (11 obras) · Philosophy (11 obras) · Mathematics (9 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (8 obras) · Natural language processing (7 obras) · Natural Language Processing Techniques (5 obras) · Noun phrase (5 obras) · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis (4 obras)