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this paper is to examine the structure and meaning of a common DP construction, the kind-construction, shown in (1), against the background of partitives (2) and OF/Z possessives (3).

Starting from an analysis for the diverging crosslinguistic grammaticality of DP-internal conjunctions such as this [man and woman] are in love, the article develops a theory of the syntax/semantics interface within the DP and a novel proposal for the interpretation of conjunction. The main claims are that plural/mass denotations are built in stages within the DP, by the combined effect of number features and semantic operators associated with functional heads; that languages differ in whether the denotation of nouns is filtered for singular or plural number, and that the word and crosslinguistically denotes SET PRODUCT, an operation which, in different contexts, can mimic the behavior of intersection and union.

This thesis is a qualitative and quantitative study of the changes that occurred in the phrase structure and system of pronominal clitics in medieval and renaissance Spanish, with the goal of explaining the basic differences between the syntactic properties of clitics in Old Spanish and their counterparts in the various dialects of modern Spanish. Specifically, I argue that these differences are explainable if we classify OSp clitics as Second Position (2P) clitics, in contrast to their modern counterparts. 2P clitics are treated here as prosodically deficient phrasal constituents that appear displaced from their canonical positions as internal arguments of the verb and are adjoined to a phrasal projection at the left edge of the clause (IP). The elements encompassed under the pre-theoretical notion clitic in modern Spanish, however, are not linked to an argument ...

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: We argue that the Minimalist view of phrase structure in Chomsky 1995 should be minimally extended to allow for phrases that have more than one head, so long as the two heads have the same category features and are not attracted by a higher head. This innovation results in an elegant typology of the various kinds of syntactically distinguishable serial verb constructions (SVCs) found in Edo and related West African languages, as discovered by Stewart (1998). In particular, we claim that the different SVCs come from different choices of which phrase in the clausal structure is doubly headed: Voice, light v, or V. Moreover, details of Edo syntax allow us to make some refinements to the theory of clause structure; these include showing that Kratzer's Voice head is distinct from Chomsky's v head, and showing exactly where agents, themes and goal phrases are generated. Empirical evidence for our claims comes from a variety of syntactic and semantic sources, but especially from the positio...

The empirical claim of this paper is that contrary to Chomsky (1986) there is no asymmetry between extraction out of subjects, objects and adjuncts. Instead, extraction out of subjects, objects and adjuncts is allowed or disallowed depending on the position the subject, object or adjunct occurs in. My proposal makes three empirical predictions that diverge from Chomsky (1986): 1. There are objects that do not allow subextraction. That-clauses cooccurring with object expletives, the complements of manner of speech verbs and the complements of nouns are examples of this kind. 2. There are subjects that allow subextraction. Subjects in SpecCP (Torrego 1985) are an example. 3. My proposal also predicts that adjuncts in SpecCP allow subextraction. I propose that maximal extended projections such as DP, CP and AgrOP are potential barriers � � AgrOP is sandwiched between two VP-shells. Extraction out of DPs and CPs is possible if they move into the specifier of a maximal extended projection. Hence extraction out of objects in SpecAgrOP is

This study aims to contribute to the efforts of explaining word order variations observed in Turkish, by granting a role to the hierarchical structure for certain word order alternations, and by admitting discourse-driven ‘extra-syntactic’ mechanisms for others. It will propose a tentative extension to the framework of the Minimalist Program (as it appears in Chomsky, 1995), by adopting its basic tenets and introducing the information structure (IS) as a representation that feeds the phonological component. IS differences will be maintained to be responsible from what is frequently referred to in the literature as ‘optional’ or ‘stylistic’ movements. Extraposition and contrastive focus fronting will be argued to be IS-driven movements in Turkish. It will be maintained that the SOV-OSV alternation in the surface forms with pre-verbal focus signals a difference in the hierarchical structure, whereas other word orders in transitives can best be viewed as sharing the phrase structures, hence being discursive variants of either the SOV or the OSV construction. OSV will be analyzed as involving a grammatical movement of the object to an IP-external Spec position. In addition, OSV will be proposed to represent the inverse voice in Turkish. The phrase structure in Turkish will be analyzed from a Minimalist perspective, and structural analyses will be given for what is referred to as ‘incorporation’ of objects and subjects in Turkish. Keywords: Turkish, word order, phrase structure, information structure, phonological component, extraposition, contrastive fronting, topic-driven movement, Case checking, object shift, incorporation, VP-shells, scrambling, inverse voice, basic word order.

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