Justin Nuger -- UCSC Linguistics

Research Projects

Palauan Causative and Applicative Constructions. The goal of this current research project is to investigate the structure of these complex predications, probing their similarities and differences. How and to what extent they can be analyzed using the mechanisms provided by the Minimalist framework (Chomsky 2000, 2001) is of particular interest.

Aspect in Palauan vP-Internal Syntax: Evidence from Passives. An in-depth investigation into Palauan me- and o- verbs concludes that they may be analyzed as passive verbs in Palauan. Evidence for the promotion of the theme DP to subject position comes from three tests: availability of quantifier float, the ability to be co-referent with the causee in Palauan's periphrastic causative construction, and wh-agreement. The structure of passives provides evidence against the analysis of transitive vP of Nuger (2007; see below), and a new analysis is constructed using concepts from Minimalism and Distributed Morphology in Nuger 2008 (Variations on the Palauan Theme).

Palauan's Case-Licensing System. Predicative aspect (i.e. telicity) directly influences the licensing of case on Palauan internal arguments. Verbs morphologically marked as telic bear inflectional suffixes that agree in person, number, and animacy with the direct object, which is the “measurer” of the event (in the sense of Tenny 1987 et seq., Arad 1998). The direct object DP itself is not case-marked. On the other hand, the direct objects of atelic verbs exhibit differential object marking (see Aissen 2003 for extensive discussion). A Minimalist analysis is presented in Nuger 2007 (The Case of Objects).

Discontiguous Reduplication. Ulu Muar Malay, Semai, and Nakanai each contain patterns of reduplication in which the monosyllabic reduplicant prefix corresponds with segments at both the left and right edge of the base (at the expense of medial segments). A unified Optimality-Theoretic analysis (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004) for the patterns in the three languages is offered in Nuger 2006 (Discontiguous Reduplication).

A CLIR-based Readability Classifier for Chinese. This project utilizes semantically parallel corpora in Chinese and other languages, as well as cross-lingual information retrieval techniques. These, in combination with established readability classification algorithms developed for other languages (e.g. LIX, Flesch-Kincaid, etc.), allow for the classification of texts using familiar indices even in languages for which the algorithms were not designed. Manuscript in preparation.