Nicholas Sobin
Biographic Data
| ID | 749335 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nicholas Sobin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nicholas |
| FAMILY NAME | Sobin |
| SIGNATURE | SOBIN N |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at El Paso |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2368-2521 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 59 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1971 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
On Subject & Negative Positioning in Spanish
Negative English sentences (‘Mary does not want apples’) suggest that the order of key elements is TP–NegP–VP. However, negative Spanish sentences (‘María no quiere manzanas’) suggest the order Subject–NegP–Tense/VP. Regarding subject positioning, some claim that subjects in Spanish are located in Rizzi’s (1997) Split CP. Others maintain that Spanish subjects are located in SpecTP or SpecAgrSP. In either case, utilizing Pollock’s (1989) split IP …
On Contracted Negation in Scots
Thoms et al. (2023) propose a system of negation involving two base–generated NegPs, one below T and the other above T, claiming that negative inflections do not syntactically attach to T, but merge with T morphophonologically. Their analysis is driven by the distribution of the contracted negative inflection –nae in Scots negative imperatives and assumptions about adverbial positioning. Clitic vs. affix is claimed insufficient to characterize –n…
The lexical source of BIN and habitual be in African American English
Although various works on African American English (AAE) offer significant and insightful analyses of the semantic interpretation of its aspectual elements, including in particular stressed remote past BIN and habitual be (behab), the syntactic analysis of these elements is problematic. BIN and behab are claimed to be invariant lexical elements with fixed semantic values, and to not interact with INFL (Tense) as auxiliaries do, thus not displayin…
VOS Puzzle
The subject (S) in Spanish sentences may appear post–verbally and even sentence–finally following an object (O). Further, in post–verbal SO/OS pairs, the first element asymmetrically c–commands the second element. Previous analyses of the VOS phenomenon encounter difficulties in accounting for this asymmetric c–command relation and/or for Case and subject–verb agreement involving the VOS subject. We argue here that these Spanish SO/OS pairs opera…
Constituency
A constituent (also called a phrase) is a sequence of one or more words within a sentence which behaves as a single entity. Constituents are revealed by the various ways that sentences can be manipulated. That is, when word sequences in a sentence can be moved, coordinated with other elements, or substituted for by single words such as pronouns, these manipulations are carried out on constituents rather than on random single words or arbitrary wo…
Directing Syntactic Traffic
While much work in generative syntax has adopted bottom-up syntactic derivation, a number of factors favor a top-down approach. This article offers a new articulation of the top-down Merge Right-Branch Right approach. In accord with the general Minimalist goals that computation should be carried out in small domains, that structure is based on binary pairings, and that grammatical mechanisms should, as far as possible, be limited to those that ar…
Th/Ex, Agreement, and Case in Expletive Sentences
Recent accounts of existential sentences (ES) within the government-and-binding/Minimalist Program tradition (Chomsky 2000, 2001; Deal 2009) claim that nominative Case valuation and φ-agreement take place inES(directly or indirectly) between T and the associateDP, essentially the same as between T and "subject" in non-ES. However, the surface facts of Case and φ-agreement inESrun contrary to such claims (e.g.,There is only me in that picture/*The…
Echo Questions in the Minimalist Program
English echo questions present numerous challenges to the analysis of interrogatives, including (a) simple wh-in-situ (You saw who?); (b) apparent Superiority violations (What did who see?); (c) apparent verb movement without wh-movement (Has Mary seen what?); and (d) requisite wide scope only for echo-question-introduced wh-phrases (underlined in these examples-only who in What did who see? is being asked about). Such apparently contrary feature…
Prestige Case Forms and the Comp-trace Effect
Case in English is "dormant"-not valued or resolved in the syntax-unless it is "activated" by the EPP feature of T. Case-activated DPs move to Spec,TP for Case valuation. Further extraction (e.g.,wh-movement) of subjects requires "phase-early" Case resolution, guaranteeing that the uninterpretable Case feature of a subject is resolved early, in Spec,TP, in compliance with the Earliness Principle. An inability to resolve an active Case feature ear…
Do So and VP
Culicover and Jackendoff (2005) argue that VP structure with adjunct modifiers is “flat”: both complements and adjuncts are equally sisters of V. Their arguments center around the apparent misbehavior of do so as a replacement for a syntactic VP constituent. However, several of these arguments are inconclusive. The rule that Culicover and Jackendoff offer for do so does not fare better overall than does the hierarchic VP account of do so
The relative roles of theory and acquisition studies
