Mark C Baker
Biographic Data
| ID | 408641 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mark C Baker |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mark C |
| FAMILY NAME | Baker |
| SIGNATURE | BAKER M C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9834-6864 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 394 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Control theory and the relationship between logophoric pronouns and logophoric uses of anaphors
On Agree without agreement as a source of reflexive voice constructions
Switch-reference has recently been argued to be the result of clausal functional heads entering into Agree with two nearby noun phrases, creating pointers to those noun phrases but not actually copying their morphosyntactic features. Instead, the semantic component interprets the pointers as referential dependency holding between pointed-to noun phrases. This article applies this analysis to reflexive voice constructions in which a feature-invari…
Person and honorification: Features and interactions in Magahi
The Magahi language is rich in honorification morphology: it has three versions of ‘you’ (nonhonorific, honorific, and high honorific) and makes honorific distinctions for third person nominals as well as second person nominals. This work uses these empirical riches to develop a formal syntactic theory of honorific marking. It argues that Magahi’s honorific distinctions can be decomposed into two binary features, [+/–HON] and [+/–HIGH]. These fea…
Configurationality and polysynthesis
Possession and nominalization in Dan: Evidence for a general theory of categories
Dan, a Mandean language of the Ivory Coast, marks the alienable possessors of simple nonrelational nouns differently from the inalienable possessors of relational nouns: only the former occur with the particle ɓa. This difference also shows up in nominalizations. When a verb is nominalized, its theme argument is expressed like the possessor of a relational noun, without ɓa, whereas when an adjective is nominalized, its theme argument is expressed…
Agree without Agreement: Switch-reference and reflexive voice in two Panoan languages
Reply to the Reviews of Case: Its Principles and Parameters
Preview this article: Reply to the Reviews of Case: Its Principles and Parameters, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/sl.16079.bak-1.gif
Doubled clitics are pronouns: Amharic objects (and beyond)
On Partial Agreement and Oblique Case
In many languages, overt case marking hidesφ-features from agreement probes. In some languages, such as Hindi, this effect is absolute. But in Adıyaman Kurmanji, our focus here, the effect is partial: the number feature of third-person oblique subjects can be registered on the verb. We account for the difference by saying that overtly case-marked nominals are in fact agreed with in the syntax, but the actual transfer ofφ-feature values happens at…
Lexical Categories: Legacy, Lacuna, and Opportunity for Functionalists and Formalists
The fundamental importance of lexical categories is uncontroversial within both formal and functional approaches to grammatical analysis. But despite the familiarity of this topic and its foundational nature for grammatical description and analysis, it is paradoxically not among the best-studied or -understood topics from either the functionalist or formalist perspective. Both schools of linguistic theory have inherited their basic assumptions an…
Case: Its Principles and its Parameters
In Case, Mark Baker develops a unified theory of how the morphological case marking of noun phrases is determined by syntactic structure. Designed to work well for languages of all alignment types - accusative, ergative, tripartite, marked nominative, or marked absolutive - this theory has been developed and tested against unrelated languages of each type, and more than twenty non-Indo-European languages are considered in depth. While affirming t…
On Dependent Ergative Case (in Shipibo) and Its Derivation by Phase
Focusing on the Shipibo language, I defend a simple ''dependent case'' theory of ergative case marking, where ergative case is assigned to the higher of two NPs in a clausal domain. I show how apparent failures of this rule can be explained assuming that VP is a Spell-Out domain distinct from the clause, and that this bleeds ergative case assignment for c-command relationships that already exist in VP and are unchanged in CP. This accounts for th…
Rethinking Amharic prepositions as case markers inserted at PF
On agreement and its relationship to case: Some generative ideas and results
Forms of predication in Sakha (Turkic): Will the true lexical predicates please stand up
