Maziar Toosarvandani

To appear, Language.

We are used to thinking about person, number, and gender as features to which the grammar is sensitive. But the place of animacy is less familiar, despite its robust syntactic activity in many languages. I investigate the pronominal system of Southeastern Sierra Zapotec, identifying an interpretive parallel between animacy and person. Third person plural pronouns, which encode a four-way animacy distinction in the language, exhibit a cluster of interpretive properties; this associativity has been argued also to characterize first and second person plural pronouns. Building on Kratzer's (2009) and Harbour's (2016) theories of person, I propose a plurality-based semantics for animacy that captures these shared properties with person. The compositional mechanism underlying this semantics ties person and animacy features to a single syntactic locus in the nominal structure. This enables an understanding of these features' shared relevance to the syntactic operation underlying pronominal cliticization. In these Zapotec varieties, it is constrained both by person (as in the well-known Person Case Constraint) and by animacy

With Ivy Sichel. To appear, Linguistic Inquiry.

We introduce a novel locality violation and its repair in Sierra Zapotec: an object pronoun cannot cliticize when the subject is a lexical DP. This locality effect differs from more familiar ones (e.g., superiority) because the lexical DP does not move. We argue that it is nonetheless able to Agree, consistent with the idea that locality conditions apply to Agree, rather than to a separate movement component. We develop an account in which pronouns and lexical DPs interact with the same probe because they share featural content. In particular, we suggest that the person domain extends to include non-pronominal DPs, so that all nominals are specified for a feature we call δ (to resonate with DP); all and only personal pronouns are specified for π. This account requires a departure from Chomsky's (2000, 2001) classical system of featural co-variation (Agree). A functional head must be able to participate in overprobing, interacting with a goal even though its requirements would appear to be met. We introduce a probe activation model for Agree, in which, after applying once, the operation can but not need apply again. We also consider two other mechanisms recently proposed to derive overprobing — Deal's (2015, 2020) "insatiable probes" and Coon & Keine's (to appear) "feature gluttony" — though neither is able to account for the locality pattern.

With John Duff and Ivy Sichel. To appear in Syntax and Semantics at Santa Cruz (SASC) 5.

Relative clauses have long been known to be heterogenous, both structurally and interpretatively. One particularly important empirical division distinguishes restrictive relative clauses from appositive relative clauses, which have interpretive differences that have been taken to arise from distinct hierarchical arrangements. In this paper, we consider how tight the mapping between the syntax and semantics of relative clauses is, in light of data from Santiago Laxopa Zapotec (SLZ). The language has two relative clause structures: bare relative clauses (BRCs) and complex relative clauses (CRCs), which contain an additional "classifier" element. We argue that BRCs are restrictive relative clauses, and that their incompatibility with proper names and demonstratives arises from a constraint on semantic redundancy. CRCs, which do not exhibit either of these restrictions can function as appositives, something that is only possible if they are not subject to a redundancy constraint as BRCs are. We do not advance a full account of why this might be, though we do show that CRCs have a different structure than BRCs.

With Pranav Anand. To appear in Linguistics meets philosophy (Cambridge University Press), Daniel Altshuler, ed.

With Morwenna Hoeks and Amanda Rysling.

Linguistic focus triggers the activation of contrastive alternatives to the expression in focus (Braun & Tagliapietra, 2010). Priming studies, which did not manipulate discourse context, suggested a two-stage model of how alternatives are considered in real-time comprehension: first, semantic associates are activated as in normal word recognition, and then alternatives that contrast appropriately with the focus are selected from among them (Husband and Ferreira, 2015). Reading, memory, and visual world studies, however, have shown that comprehenders also utilize discourse information and world-knowledge to identify alternatives (Fraundorf et al., 2013; Kim et al., 2015; Sedivy, 2002). This article considers two extensions of Husband and Ferreira’s (2015) model that take discourse information into account: one in which discourse information is only used at a late stage to select appropriate alternatives after semantic associates are primed, and one in which discourse information may itself be used to activate alternatives during earlier processing stages. Under the first, purely selection-based model, any effect of the contextual (in)appropriateness of alternatives should not be contemporaneous with effects of semantic association, because discourse information should be used only in the selection process, after an initial candidate set has been activated. Three Maze reading studies do not support these predictions. The results indicated contemporaneous effects of discourse information and semantic association on reading of potential alternatives, pointing instead to a model with effects of discourse at an early stage of activation. Comprehenders rapidly access discourse information to differentiate among potential alternatives, whose activation does not depend exclusively on semantic associate priming.

With Morwenna Hoeks and Amanda Rysling. To appear, Journal of Memory and Language.

Readers progressed through a sentence in the Maze task, deciding at each word between a sensical and a non-sensical continuation. Contexts presented before these target sentences manipulated whether a focus (either free or bound by only or an it-cleft) was given or new, whether contrastive alternatives to focused words were present, and whether a semantically associated expression was present independently of the presence of a contrastive alternative. Readers slowed down less when an alternative was present in the context, even when this alternative was not semantically associated to the target. These results indicate that the processing of focus depends on contrastive alternatives, in their interaction with newness, semantic association, and focus construction.

With Kelsey Sasaki, Steven Foley, Jed Pizarro-Guevara, Fe Silva-Robles, and Matt Wagers.