Maziar Toosarvandani
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 215289 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Maziar Toosarvandani |
| NOMBRES | Maziar |
| APELLIDO | Toosarvandani |
| FIRMA | TOOSARVANDANI M |
| AFILIACIONES | University of California, Santa Cruz |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4508-647X |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 24 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 44 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 24 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2004 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Languages Without Tense
Within formal semantics, languages with no exponent of tense, or with optional tense, have begun to be incorporated into the theory of temporality only in the last couple decades. This article traces the development of their study, identifying empirical arguments that arbitrate between competing analyses of tenselessness. How future and past reference is established for root clauses, both in information‐seeking exchanges and in narratives, requir…
The Featural Life of Nominals
We introduce a novel locality violation and its repair in Southeastern Sierra Zapotec: an object pronoun cannot cliticize when the subject is a lexical DP. We develop an account in which pronouns and lexical DPs interact with the same probe because they share featural content. In particular, we suggest that the Person domain extends to include nonpronominal DPs, so that all nominals are specified for a feature we call [δ] (to resonate with DP), w…
Processing of linguistic focus depends on contrastive alternatives
Readers progressed through a sentence in the Maze task (Forster et al., 2009), deciding at each word between a sensical and a non-sensical continuation. Contexts presented before these sentences manipulated whether words were linguistically focused and whether they were given or new (Experiment 1); focused targets were read more slowly even when they were given, and new targets were read slowly in general. This both replicated earlier results in …
The interpretation and grammatical representation of animacy
We are used to thinking about person, number, and gender as features to which the grammar is sensitive. But the place of animacy is less familiar, despite its robust syntactic activity in many languages. I investigate the pronominal system of Southeastern Sierra Zapotec, identifying an interpretive parallel between animacy and person. Third-person plural pronouns, which encode a four-way animacy distinction in the language, exhibit associativity,…
Extending the Person-Case Constraint to Gender
In many languages with clitic or other weak pronouns, a Person-Case Constraint (Perlmutter 1971, Bonet 1991) prohibits certain combinations of these pronouns on the basis of their person features. This article explores the crosslinguistic variation in such constraints, starting with several closely related Zapotec varieties. These restrict combinations of clitics not just on the basis of person, but also on the basis of a finely articulated, larg…
Mono Lake and Environs
Walker River (Schurz, Nevada)
Northern Paiute Texts
This volume of Northern Paiute texts is the result of continued collaborative relationships between members of several Northern Paiute (Western Numic; Uto-Aztecan) speech communities and two linguists who have nearly 30 years of combined experience working on the language. The resulting documentary resource provides varied samples of naturally occurring speech—narratives recorded and analyzed by the editors as part of their own fieldwork as well …
No explanation for the historical present
Discourses in the historical (or narrative) use of the simple present in English prohibitbackshifting, though they allow forward sequencing. Unlike both reference time theories anddiscourse coherence theories of these temporal inferences, we propose that backshifting hasa different source from narrative progression. In particular, we argue that backshifting arisesthrough anaphora to a salient event in the preceding discourse.Keywords: tense, disc…
Quantification in Persian
The Imperfective Semantics of Durative Gemination in Northern Paiute
Like other Numic languages (Uto-Aztecan), Northern Paiute has a morphological process of durative gemination, which conveys some type of aspect. I describe the semantics of durative gemination in Northern Paiute, locating it within a typology of imperfective aspect emerging from the formal semantics literature. Like the imperfective aspect in other languages, durative gemination has an event-in-progress interpretation in addition to a number of o…
Embedding the Antecedent in Gapping
Gapping removes the finite element (T and its host), possibly along with additional material, in the second and subsequent coordinates of a coordination structure, leaving behind two remnants. (The material that has gone missing—in (1), the finite auxiliary had and the main verb ordered—is represented with ∆.)Building on a long tradition of earlier work, Johnson (2009:293) identifies three unique properties that distinguish gapping from superfici…
