Jason Merchant
Biographic Data
| ID | 3842759 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jason Merchant |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jason |
| FAMILY NAME | Merchant |
| SIGNATURE | MERCHANT J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 220 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Roots don’t select, categorial heads do: Lexical-selection of PPs may vary by category
The vast majority of roots in English show uniform selectional properties across their various instantiations in verbs, nouns, or adjectives: rely V \textit{rely}_{\textrm{V}} on , reliance N _{\textrm{N}} on , reliant A _{\textrm{A}} on . This paper reports a new discovery: there are more than a hundred roots that display nonuniform selectional behavior. Their selectional class depends on whether the root is realized as a verb, a noun, or an adj…
The morphosyntax of the periphrastic future under negation in Cypriot Greek
In Cypriot Greek, the negated future is marked by the element tha , which appears instead of the expected present tense copula and a selected subordinating element. This paper documents the distribution of this item for the first time, and presents an analysis in Distributed Morphology that analyzes tha as a portmanteau morpheme realizing two heads in the context of negation. This analysis requires that spans (or targets of Fusion) can include a …
The Dynamics of Ellipsis
An Embarrassment of Riches? Cutting Up the Elliptical Pie
How Much Context Is Enough? Two Cases of Span-Conditioned Stem Allomorphy
Greek voice and aspect jointly condition verbal stem allomorphy, including suppletion. Negation and tense in English do likewise. These cases show that stem allomorphy cannot be restricted to cases where the conditioning element is structurally adjacent to the element that displays allomorphic variation. But neither is contextual allomorphy entirely free from locality constraints: allomorphy can be conditioned only by a span, a contiguous set of …
On ineffable predicates: Bilingual Greek-English code-switching under ellipsis
Gender mismatches under nominal ellipsis
Voice and Ellipsis
Elided VPs and their antecedent VPs can mismatch in voice, with passive VPs being elided under apparent identity with active antecedent VPs, and vice versa. Such voice mismatches are not allowed in any other kind of ellipsis, such as sluicing and other clausal ellipses. These latter facts appear to indicate that the identity relation in ellipsis is sensitive to syntactic form, not merely to semantic form. The VPellipsis facts fall into place if t…
Sluicing: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives
This book is a multi-authored volume of eleven chapters dedicated to the analysis of sluicing in a range of languages from Europe, Asia, and Africa. Sluicing is the term applied to sentences in which the ellipsis of a sequence of words following an embedded wh question word appears to occur, and hearers must somehow recover the content of missing material, as in English: Someone saw her, but I don’t know who .... Elliptical constructions of this …
Sluicing: Cross-Linguistic Perspective
Phrasal and clausal comparatives in Greek and the abstractness of syntax
Greek phrasal and reduced clausal comparatives diff er in that the former, but not the latter, show island sensitivities. In neither case, however, is the material that constitutes the island pronounced. Th is paper argues that such facts can only be captured by positing abstract unpronounced syntactic structures; the comparison between the two kinds of comparatives further shows that reducing the island eff ects to semantic or other ill-formedne…
An Asymmetry in Voice Mismatches in VP-Ellipsis and Pseudogapping
January 01 2008 An Asymmetry in Voice Mismatches in VP-Ellipsis and Pseudogapping In Special Collection: CogNet Jason Merchant Jason Merchant University of Chicago Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Jason Merchant University of Chicago Online ISSN: 1530-9150 Print ISSN: 0024-3892 © 2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2008 Linguistic Inquiry (2008) 39 (1): 169–179. https://doi.or…
Fragments and ellipsis
Swiping in Germanic
Establishing the level of representation or the point in a derivation at which movement takes place has never been a trivial matter, and as such remains an topic of substantial ongoing interest. For overt movement, this question is complicated by the availability in principle of two components in which movement could take place with indistinguishable effects on word order: in the derivation leading to Spell-Out, or in the mapping from Spell-Out t…
The Syntax of Silence: Sluicing, Islands, and the Theory of Ellipsis