Radford (1988: 2) and others before and after have argued that the core theoretical question (i) ‘How are human languages structured?’ is logically prior to another core theoretical question (ii) ‘How are human languages acquired?’ This is said to be so because the answer to (i), the structure of human language, is the real target of question (ii) – language acquisition is about acquiring the structure of a human language. Thus, we can't ask abou…
Echo questions, echo negation, and split CP
This work examines English echo questions (EQs) against the background of Rizzi's (1997) analysis of split CP. It argues that EQs do not behave as the split CP analysis predicts that they should, and that their behavior can instead be straightforwardly explained within the classic CP analysis. Further, what are termed here 'echo negations' of negative inversion constructions are shown not to parallel EQs, a surprising result if negative inversion…
Expletive Constructions Are Not "Lower Right Corner" Movement Constructions
July 01 2004 Expletive Constructions Are Not “Lower Right Corner” Movement Constructions In Special Collection: CogNet Nicholas Sobin Nicholas Sobin The University of Texas at El Paso and University of Wales, Bangor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Nicholas Sobin The University of Texas at El Paso and University of Wales, Bangor Online ISSN: 1530-9150 Print ISSN: 0024-3892 © 2004 Ma…
Negative Inversion as Nonmovement
In a substantial body of work, negative inversion (NT) is argued to be movement of a verb toward a negative expression and out of IP/AgrP. NI constructions are claimed to work in parallel with w/h-questions. This paper offers an AgrP-internal account of NI constructions, which is consistent with positing a simpler CP layer. I argue here that there is no attraction of the verb to the negative expression (i.e., no Negative Criterion) and that the a…
The Comp-trace effect, the adverb effect and minimal CP
Recent work has ascribed the adverb effect, the reduction or elimination of the that -trace effect by the addition of an adverbial phrase, to an elaborated CP layer. However, additional observations about a variety of adverb effects with both positive and negative effects on acceptability, including some experimental data, suggest that (i) adverbs may undergo lexical adjunction to a complementizer and (ii) the CP layer may be contracting or foldi…
Determiners in genitive constructions
The Who/Whom Puzzle
Belfast English and Standard English
Agreement in CP
On the syntax of english echo questions
The variable status of comp-trace phenomena
On the subject of gapped sentences
Since the proposal by Kuno (1976) that Gapping is strongly constrained by the Requirement for Simplex Sentential Relationship, others (e.g. Jake 1977) have found exceptions to this proposal. This paper argues that Gapping, more accurately sentence‐internal Gapping, is constrained less broadly by RSSR and that some unacceptable gaps are due instead to a condition requiring N2 s in first position in gapping remaindered pairs to be subjects. This re…
Texas Spanish and lexical borrowing
(1976). Texas Spanish and lexical borrowing. Paper in Linguistics: Vol. 9, No. 1-2, pp. 15-47
Auxiliary Structures and Time Adverbs in Black American English
IN RECENT YEARS, black American English (also called Negro nonstandard English) has received a great deal of attention from researchers. From the original position that black English is simply the dialect of the region in which black speakers happen to reside (Pederson 1968), there has been a change toward realization that different varieties of English are spoken by economically disadvantaged Negroes and by other residents of the same areas (inc…
On the inadequacy of some recent syntactic proposals
The variable status of comp-trace phenomena
On the syntax of english echo questions
The Comp-trace effect, the adverb effect and minimal CP
Recent work has ascribed the adverb effect, the reduction or elimination of the that -trace effect by the addition of an adverbial phrase, to an elaborated CP layer. However, additional observations about a variety of adverb effects with both positive and negative effects on acceptability, including some experimental data, suggest that (i) adverbs may undergo lexical adjunction to a complementizer and (ii) the CP layer may be contracting or foldi…
The Who/Whom Puzzle
Negative Inversion as Nonmovement
In a substantial body of work, negative inversion (NT) is argued to be movement of a verb toward a negative expression and out of IP/AgrP. NI constructions are claimed to work in parallel with w/h-questions. This paper offers an AgrP-internal account of NI constructions, which is consistent with positing a simpler CP layer. I argue here that there is no attraction of the verb to the negative expression (i.e., no Negative Criterion) and that the a…
Prestige Case Forms and the Comp-trace Effect
Case in English is "dormant"-not valued or resolved in the syntax-unless it is "activated" by the EPP feature of T. Case-activated DPs move to Spec,TP for Case valuation. Further extraction (e.g.,wh-movement) of subjects requires "phase-early" Case resolution, guaranteeing that the uninterpretable Case feature of a subject is resolved early, in Spec,TP, in compliance with the Earliness Principle. An inability to resolve an active Case feature ear…
Th/Ex, Agreement, and Case in Expletive Sentences
