About sharing

This thesis is about multidominance or sharing in syntax. The term sharing is used in a technical sense, to refer to a situation where a syntactic node has more than one mother. I assume that multidominance is allowed by the grammar. I argue that sharing configurations are more diverse than it has been proposed. I identify two kinds of sharing: bulk sharing and non-bulk sharing. A string of multidominated material may be shared as a single constituent, resulting in a bulk sharing structure or its subparts may be shared individually, which results in a non-bulk sharing configuration. I argue that all sharing structures are constrained by a single condition: Constraint On Sharing (COSH). COSH is a filter on derivations, which imposes an identity requirement on the sets of terminal nodes completely dominated by horizontal mothers of any shared node. Horizontal mothers are mothers that do not dominate each other. I propose that effects of COSH are reducible to conditions that must be satisfied for a structure to be linearizable. Empirical evidence for COSH and non-bulk sharing comes from Bi-Clausal Multiple Wh-questions (BMWs), which I investigate in English and Croatian.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Gračanin Yuksek, Martina

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David Pesetsky.

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/39343

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/39343