Person: Deal, Amy Rose
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Deal
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Amy Rose
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Deal, Amy Rose
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Publication Ergative Case and the Transitive Subject: A View from Nez Perce(Springer Verlag, 2010) Deal, Amy RoseErgative case, the special case of transitive subjects, raises questions not only for the theory of case but also for theories of subjecthood and transitivity. This paper analyzes the case system of Nez Perce, a ”three-way ergative” language, with an eye towards a formalization of the category of transitive subject. I show that it is object agreement that is determinative of transitivity, and hence of ergative case, in Nez Perce. I further show that the transitivity condition on ergative case must be coupled with a criterion of subjecthood that makes reference to participation in subject agreement, not just to origin in a high argument-structural position. These two results suggest a formalization of the transitive subject as that argument uniquely accessing both high and low agreement information, the former through its (agreement-derived) connection with T and the latter through its origin in the specifier of a head associated with object agreement (v). In view of these findings, I argue that ergative case morphology should be analyzed not as the expression of a syntactic primitive but as the morphological spell-out of subject agreement and object agreement on a nominal.Publication Events in Space(2009) Deal, Amy RoseMany languages make use of verbal forms to express spatial relations and distinctions. Spatial notions are lexicalized into verb roots, as in come and go; they are expressed by derivational-morphology such as Inese˜no Chumash maquti ‘hither and thither’ or Shasta eh´ee ‘downward’ (Mithun 1999: 140-141); and, I will argue, they are expressed by verbal inflectional morphology in Nez Perce. This verbal inflection for space shows a number of parallels with inflection for tense, which it appears immediately below. Like tense, space markers in Nez Perce are a closed-class inflectional category with a basic locativemeaning; they differ in the axis along which their locative meaning is computed. The syntax and semantics of space inflection raises the question of just how tight the liaison is between verbal categories and temporal specification. I argue that in view of the presence of space inflection in languages like Nez Perce, tense marking is best captured as a device for narrowing the temporal coordinates of a spatiotemporally located sentence topic.Publication The Origin and Content of Expletives: Evidence from “Selection”(Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) Deal, Amy RoseWhile expletive there has primarily been studied in the context of the existential construction, it has long been known that some but not all lexical verbs are compatible with there-insertion. This paper argues that there-insertion can be used to diagnose vPs with no external argument, ruling out transitives, unergatives, and also inchoatives, which are argued to project an event argument on the edge of vP. Based on the tight link between there-insertion and low functional structure, I build a case for low there-insertion, where the expletive is first merged in the specifier of a verbalizing head v. The low merge position is motivated by a stringently local relation that holds between there and its associate DP; this relation plays a crucial role in the interaction of there with raising verbs, where local agreement rules out cases of “too many theres” such as *There seemed there to be a man in the room. An account of these cases in terms of phase theory is explored, ultimately suggesting that there must be merged in a non-thematic phasal specifier position.