The temporal interpretation of clause chaining in Northern Paiute
Northern Paiute uses clause chaining to express certain temporal relations between clauses, which are conveyed by temporal subordinators such as after and while in English. Rather than a subordination structure, however, I show that clause chaining in Northern Paiute has an underlying coordination structure. I propose that temporal relations between the clauses in a chain arise, in part, from verbal morphology conveying relative tense. In Norther…
Contrast and the structure of discourse
The semantics of the coordinator but does not fit neatly into the traditional distinction between entailments and conversational implicatures. In its counterexpectational use, but can convey an implication relating its two conjuncts, which Grice (1975) classifies as a conventional implicature because its behavior diverges from both entailments and conversational implicatures. I propose that this meaning component arises from but ’s interaction wi…
General Session and Parasession on Gesture and Language
Two types of deverbal nominalization in Northern Paiute
Why do nominalizations mean what they do? I investigate two deverbal nominalizers in Northern Paiute (Uto-Aztecan, Numic: Western United States), - na and - dɨ , which create nominalizations that describe either an event (like the poss - ing gerund in English) or an individual (like agent nominalizations with - er ). I propose a syntax and semantics for these deverbal nominalizations that account for their interpretive variability. On the syntax …
Corrective but coordinates clauses not always but sometimes
Descent and Diffusion in Language Diversification
The two branches of Western Numic are the Mono and Northern Paiute languages. We argue that this taxonomic structure did not arise as usually assumed in historical linguistics, through increased differentiation brought about by changes internal to each branch, but rather that diffusion between Western and Central Numic played a crucial role in forming the Western Numic family tree. More generally, we suggest that diffusion plays a greater role in…
Mono Lake Northern Paiute
Northern Paiute is a member of the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It is spoken across the Great Basin in the western United States - from Mono Lake in California, on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, through western Nevada and into southeastern Oregon and southwestern Idaho, as well as in a discontinuous region in southeastern Idaho by the Bannock. There are, according to Golla (2011), about 300 first-language speakers of…
A Defective Auxiliary in Danish
In English, auxiliaries form a cohesive category—unlike main verbs, they all raise to T. In Danish, it is not so obvious that auxiliaries form such a unified category. In root clauses, all verbal elements can raise to T (and then to C), while in embedded clauses they always stay in situ. Therefore, determining the position of a verbal element in the extended verbal projection is a challenging task. We examine the Danish verbal element g⊘re ‘do’ t…
Patterns of Nominalization in Numic
I examine deverbal nominalization in the Numic branch of Uto-Aztecan and reconstruct an inventory of nominalizer suffixes for Proto-Numic. While some of the protoforms have been supplanted in the daughter languages, others have not changed at all. I attribute this difference in stability to a distinction between the nomenclative and constructional functions of nominalization. The data for this study, compiled from a survey of dictionaries and gra…
Ellipsis in Farsi Complex Predicates
In this paper, I introduce a novel ellipsis construction from Farsi, v-stranding VPE, in which part of a complex predicate goes missing, leaving behind the light verb. Under an analysis of complex predicates where the light verb is the overt realization of v, this type of ellipsis can be construed as deletion of the complement of v. I give evidence that this phenomenon patterns with English verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) in a number of important resp…
Wh -movement and the syntax of sluicing
Sluicing – the elliptical construction in which all of a constituent question goes missing except for the interrogative phrase – is commonly analyzed as involving movement of the interrogative phrase to Spec-CP followed by deletion of TP (Ross 1969, Merchant 2001). In this paper, I examine how well the movement-plus-deletion analysis extends to Farsi, a wh -in situ language that, surprisingly, has a sluicing construction nearly identical to its E…
Vowel Length in Modern Farsi
Modern Farsi historically possessed an underlying opposition of vowel length that has since largely disappeared in all but open, non-final syllables. At the same time, qualitative differences have arisen between the once identical short and long vowels. Two opposing analyses have been proposed to account for these facts. The “quantity only” analysis posits an underlying opposition of length and derives the qualitative differences by rule, while t…