A primary goal of contemporary theoretical linguistics is to develop a theory of the correspondence between sound (or gesture) and meaning. This sound-meaning correspondence breaks down completely in the case of ellipsis, and yet various forms of ellipsis are pervasive in natural language: words and phrases which should be in the linguistic signal go missing. How this should be possible is the focus of Jason Merchant's investigation. He focuses o…
Islands and LF-movement in Greek sluicing
This paper investigates the interaction of island insensitivities and form-identity effects in sluicing, and examines the consequences of these for the architecture of ellipsis resolution. On the basis of a number of novel facts from Greek, it is argued that current approaches, both PF-deletion and LF-copying, are inadequate. The present data instead motivate a revised LF-copying approach which relies on the scoping movement of indefinites at LF …
Attributive Comparative Deletion
Economy, The Copy Theory, and Antecedent-Contained Deletion
July 01 2000 Economy, The Copy Theory, and Antecedent-Contained Deletion In Special Collection: CogNet Jason Merchant Jason Merchant Northwestern University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Jason Merchant Northwestern University Online Issn: 1530-9150 Print Issn: 0024-3892 © 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2000 Linguistic Inquiry (2000) 31 (3): 566–575. https://doi.org/10.…
Antecedents-contained Deletion in Negative Polarity Items
Readings in the Philosophy of Language
Part 1 Language and meaning: the thought - a logical inquiry, Gottlob Frege excerpt from The Blue and Brown Books, Ludwig Wittgenstein translation and meaning, Willard Van Orman Quine Utterer's meaning and intentions, Paul Grice truth and meaning, Donald Davidson what model-theoretic semantics cannot do, Ernest Lepore what is a theory of meaning? Nichael Dummett elucidations of meaning, James Higginbotham knowledge of meaning and theories of trut…
Reverse sluicing in English and Greek
In this article we identify and analyze a novel elliptical phenomenon in English and Greek which we dub reverse sluicing. We show that a complete account of reverse sluicing follows from an extension of the analysis of sluicing proposed in Chung, Ladusaw, and McCloskey (1995). Chung et al.'s operation of IP-copy, which reconstructs a missing IP at LF, supplemented by the standard Heimian analysis of indefinites, can successfully capture the facts…
'Pseudosluicing': Elliptical clefts in Japanese and English
This paper examines apparent cases of sluicing in Japanese and concludes that these do not instantiate sluicing as found in English, but rather a kind of reduced cleft in which the pivot is a wh-phrase. An attempt to extend this analysis to English sluicing is shown to encounter severe difficulties.Finally, the structure of the cleft in English is considered, where it is argued that the cleft is a CP complement to be with the pivot adjoined; a nu…
Voice and Ellipsis
Elided VPs and their antecedent VPs can mismatch in voice, with passive VPs being elided under apparent identity with active antecedent VPs, and vice versa. Such voice mismatches are not allowed in any other kind of ellipsis, such as sluicing and other clausal ellipses. These latter facts appear to indicate that the identity relation in ellipsis is sensitive to syntactic form, not merely to semantic form. The VPellipsis facts fall into place if t…
How Much Context Is Enough? Two Cases of Span-Conditioned Stem Allomorphy
Greek voice and aspect jointly condition verbal stem allomorphy, including suppletion. Negation and tense in English do likewise. These cases show that stem allomorphy cannot be restricted to cases where the conditioning element is structurally adjacent to the element that displays allomorphic variation. But neither is contextual allomorphy entirely free from locality constraints: allomorphy can be conditioned only by a span, a contiguous set of …
An Asymmetry in Voice Mismatches in VP-Ellipsis and Pseudogapping
January 01 2008 An Asymmetry in Voice Mismatches in VP-Ellipsis and Pseudogapping In Special Collection: CogNet Jason Merchant Jason Merchant University of Chicago Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Jason Merchant University of Chicago Online ISSN: 1530-9150 Print ISSN: 0024-3892 © 2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2008 Linguistic Inquiry (2008) 39 (1): 169–179. https://doi.or…
Attributive Comparative Deletion
Gender mismatches under nominal ellipsis
Phrasal and clausal comparatives in Greek and the abstractness of syntax
Greek phrasal and reduced clausal comparatives diff er in that the former, but not the latter, show island sensitivities. In neither case, however, is the material that constitutes the island pronounced. Th is paper argues that such facts can only be captured by positing abstract unpronounced syntactic structures; the comparison between the two kinds of comparatives further shows that reducing the island eff ects to semantic or other ill-formedne…