The Turkic language Sakha (Yakut) uses a copular verb with predicate nominals but not with predicate adjectives or verbs in certain environments, including relative clauses, nominalized clauses, and complements to nouns. Previous work takes this as evidence that adjectives but not nouns are true one-place predicates. However, unaccusativity diagnostics show that adjectives pattern with nouns in Sakha, as in other languages: neither is inherently …
On the Relationship of Object Agreement and Accusative Case: Evidence from Amharic
This article shows that accusative case and object agreement are not closely related in Amharic, a language in which both are morphologically overt. This suggests that it is wrong to generalize Chomsky's claim that agreement and case are both manifestations of the same Agree relation from subjects to objects across the board. I show that object agreements in Amharic are the true manifestations of Agree (not pronominal clitics), whereas accusative…
When agreement is for number and gender but not person
Degrees of nominalization: Clause-like constituents in Sakha
On the syntax and pragmatics of lexical categories: A comment on Mark Smith
While agreeing with Smith that the lexical categories cannot be defined pragmatically, I disagree with his implication that Baker 2003 is a pragmatic theory. Rather, I attempt to clarify my view that the definitional differences between nouns, verbs, and adjectives are primarily syntactic in nature. These syntactic differences stand in a natural correspondence to the pragmatic differences discussed in the literature in many cases, but when syntax…
Two modalities of case assignment: Case in Sakha
Agreement in Ibibio: From Every Head to Every Head
The Ibibio language has the special property that agreement with a single grammatical subject can appear multiple times in the same clause. After showing that this is a general phenomenon in the language, we argue that every verbal functional head in Ibibio-Aspect, Auxiliary, Mood, and Participle, as well as Tense-acts as a probe, capable of initiating an Agree relationship. Furthermore, a close comparison of agreement in indicative, subjunctive,…
On some ways to test Tagalog nominalism from a crosslinguistic perspective
Daniel Kaufman’s core proposal is that much of what is typologically special about Tagalog syntax is rooted in the language having nouns but not verbs as its core lexical categories. He sees this at two levels. First, bare roots in Tagalog are nominal rather than verbal; for example, bili on its own means ‘price bought for ’ rather than ‘buy’. Second, he claims that fully inflected “verbs ” in Tagalog are also really nouns; they are nouns that re…
Is head movement still needed for noun incorporation
On agent nominalizations and why they are not like event nominalizations
We consider agent-denoting nominalizations like the finder of the wallet , contrasting them with the better-studied action/event-denoting nominalizations. We show that in English, Sakha, and Mapudungun, agent-denoting nominalizations can have none of the verbal/clausal features that event-denoting nominalizations often have: they cannot contain adverbs, voice markers, aspect, or negation. The one apparent exception to this generalization is that …
The Syntax of Agreement and Concord
'Agreement' is the grammatical phenomenon in which the form of one item, such as the noun 'horses', forces a second item in the sentence, such as the verb 'gallop', to appear in a particular form, i.e. 'gallop' must agree with 'horses' in number. Even though agreement phenomena are some of the most familiar and well-studied aspects of grammar, there are certain basic questions that have rarely been asked, let alone answered. This book develops a …
Lexical Categories: Verbs, Nouns, and Adjectives
This book offers a new syntactic theory of the parts of speech, focusing on verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Baker argues against semantic and functional approaches, proposing instead that lexical categories are defined by their syntactic behavior. He posits a universal underlying structure explaining cross-linguistic variations in how these categories manifest. The core claim is that nouns, verbs, and adjectives are distinguished by their differing…
Two modalities of case assignment: Case in Sakha
Mixed Categories: Nominalizations in Quechua
1: Introduction.- 1. Towards a Theory of Mixed Categories.- 1.1. Syntactic Categories and Their Projections.- 1.2. Morphology and Syntax.- 1.3. Case.- 1.4. Movement.- 1.5. Complementation versus Relativization.- 1.6. Nominalizations as Clauses.- 1.7. Modularity and Category Theory.- 2. Overview of the Structure of Quechua.- 2: Syntactic Categories and Their Projections.- 1. Nominalized Clauses versus Main Clauses.- 1.1. Features in Common.- 1.2. …
On Dependent Ergative Case (in Shipibo) and Its Derivation by Phase
Focusing on the Shipibo language, I defend a simple ''dependent case'' theory of ergative case marking, where ergative case is assigned to the higher of two NPs in a clausal domain. I show how apparent failures of this rule can be explained assuming that VP is a Spell-Out domain distinct from the clause, and that this bleeds ergative case assignment for c-command relationships that already exist in VP and are unchanged in CP. This accounts for th…
