LISSIM 6

June 1-15, 2012@ Kangra

Selected Essays

Subjunctives and covert subjects

Jyoti Iyer
JNU

 

Since I am in the first year of my M.Phil, I have not yet decided on a specific research topic. My current interest, however, lies in the following topic:

 

Subjunctives and covert subjects

Crosslinguistically, there seems to be some relation between certain classes of predicates, and their ability to license the subjunctive in embedded clauses. These are often predicates of desire (want, fear), of communication (tell, say), and so on.

This is the case in Hindi as well. Subjunctive morphology is licensed only by a small class of predicates, e.g. caah (want), kɛh (say), dar (fear).

Data from Hindi shows that some syntactic configurations can disallow the subjunctive even in embeddings by these licensors. For example:

(1)        anu    caahti hai     [ki      amar gaaRi calaaye]

          Anu    want.F         PRES   that    Amar  car drive.SUBJ

          Anu wants that Amar should drive a car.

 (2)      *anu   caahti hai     [(ki)   ec      gaaRi calaaye]

          Anu    want.F         PRES   (that) ec      car drive.SUBJ

          *(Anu wants that should drive a car)

 (3)       anu    [(*amar) gaaRi calaana]   caahti                    hai

          Anu    (*Amar) car driving          want.F                   PRES

          Anu wants (*Amar) to drive a car.

 

As we can see above, the environments where subjunctive is licensed is very restricted, and have the following characteristics:

a.   Right-of-the-verb (non-canonical complement position)

b.   CP

c.    Do not allow overt subjects

 

Informally, the research question which I would like to pursue is on the following lines:

What is the structure of the complements selected by these desire predicates? Can they license covert subjects which are obligatorily subject controlled? Are the complements better analysable as restructuring type in some positions, and non-restructuring in others?

What role does movement to right-of-the-verb (adjunction to IP, in some accounts) position play in barring overt subjects?

 

The approach to the DP/NP layer used by Boskovic in LISSIM 5 was one which began with small hypotheses and went on to explore crosslinguistically several implications of the absence of articles and therefore the DP layer, which would confirm that the absence of one did mean the absence of the other. Although I have not explored this particular topic, his approach appealed to me from a methodological point of view. This is because the subjunctive is a notoriously difficult category to define in syntactic terms. The only fruitful attempts at defining the subjunctive have been in terms of the semantics, either of embedding predicates or the illocutionary force involved.

Since work has been done on Romance and Balkan languages, I hope that my work in Indo-Aryan will contribute towards a syntactic characterisation of the subjunctive, which can later be checked against various other languages families.

 

LISSIM 5 was also my introduction to Nanosyntax, which I have looked at in a paper co-authored with Sakshi Bhatia who was also at the summer school. The paper, entitled “A Nanosyntax approach to Hindi Case and Path Expressions” was presented at SCONLI 6 at Varanasi this February. The paper was motivated by the workshop conducted by Michal Starke in which we had placed our own language data (largely from Hindi, also other Indo-Aryan languages like Angika) in the f-seq for case and path expressions and had observed that some of the expected syncretisms did not hold. The paper drew from the work of Pantcheva, Caha and Starke, and poses counterexamples to them; for example:

 

·         Syncretism between Accusative and Dative where they are not contiguous in the f-seq (Genitive Case intervenes) is found in Hindi, not allowed by *ABA constraint.

 We also raise some larger questions about the framework set up by Nanosyntax, e.g.

·         Are null forms to be included in looking for syncretism/containment relations?

·         Is it non-trivial to account for null-null syncretism?

·         Can the system possibly account for different ways of encoding the same feature? Does it aim to?

 The lectures by Norvin Richards at LISSIM 5 were also an introduction to a facet of Minimalism which I had not earlier been exposed to. It was both interesting and easy to follow because I had recently been studying wh-movement. I have not, however, had a chance to explore this area further.

 As for the lectures and reading group by Utpal Lahiri, I am his student at JNU, and therefore happened to already be familiar with many of the issues dealt with at LISSIM 5, and at this stage I can only say that doing semantics is still something I am acquiring slowly.

 I look forward to LISSIM 6 because I have come across the work of Roumyana Pancheva when I was reading about Tense. Subjunctive has been called both tense and mood. In either case, it will be useful for me to interact with her, and I hope some of the focus at the summer school will be on tense.

 Also, David Pesetsky I hope will be able to throw some light on broad theoretical issues. I wish to work towards a theory-driven, rather than data driven solution. With phase-boundaries, etc. we have seen that now there are correlations made between levels of the derivation that were previously thought to not have any connections. I am interested in this, because I believe that the right adjoined CP in Hindi may have some larger cause.

 

References

 Caha, Pavel. 2008. The case hierarchy as functional sequence. In Scales: no. 86 in Linguistische Arbeits Berichte. Marc Richards and Andrej L. Malchukov (Eds.) pp. 247–276. University of Leipzig, Leipzig.

 Landau, Idan (2005). “Severing the Distribution of PRO from Case”. Ben Gurion University.

 Starke, Michal. 2009. Nanosyntax: A Short Primer to a New Approach to Language in Nordlyd 36.1, Special issue on Nanosyntax, in Peter Svenonius, Gillian Ramchand, Michal Starke, and Knut Tarald Taraldsen (Eds.) pp. 1–6. CASTL, Tromsø.

http://www.ub.uit.no/baser/nordlyd

 Villalta, Elisabeth. "Mood and gradability: an investigation of the subjunctive mood in Spanish." Linguistics and Philosophy 31 (2008): 467–522

 
For enquiries, write to secretary@fosssil.in