Economy, The Copy Theory, and Antecedent-Contained Deletion
July 01 2000 Economy, The Copy Theory, and Antecedent-Contained Deletion In Special Collection: CogNet Jason Merchant Jason Merchant Northwestern University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Jason Merchant Northwestern University Online Issn: 1530-9150 Print Issn: 0024-3892 © 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2000 Linguistic Inquiry (2000) 31 (3): 566–575. https://doi.org/10.…
Antecedents-contained Deletion in Negative Polarity Items
On ineffable predicates: Bilingual Greek-English code-switching under ellipsis
Islands and LF-movement in Greek sluicing
This paper investigates the interaction of island insensitivities and form-identity effects in sluicing, and examines the consequences of these for the architecture of ellipsis resolution. On the basis of a number of novel facts from Greek, it is argued that current approaches, both PF-deletion and LF-copying, are inadequate. The present data instead motivate a revised LF-copying approach which relies on the scoping movement of indefinites at LF …
The morphosyntax of the periphrastic future under negation in Cypriot Greek
In Cypriot Greek, the negated future is marked by the element tha , which appears instead of the expected present tense copula and a selected subordinating element. This paper documents the distribution of this item for the first time, and presents an analysis in Distributed Morphology that analyzes tha as a portmanteau morpheme realizing two heads in the context of negation. This analysis requires that spans (or targets of Fusion) can include a …
Reverse sluicing in English and Greek
In this article we identify and analyze a novel elliptical phenomenon in English and Greek which we dub reverse sluicing. We show that a complete account of reverse sluicing follows from an extension of the analysis of sluicing proposed in Chung, Ladusaw, and McCloskey (1995). Chung et al.'s operation of IP-copy, which reconstructs a missing IP at LF, supplemented by the standard Heimian analysis of indefinites, can successfully capture the facts…
'Pseudosluicing': Elliptical clefts in Japanese and English
This paper examines apparent cases of sluicing in Japanese and concludes that these do not instantiate sluicing as found in English, but rather a kind of reduced cleft in which the pivot is a wh-phrase. An attempt to extend this analysis to English sluicing is shown to encounter severe difficulties.Finally, the structure of the cleft in English is considered, where it is argued that the cleft is a CP complement to be with the pivot adjoined; a nu…
Readings in the Philosophy of Language
Part 1 Language and meaning: the thought - a logical inquiry, Gottlob Frege excerpt from The Blue and Brown Books, Ludwig Wittgenstein translation and meaning, Willard Van Orman Quine Utterer's meaning and intentions, Paul Grice truth and meaning, Donald Davidson what model-theoretic semantics cannot do, Ernest Lepore what is a theory of meaning? Nichael Dummett elucidations of meaning, James Higginbotham knowledge of meaning and theories of trut…
Islands and LF-movement in Greek sluicing
This paper investigates the interaction of island insensitivities and form-identity effects in sluicing, and examines the consequences of these for the architecture of ellipsis resolution. On the basis of a number of novel facts from Greek, it is argued that current approaches, both PF-deletion and LF-copying, are inadequate. The present data instead motivate a revised LF-copying approach which relies on the scoping movement of indefinites at LF …
Attributive Comparative Deletion
Economy, The Copy Theory, and Antecedent-Contained Deletion
July 01 2000 Economy, The Copy Theory, and Antecedent-Contained Deletion In Special Collection: CogNet Jason Merchant Jason Merchant Northwestern University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Jason Merchant Northwestern University Online Issn: 1530-9150 Print Issn: 0024-3892 © 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2000 Linguistic Inquiry (2000) 31 (3): 566–575. https://doi.org/10.…
Antecedents-contained Deletion in Negative Polarity Items
The Syntax of Silence: Sluicing, Islands, and the Theory of Ellipsis
A primary goal of contemporary theoretical linguistics is to develop a theory of the correspondence between sound (or gesture) and meaning. This sound-meaning correspondence breaks down completely in the case of ellipsis, and yet various forms of ellipsis are pervasive in natural language: words and phrases which should be in the linguistic signal go missing. How this should be possible is the focus of Jason Merchant's investigation. He focuses o…