Theta theory and the syntax of applicatives in Chichewa
Is head movement still needed for noun incorporation
Two Types of Syntactic Noun Incorporation: Noun Incorporation in Mapudungun and its Typological Implications
NOUN INCORPORATION (NI) in Mapudungun is different from NI in better-studied languages like Mohawk in three ways: the incorporated noun is invisible to verbal agreement, incorporation into unaccusative verbs is impossible unless a possessor is stranded, and possessors are the only modifiers that can be stranded. These differences can be explained by saying that the trace of NI retains its person, number, and gender features in Mohawk but not in M…
On the Relationship of Object Agreement and Accusative Case: Evidence from Amharic
This article shows that accusative case and object agreement are not closely related in Amharic, a language in which both are morphologically overt. This suggests that it is wrong to generalize Chomsky's claim that agreement and case are both manifestations of the same Agree relation from subjects to objects across the board. I show that object agreements in Amharic are the true manifestations of Agree (not pronominal clitics), whereas accusative…
Doubled clitics are pronouns: Amharic objects (and beyond)
Linkers and the Internal Structure of vP
On Partial Agreement and Oblique Case
In many languages, overt case marking hidesφ-features from agreement probes. In some languages, such as Hindi, this effect is absolute. But in Adıyaman Kurmanji, our focus here, the effect is partial: the number feature of third-person oblique subjects can be registered on the verb. We account for the difference by saying that overtly case-marked nominals are in fact agreed with in the syntax, but the actual transfer ofφ-feature values happens at…
On agent nominalizations and why they are not like event nominalizations
We consider agent-denoting nominalizations like the finder of the wallet , contrasting them with the better-studied action/event-denoting nominalizations. We show that in English, Sakha, and Mapudungun, agent-denoting nominalizations can have none of the verbal/clausal features that event-denoting nominalizations often have: they cannot contain adverbs, voice markers, aspect, or negation. The one apparent exception to this generalization is that …
When agreement is for number and gender but not person
Degrees of nominalization: Clause-like constituents in Sakha
On some subject/object non-asymmetries in Mohawk
Agree without Agreement: Switch-reference and reflexive voice in two Panoan languages
On Directionality and the Structure of the Verb Phrase: Evidence from Nupe
We propose a movement account of why some verb phrases seem to be head-final in the Nupe language whereas others seem to be head-initial. Several converging arguments are given that verbs come before their complements in the underlying structure. Apparent counterexamples come from the presence of identifiable functional heads within the verb phrase structure that attract NPs to their specifier position. Two such heads are distinguished: Agro0, wh…
Rethinking Amharic prepositions as case markers inserted at PF
On agreement and its relationship to case: Some generative ideas and results
On the Nature of the Antiagreement Effect: Evidence from Wh-in-Situ in Ibibio
The Ibibio language displays an antiagreement effect (AAE), in which φ-feature agreement on the verb is suppressed in subject questions, even when the wh-phrase remains in situ. I discuss why this fact is problematic for existing theories of the AAE. I then suggest that the AAE arises when the deletion process that applies to copies in a movement chain removes the φ-features of a copy along with its semantic features. This formulation applies equ…
Mood as Verbal Definiteness in a "Tenseless" Language
Agreement in Ibibio: From Every Head to Every Head
The Ibibio language has the special property that agreement with a single grammatical subject can appear multiple times in the same clause. After showing that this is a general phenomenon in the language, we argue that every verbal functional head in Ibibio-Aspect, Auxiliary, Mood, and Participle, as well as Tense-acts as a probe, capable of initiating an Agree relationship. Furthermore, a close comparison of agreement in indicative, subjunctive,…
Building and Merging, not Checking: The Nonexistence of (Aux)-S-V-O Languages
Standard views about the factors that determine verb position and subject position predict that there should be Subject-Verb-Object languages in which tense and aspect are indicated by a particle or auxiliary that comes before the subject. Julien's (2000) large-scale survey of the languages of the world, however, indicates that this word order is never found. This striking gap suggests that the theory of how verbs are related to tense needs to be…