Two types of deverbal nominalization in Northern Paiute
Why do nominalizations mean what they do? I investigate two deverbal nominalizers in Northern Paiute (Uto-Aztecan, Numic: Western United States), - na and - dɨ , which create nominalizations that describe either an event (like the poss - ing gerund in English) or an individual (like agent nominalizations with - er ). I propose a syntax and semantics for these deverbal nominalizations that account for their interpretive variability. On the syntax …
Ellipsis in Farsi Complex Predicates
In this paper, I introduce a novel ellipsis construction from Farsi, v-stranding VPE, in which part of a complex predicate goes missing, leaving behind the light verb. Under an analysis of complex predicates where the light verb is the overt realization of v, this type of ellipsis can be construed as deletion of the complement of v. I give evidence that this phenomenon patterns with English verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) in a number of important resp…
Wh -movement and the syntax of sluicing
Sluicing – the elliptical construction in which all of a constituent question goes missing except for the interrogative phrase – is commonly analyzed as involving movement of the interrogative phrase to Spec-CP followed by deletion of TP (Ross 1969, Merchant 2001). In this paper, I examine how well the movement-plus-deletion analysis extends to Farsi, a wh -in situ language that, surprisingly, has a sluicing construction nearly identical to its E…
Extending the Person-Case Constraint to Gender
In many languages with clitic or other weak pronouns, a Person-Case Constraint (Perlmutter 1971, Bonet 1991) prohibits certain combinations of these pronouns on the basis of their person features. This article explores the crosslinguistic variation in such constraints, starting with several closely related Zapotec varieties. These restrict combinations of clitics not just on the basis of person, but also on the basis of a finely articulated, larg…
Descent and Diffusion in Language Diversification
The two branches of Western Numic are the Mono and Northern Paiute languages. We argue that this taxonomic structure did not arise as usually assumed in historical linguistics, through increased differentiation brought about by changes internal to each branch, but rather that diffusion between Western and Central Numic played a crucial role in forming the Western Numic family tree. More generally, we suggest that diffusion plays a greater role in…
The temporal interpretation of clause chaining in Northern Paiute
Northern Paiute uses clause chaining to express certain temporal relations between clauses, which are conveyed by temporal subordinators such as after and while in English. Rather than a subordination structure, however, I show that clause chaining in Northern Paiute has an underlying coordination structure. I propose that temporal relations between the clauses in a chain arise, in part, from verbal morphology conveying relative tense. In Norther…
Corrective but coordinates clauses not always but sometimes
Mono Lake Northern Paiute
Northern Paiute is a member of the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It is spoken across the Great Basin in the western United States - from Mono Lake in California, on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, through western Nevada and into southeastern Oregon and southwestern Idaho, as well as in a discontinuous region in southeastern Idaho by the Bannock. There are, according to Golla (2011), about 300 first-language speakers of…
Patterns of Nominalization in Numic
I examine deverbal nominalization in the Numic branch of Uto-Aztecan and reconstruct an inventory of nominalizer suffixes for Proto-Numic. While some of the protoforms have been supplanted in the daughter languages, others have not changed at all. I attribute this difference in stability to a distinction between the nomenclative and constructional functions of nominalization. The data for this study, compiled from a survey of dictionaries and gra…
Vowel Length in Modern Farsi
Modern Farsi historically possessed an underlying opposition of vowel length that has since largely disappeared in all but open, non-final syllables. At the same time, qualitative differences have arisen between the once identical short and long vowels. Two opposing analyses have been proposed to account for these facts. The “quantity only” analysis posits an underlying opposition of length and derives the qualitative differences by rule, while t…
The interpretation and grammatical representation of animacy
We are used to thinking about person, number, and gender as features to which the grammar is sensitive. But the place of animacy is less familiar, despite its robust syntactic activity in many languages. I investigate the pronominal system of Southeastern Sierra Zapotec, identifying an interpretive parallel between animacy and person. Third-person plural pronouns, which encode a four-way animacy distinction in the language, exhibit associativity,…