Recent accounts of existential sentences (ES) within the government-and-binding/Minimalist Program tradition (Chomsky 2000, 2001; Deal 2009) claim that nominative Case valuation and φ-agreement take place inES(directly or indirectly) between T and the associateDP, essentially the same as between T and "subject" in non-ES. However, the surface facts of Case and φ-agreement inESrun contrary to such claims (e.g.,There is only me in that picture/*The…
Expletive Constructions Are Not "Lower Right Corner" Movement Constructions
July 01 2004 Expletive Constructions Are Not “Lower Right Corner” Movement Constructions In Special Collection: CogNet Nicholas Sobin Nicholas Sobin The University of Texas at El Paso and University of Wales, Bangor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Nicholas Sobin The University of Texas at El Paso and University of Wales, Bangor Online ISSN: 1530-9150 Print ISSN: 0024-3892 © 2004 Ma…
Determiners in genitive constructions
Echo Questions in the Minimalist Program
English echo questions present numerous challenges to the analysis of interrogatives, including (a) simple wh-in-situ (You saw who?); (b) apparent Superiority violations (What did who see?); (c) apparent verb movement without wh-movement (Has Mary seen what?); and (d) requisite wide scope only for echo-question-introduced wh-phrases (underlined in these examples-only who in What did who see? is being asked about). Such apparently contrary feature…
Auxiliary Structures and Time Adverbs in Black American English
IN RECENT YEARS, black American English (also called Negro nonstandard English) has received a great deal of attention from researchers. From the original position that black English is simply the dialect of the region in which black speakers happen to reside (Pederson 1968), there has been a change toward realization that different varieties of English are spoken by economically disadvantaged Negroes and by other residents of the same areas (inc…
On the inadequacy of some recent syntactic proposals
Auxiliary Structures and Time Adverbs in Black American English
IN RECENT YEARS, black American English (also called Negro nonstandard English) has received a great deal of attention from researchers. From the original position that black English is simply the dialect of the region in which black speakers happen to reside (Pederson 1968), there has been a change toward realization that different varieties of English are spoken by economically disadvantaged Negroes and by other residents of the same areas (inc…
Texas Spanish and lexical borrowing
(1976). Texas Spanish and lexical borrowing. Paper in Linguistics: Vol. 9, No. 1-2, pp. 15-47
On the subject of gapped sentences
Since the proposal by Kuno (1976) that Gapping is strongly constrained by the Requirement for Simplex Sentential Relationship, others (e.g. Jake 1977) have found exceptions to this proposal. This paper argues that Gapping, more accurately sentence‐internal Gapping, is constrained less broadly by RSSR and that some unacceptable gaps are due instead to a condition requiring N2 s in first position in gapping remaindered pairs to be subjects. This re…
The variable status of comp-trace phenomena
On the syntax of english echo questions
Agreement in CP
Belfast English and Standard English
The Who/Whom Puzzle
The Comp-trace effect, the adverb effect and minimal CP
Recent work has ascribed the adverb effect, the reduction or elimination of the that -trace effect by the addition of an adverbial phrase, to an elaborated CP layer. However, additional observations about a variety of adverb effects with both positive and negative effects on acceptability, including some experimental data, suggest that (i) adverbs may undergo lexical adjunction to a complementizer and (ii) the CP layer may be contracting or foldi…
Determiners in genitive constructions
Negative Inversion as Nonmovement
In a substantial body of work, negative inversion (NT) is argued to be movement of a verb toward a negative expression and out of IP/AgrP. NI constructions are claimed to work in parallel with w/h-questions. This paper offers an AgrP-internal account of NI constructions, which is consistent with positing a simpler CP layer. I argue here that there is no attraction of the verb to the negative expression (i.e., no Negative Criterion) and that the a…
The relative roles of theory and acquisition studies
Radford (1988: 2) and others before and after have argued that the core theoretical question (i) ‘How are human languages structured?’ is logically prior to another core theoretical question (ii) ‘How are human languages acquired?’ This is said to be so because the answer to (i), the structure of human language, is the real target of question (ii) – language acquisition is about acquiring the structure of a human language. Thus, we can't ask abou…
Echo questions, echo negation, and split CP
This work examines English echo questions (EQs) against the background of Rizzi's (1997) analysis of split CP. It argues that EQs do not behave as the split CP analysis predicts that they should, and that their behavior can instead be straightforwardly explained within the classic CP analysis. Further, what are termed here 'echo negations' of negative inversion constructions are shown not to parallel EQs, a surprising result if negative inversion…
Expletive Constructions Are Not "Lower Right Corner" Movement Constructions