Lexical Categories: Legacy, Lacuna, and Opportunity for Functionalists and Formalists
The fundamental importance of lexical categories is uncontroversial within both formal and functional approaches to grammatical analysis. But despite the familiarity of this topic and its foundational nature for grammatical description and analysis, it is paradoxically not among the best-studied or -understood topics from either the functionalist or formalist perspective. Both schools of linguistic theory have inherited their basic assumptions an…
Autolexical Syntax: A Theory of Parallel Grammatical Representations
In Syntax, Jerrold M. Sadock argues for a radical departure from the derivational model of grammar that has prevailed in linguistics for thirty years. He offers an alternative theory in which the various components of grammar in particular syntax, semantics, and morphology are viewed as fully autonomous descriptive devices for various parallel dimensions of linguistic representation. The lexicon in this theory forges the connection between autono…
Theta theory and the syntax of applicatives in Chichewa
Mixed Categories: Nominalizations in Quechua
1: Introduction.- 1. Towards a Theory of Mixed Categories.- 1.1. Syntactic Categories and Their Projections.- 1.2. Morphology and Syntax.- 1.3. Case.- 1.4. Movement.- 1.5. Complementation versus Relativization.- 1.6. Nominalizations as Clauses.- 1.7. Modularity and Category Theory.- 2. Overview of the Structure of Quechua.- 2: Syntactic Categories and Their Projections.- 1. Nominalized Clauses versus Main Clauses.- 1.1. Features in Common.- 1.2. …
On some subject/object non-asymmetries in Mohawk
Structure Preservation and Mohawk Inchoative Verbs
Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Place of Morphology in a Grammar (1992), pp. 261-275
Unmatched chains and the representation of plural pronouns
The Polysynthesis Parameter
This book investigates in detail the grammar of polysynthetic languages-those with very complex verbal morphology. Baker argues that polysynthesis is more than an accidental collection of morphological processes; rather, it is a systematic way of representing predicate-argument relationships that is parallel to but distinct from the system used in languages like English. Having repercussions for many areas of syntax and related aspects of morphol…
Thematic Roles and Syntactic Structure
Particles: On the Syntax of Verb-Particle, Triadic, and Causative Constructions, by Marcel den Dikken
Mood as Verbal Definiteness in a "Tenseless" Language
Autolexical Syntax: A Theory of Parallel Grammatical Representations
In Syntax, Jerrold M. Sadock argues for a radical departure from the derivational model of grammar that has prevailed in linguistics for thirty years. He offers an alternative theory in which the various components of grammar in particular syntax, semantics, and morphology are viewed as fully autonomous descriptive devices for various parallel dimensions of linguistic representation. The lexicon in this theory forges the connection between autono…
The Polysynthesis Parameter
Baker argues that polysynthetic languages - in which verbs are built up of many parts and where one verb can act as a whole sentence - are more than an accidental collection of morphological processes; rather they adopt a systematic way of representing predicate-argument relationships, parallel to but distinct from the system used for English. This idea has repercussions for many areas of syntax and morphology, resulting in a comprehensive pictur…
Events, Times, and Mohawk Verbal Inflection
The Mohawk tense-mood-aspect system has many “irregularities” that seem to require a powerful morphological component distinct from syntax. Nevertheless, it is shown that most of these “irregularities” can be explained in syntactic and semantic terms, once the right lexical entries are given. This result is achieved by making two assumptions of general interest: (1) mood is analyzed as the verbal equivalent of specifity in the NP system, and (2) …
Building and Merging, not Checking: The Nonexistence of (Aux)-S-V-O Languages
Standard views about the factors that determine verb position and subject position predict that there should be Subject-Verb-Object languages in which tense and aspect are indicated by a particle or auxiliary that comes before the subject. Julien's (2000) large-scale survey of the languages of the world, however, indicates that this word order is never found. This striking gap suggests that the theory of how verbs are related to tense needs to be…
On Directionality and the Structure of the Verb Phrase: Evidence from Nupe