Embedding the Antecedent in Gapping
Gapping removes the finite element (T and its host), possibly along with additional material, in the second and subsequent coordinates of a coordination structure, leaving behind two remnants. (The material that has gone missing—in (1), the finite auxiliary had and the main verb ordered—is represented with ∆.)Building on a long tradition of earlier work, Johnson (2009:293) identifies three unique properties that distinguish gapping from superfici…
Vowel Length in Modern Farsi
Modern Farsi historically possessed an underlying opposition of vowel length that has since largely disappeared in all but open, non-final syllables. At the same time, qualitative differences have arisen between the once identical short and long vowels. Two opposing analyses have been proposed to account for these facts. The “quantity only” analysis posits an underlying opposition of length and derives the qualitative differences by rule, while t…
Wh -movement and the syntax of sluicing
Sluicing – the elliptical construction in which all of a constituent question goes missing except for the interrogative phrase – is commonly analyzed as involving movement of the interrogative phrase to Spec-CP followed by deletion of TP (Ross 1969, Merchant 2001). In this paper, I examine how well the movement-plus-deletion analysis extends to Farsi, a wh -in situ language that, surprisingly, has a sluicing construction nearly identical to its E…
Ellipsis in Farsi Complex Predicates
In this paper, I introduce a novel ellipsis construction from Farsi, v-stranding VPE, in which part of a complex predicate goes missing, leaving behind the light verb. Under an analysis of complex predicates where the light verb is the overt realization of v, this type of ellipsis can be construed as deletion of the complement of v. I give evidence that this phenomenon patterns with English verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) in a number of important resp…
Patterns of Nominalization in Numic
I examine deverbal nominalization in the Numic branch of Uto-Aztecan and reconstruct an inventory of nominalizer suffixes for Proto-Numic. While some of the protoforms have been supplanted in the daughter languages, others have not changed at all. I attribute this difference in stability to a distinction between the nomenclative and constructional functions of nominalization. The data for this study, compiled from a survey of dictionaries and gra…
A Defective Auxiliary in Danish
In English, auxiliaries form a cohesive category—unlike main verbs, they all raise to T. In Danish, it is not so obvious that auxiliaries form such a unified category. In root clauses, all verbal elements can raise to T (and then to C), while in embedded clauses they always stay in situ. Therefore, determining the position of a verbal element in the extended verbal projection is a challenging task. We examine the Danish verbal element g⊘re ‘do’ t…
Mono Lake Northern Paiute
Northern Paiute is a member of the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It is spoken across the Great Basin in the western United States - from Mono Lake in California, on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, through western Nevada and into southeastern Oregon and southwestern Idaho, as well as in a discontinuous region in southeastern Idaho by the Bannock. There are, according to Golla (2011), about 300 first-language speakers of…
Corrective but coordinates clauses not always but sometimes
Descent and Diffusion in Language Diversification
The two branches of Western Numic are the Mono and Northern Paiute languages. We argue that this taxonomic structure did not arise as usually assumed in historical linguistics, through increased differentiation brought about by changes internal to each branch, but rather that diffusion between Western and Central Numic played a crucial role in forming the Western Numic family tree. More generally, we suggest that diffusion plays a greater role in…
Contrast and the structure of discourse
The semantics of the coordinator but does not fit neatly into the traditional distinction between entailments and conversational implicatures. In its counterexpectational use, but can convey an implication relating its two conjuncts, which Grice (1975) classifies as a conventional implicature because its behavior diverges from both entailments and conversational implicatures. I propose that this meaning component arises from but ’s interaction wi…
General Session and Parasession on Gesture and Language
Two types of deverbal nominalization in Northern Paiute
Why do nominalizations mean what they do? I investigate two deverbal nominalizers in Northern Paiute (Uto-Aztecan, Numic: Western United States), - na and - dɨ , which create nominalizations that describe either an event (like the poss - ing gerund in English) or an individual (like agent nominalizations with - er ). I propose a syntax and semantics for these deverbal nominalizations that account for their interpretive variability. On the syntax …