Swiping in Germanic
Establishing the level of representation or the point in a derivation at which movement takes place has never been a trivial matter, and as such remains an topic of substantial ongoing interest. For overt movement, this question is complicated by the availability in principle of two components in which movement could take place with indistinguishable effects on word order: in the derivation leading to Spell-Out, or in the mapping from Spell-Out t…
Fragments and ellipsis
An Asymmetry in Voice Mismatches in VP-Ellipsis and Pseudogapping
January 01 2008 An Asymmetry in Voice Mismatches in VP-Ellipsis and Pseudogapping In Special Collection: CogNet Jason Merchant Jason Merchant University of Chicago Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Jason Merchant University of Chicago Online ISSN: 1530-9150 Print ISSN: 0024-3892 © 2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2008 Linguistic Inquiry (2008) 39 (1): 169–179. https://doi.or…
Phrasal and clausal comparatives in Greek and the abstractness of syntax
Greek phrasal and reduced clausal comparatives diff er in that the former, but not the latter, show island sensitivities. In neither case, however, is the material that constitutes the island pronounced. Th is paper argues that such facts can only be captured by positing abstract unpronounced syntactic structures; the comparison between the two kinds of comparatives further shows that reducing the island eff ects to semantic or other ill-formedne…
Sluicing: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives
This book is a multi-authored volume of eleven chapters dedicated to the analysis of sluicing in a range of languages from Europe, Asia, and Africa. Sluicing is the term applied to sentences in which the ellipsis of a sequence of words following an embedded wh question word appears to occur, and hearers must somehow recover the content of missing material, as in English: Someone saw her, but I don’t know who .... Elliptical constructions of this …
Sluicing: Cross-Linguistic Perspective
Voice and Ellipsis
Elided VPs and their antecedent VPs can mismatch in voice, with passive VPs being elided under apparent identity with active antecedent VPs, and vice versa. Such voice mismatches are not allowed in any other kind of ellipsis, such as sluicing and other clausal ellipses. These latter facts appear to indicate that the identity relation in ellipsis is sensitive to syntactic form, not merely to semantic form. The VPellipsis facts fall into place if t…
Gender mismatches under nominal ellipsis
How Much Context Is Enough? Two Cases of Span-Conditioned Stem Allomorphy
Greek voice and aspect jointly condition verbal stem allomorphy, including suppletion. Negation and tense in English do likewise. These cases show that stem allomorphy cannot be restricted to cases where the conditioning element is structurally adjacent to the element that displays allomorphic variation. But neither is contextual allomorphy entirely free from locality constraints: allomorphy can be conditioned only by a span, a contiguous set of …
On ineffable predicates: Bilingual Greek-English code-switching under ellipsis
The Dynamics of Ellipsis
An Embarrassment of Riches? Cutting Up the Elliptical Pie
The morphosyntax of the periphrastic future under negation in Cypriot Greek
In Cypriot Greek, the negated future is marked by the element tha , which appears instead of the expected present tense copula and a selected subordinating element. This paper documents the distribution of this item for the first time, and presents an analysis in Distributed Morphology that analyzes tha as a portmanteau morpheme realizing two heads in the context of negation. This analysis requires that spans (or targets of Fusion) can include a …
Roots don’t select, categorial heads do: Lexical-selection of PPs may vary by category
The vast majority of roots in English show uniform selectional properties across their various instantiations in verbs, nouns, or adjectives: rely V \textit{rely}_{\textrm{V}} on , reliance N _{\textrm{N}} on , reliant A _{\textrm{A}} on . This paper reports a new discovery: there are more than a hundred roots that display nonuniform selectional behavior. Their selectional class depends on whether the root is realized as a verb, a noun, or an adj…
Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (19 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Linguistics (17 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Natural Language Processing Techniques (8 works) · History (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Syntax (6 works) · Ellipsis (linguistics) (5 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (5 works)