We propose a movement account of why some verb phrases seem to be head-final in the Nupe language whereas others seem to be head-initial. Several converging arguments are given that verbs come before their complements in the underlying structure. Apparent counterexamples come from the presence of identifiable functional heads within the verb phrase structure that attract NPs to their specifier position. Two such heads are distinguished: Agro0, wh…
Lexical Categories: Verbs, Nouns, and Adjectives
This book offers a new syntactic theory of the parts of speech, focusing on verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Baker argues against semantic and functional approaches, proposing instead that lexical categories are defined by their syntactic behavior. He posits a universal underlying structure explaining cross-linguistic variations in how these categories manifest. The core claim is that nouns, verbs, and adjectives are distinguished by their differing…
Two Types of Syntactic Noun Incorporation: Noun Incorporation in Mapudungun and its Typological Implications
NOUN INCORPORATION (NI) in Mapudungun is different from NI in better-studied languages like Mohawk in three ways: the incorporated noun is invisible to verbal agreement, incorporation into unaccusative verbs is impossible unless a possessor is stranded, and possessors are the only modifiers that can be stranded. These differences can be explained by saying that the trace of NI retains its person, number, and gender features in Mohawk but not in M…
On Zero Agreement and Polysynthesis
This chapter was made possible thanks to a trip to Argentina in October 2000, to visit the Universidad de Comahue in General Roca, Argentina. This gave me a chance to supplement my knowledge of Mapudungun from secondary sources (Augusta 1903; Smeets 1989; Salas 1992) by consulting Argentine experts on this language (Pascual Masullo, Luc ́ıa Golluscio, and Roberto Aranovich), and by inter- viewing their Mapuche consultants, as well as members of t…
Linkers and the Internal Structure of vP
The Syntax of Agreement and Concord
'Agreement' is the grammatical phenomenon in which the form of one item, such as the noun 'horses', forces a second item in the sentence, such as the verb 'gallop', to appear in a particular form, i.e. 'gallop' must agree with 'horses' in number. Even though agreement phenomena are some of the most familiar and well-studied aspects of grammar, there are certain basic questions that have rarely been asked, let alone answered. This book develops a …
On the Nature of the Antiagreement Effect: Evidence from Wh-in-Situ in Ibibio
The Ibibio language displays an antiagreement effect (AAE), in which φ-feature agreement on the verb is suppressed in subject questions, even when the wh-phrase remains in situ. I discuss why this fact is problematic for existing theories of the AAE. I then suggest that the AAE arises when the deletion process that applies to copies in a movement chain removes the φ-features of a copy along with its semantic features. This formulation applies equ…
On some ways to test Tagalog nominalism from a crosslinguistic perspective
Daniel Kaufman’s core proposal is that much of what is typologically special about Tagalog syntax is rooted in the language having nouns but not verbs as its core lexical categories. He sees this at two levels. First, bare roots in Tagalog are nominal rather than verbal; for example, bili on its own means ‘price bought for ’ rather than ‘buy’. Second, he claims that fully inflected “verbs ” in Tagalog are also really nouns; they are nouns that re…
Is head movement still needed for noun incorporation
On agent nominalizations and why they are not like event nominalizations
We consider agent-denoting nominalizations like the finder of the wallet , contrasting them with the better-studied action/event-denoting nominalizations. We show that in English, Sakha, and Mapudungun, agent-denoting nominalizations can have none of the verbal/clausal features that event-denoting nominalizations often have: they cannot contain adverbs, voice markers, aspect, or negation. The one apparent exception to this generalization is that …
On the syntax and pragmatics of lexical categories: A comment on Mark Smith
While agreeing with Smith that the lexical categories cannot be defined pragmatically, I disagree with his implication that Baker 2003 is a pragmatic theory. Rather, I attempt to clarify my view that the definitional differences between nouns, verbs, and adjectives are primarily syntactic in nature. These syntactic differences stand in a natural correspondence to the pragmatic differences discussed in the literature in many cases, but when syntax…
Two modalities of case assignment: Case in Sakha
Philosophy (40 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (40 works) · Linguistics (39 works) · Computer Science (35 works) · Noun (18 works) · Mathematics (17 works) · Natural Language Processing Techniques (16 works) · Syntax (14 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (13 works) · Verb (13 works)