Embedding the Antecedent in Gapping
Gapping removes the finite element (T and its host), possibly along with additional material, in the second and subsequent coordinates of a coordination structure, leaving behind two remnants. (The material that has gone missing—in (1), the finite auxiliary had and the main verb ordered—is represented with ∆.)Building on a long tradition of earlier work, Johnson (2009:293) identifies three unique properties that distinguish gapping from superfici…
The temporal interpretation of clause chaining in Northern Paiute
Northern Paiute uses clause chaining to express certain temporal relations between clauses, which are conveyed by temporal subordinators such as after and while in English. Rather than a subordination structure, however, I show that clause chaining in Northern Paiute has an underlying coordination structure. I propose that temporal relations between the clauses in a chain arise, in part, from verbal morphology conveying relative tense. In Norther…
Quantification in Persian
The Imperfective Semantics of Durative Gemination in Northern Paiute
Like other Numic languages (Uto-Aztecan), Northern Paiute has a morphological process of durative gemination, which conveys some type of aspect. I describe the semantics of durative gemination in Northern Paiute, locating it within a typology of imperfective aspect emerging from the formal semantics literature. Like the imperfective aspect in other languages, durative gemination has an event-in-progress interpretation in addition to a number of o…
No explanation for the historical present
Discourses in the historical (or narrative) use of the simple present in English prohibitbackshifting, though they allow forward sequencing. Unlike both reference time theories anddiscourse coherence theories of these temporal inferences, we propose that backshifting hasa different source from narrative progression. In particular, we argue that backshifting arisesthrough anaphora to a salient event in the preceding discourse.Keywords: tense, disc…
Mono Lake and Environs
Walker River (Schurz, Nevada)
Northern Paiute Texts
This volume of Northern Paiute texts is the result of continued collaborative relationships between members of several Northern Paiute (Western Numic; Uto-Aztecan) speech communities and two linguists who have nearly 30 years of combined experience working on the language. The resulting documentary resource provides varied samples of naturally occurring speech—narratives recorded and analyzed by the editors as part of their own fieldwork as well …
Extending the Person-Case Constraint to Gender
In many languages with clitic or other weak pronouns, a Person-Case Constraint (Perlmutter 1971, Bonet 1991) prohibits certain combinations of these pronouns on the basis of their person features. This article explores the crosslinguistic variation in such constraints, starting with several closely related Zapotec varieties. These restrict combinations of clitics not just on the basis of person, but also on the basis of a finely articulated, larg…
Processing of linguistic focus depends on contrastive alternatives
Readers progressed through a sentence in the Maze task (Forster et al., 2009), deciding at each word between a sensical and a non-sensical continuation. Contexts presented before these sentences manipulated whether words were linguistically focused and whether they were given or new (Experiment 1); focused targets were read more slowly even when they were given, and new targets were read slowly in general. This both replicated earlier results in …
The interpretation and grammatical representation of animacy
We are used to thinking about person, number, and gender as features to which the grammar is sensitive. But the place of animacy is less familiar, despite its robust syntactic activity in many languages. I investigate the pronominal system of Southeastern Sierra Zapotec, identifying an interpretive parallel between animacy and person. Third-person plural pronouns, which encode a four-way animacy distinction in the language, exhibit associativity,…
The Featural Life of Nominals
We introduce a novel locality violation and its repair in Southeastern Sierra Zapotec: an object pronoun cannot cliticize when the subject is a lexical DP. We develop an account in which pronouns and lexical DPs interact with the same probe because they share featural content. In particular, we suggest that the Person domain extends to include nonpronominal DPs, so that all nominals are specified for a feature we call [δ] (to resonate with DP), w…
Languages Without Tense
Within formal semantics, languages with no exponent of tense, or with optional tense, have begun to be incorporated into the theory of temporality only in the last couple decades. This article traces the development of their study, identifying empirical arguments that arbitrate between competing analyses of tenselessness. How future and past reference is established for root clauses, both in information‐seeking exchanges and in narratives, requir…
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