July 01 2004 Expletive Constructions Are Not “Lower Right Corner” Movement Constructions In Special Collection: CogNet Nicholas Sobin Nicholas Sobin The University of Texas at El Paso and University of Wales, Bangor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Nicholas Sobin The University of Texas at El Paso and University of Wales, Bangor Online ISSN: 1530-9150 Print ISSN: 0024-3892 © 2004 Ma…
Do So and VP
Culicover and Jackendoff (2005) argue that VP structure with adjunct modifiers is “flat”: both complements and adjuncts are equally sisters of V. Their arguments center around the apparent misbehavior of do so as a replacement for a syntactic VP constituent. However, several of these arguments are inconclusive. The rule that Culicover and Jackendoff offer for do so does not fare better overall than does the hierarchic VP account of do so
Prestige Case Forms and the Comp-trace Effect
Case in English is "dormant"-not valued or resolved in the syntax-unless it is "activated" by the EPP feature of T. Case-activated DPs move to Spec,TP for Case valuation. Further extraction (e.g.,wh-movement) of subjects requires "phase-early" Case resolution, guaranteeing that the uninterpretable Case feature of a subject is resolved early, in Spec,TP, in compliance with the Earliness Principle. An inability to resolve an active Case feature ear…
Echo Questions in the Minimalist Program
English echo questions present numerous challenges to the analysis of interrogatives, including (a) simple wh-in-situ (You saw who?); (b) apparent Superiority violations (What did who see?); (c) apparent verb movement without wh-movement (Has Mary seen what?); and (d) requisite wide scope only for echo-question-introduced wh-phrases (underlined in these examples-only who in What did who see? is being asked about). Such apparently contrary feature…
Th/Ex, Agreement, and Case in Expletive Sentences
Recent accounts of existential sentences (ES) within the government-and-binding/Minimalist Program tradition (Chomsky 2000, 2001; Deal 2009) claim that nominative Case valuation and φ-agreement take place inES(directly or indirectly) between T and the associateDP, essentially the same as between T and "subject" in non-ES. However, the surface facts of Case and φ-agreement inESrun contrary to such claims (e.g.,There is only me in that picture/*The…
Constituency
A constituent (also called a phrase) is a sequence of one or more words within a sentence which behaves as a single entity. Constituents are revealed by the various ways that sentences can be manipulated. That is, when word sequences in a sentence can be moved, coordinated with other elements, or substituted for by single words such as pronouns, these manipulations are carried out on constituents rather than on random single words or arbitrary wo…
Directing Syntactic Traffic
While much work in generative syntax has adopted bottom-up syntactic derivation, a number of factors favor a top-down approach. This article offers a new articulation of the top-down Merge Right-Branch Right approach. In accord with the general Minimalist goals that computation should be carried out in small domains, that structure is based on binary pairings, and that grammatical mechanisms should, as far as possible, be limited to those that ar…
VOS Puzzle
The subject (S) in Spanish sentences may appear post–verbally and even sentence–finally following an object (O). Further, in post–verbal SO/OS pairs, the first element asymmetrically c–commands the second element. Previous analyses of the VOS phenomenon encounter difficulties in accounting for this asymmetric c–command relation and/or for Case and subject–verb agreement involving the VOS subject. We argue here that these Spanish SO/OS pairs opera…
On Contracted Negation in Scots
Thoms et al. (2023) propose a system of negation involving two base–generated NegPs, one below T and the other above T, claiming that negative inflections do not syntactically attach to T, but merge with T morphophonologically. Their analysis is driven by the distribution of the contracted negative inflection –nae in Scots negative imperatives and assumptions about adverbial positioning. Clitic vs. affix is claimed insufficient to characterize –n…
The lexical source of BIN and habitual be in African American English
Although various works on African American English (AAE) offer significant and insightful analyses of the semantic interpretation of its aspectual elements, including in particular stressed remote past BIN and habitual be (behab), the syntactic analysis of these elements is problematic. BIN and behab are claimed to be invariant lexical elements with fixed semantic values, and to not interact with INFL (Tense) as auxiliaries do, thus not displayin…
On Subject & Negative Positioning in Spanish
Negative English sentences (‘Mary does not want apples’) suggest that the order of key elements is TP–NegP–VP. However, negative Spanish sentences (‘María no quiere manzanas’) suggest the order Subject–NegP–Tense/VP. Regarding subject positioning, some claim that subjects in Spanish are located in Rizzi’s (1997) Split CP. Others maintain that Spanish subjects are located in SpecTP or SpecAgrSP. In either case, utilizing Pollock’s (1989) split IP …
Linguistics (24 works) · Philosophy (22 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (17 works) · Mathematics (12 works) · Natural Language Processing Techniques (11 works) · Syntax (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Artificial Intelligence (7 works)