Graf, Thomas

Abstract I argue that important generalizations in morphosyntax are currently obscured by the technical details of the syntactic apparatus. These generalizations can be brought out more clearly via a perspective that is informed by higher algebra.

I support my argument with a case study of the Person Case Constraint (PCC). I give an algebraic characterization of the attested PCCs that completely abstracts away from the details of their syntactic encoding. All PCC variants are reduced to one general prominence principle, with the cross-linguistic variation stemming from differences in how the individual person features are ranked with respect to prominence. These rankings, in turn, form a natural class in the sense that there is an algebraically natural class of functions that derives them from Zwicky’s (1977) person hierarchy. The algebraic perspective thus highlights the feature regularities that underly a specific area of morphosyntax without relying on a specific syntactic analysis.

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@Misc{Graf15MSUAlgebratalk,
  author    = {Graf, Thomas},
  title     = {Towards an Algebraic Morphosyntax},
  year      = {2015},
  note      = {Invited talk, December 16, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia}
}

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Person Case Constraints and Feature Complexity in Syntax

Graf, Thomas

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@Misc{Graf14Viennatalk,
  author    = {Graf, Thomas},
  title     = {Person Case Constraints and Feature Complexity in Syntax},
  year      = {2014},
  note      = {Invited talk, January 9, Institut für Sprachwissenschaft,
          Universität Wien, Vienna, Austria}
}

Of Tops and Bottoms: The Algebra of Person Case Constraints

Fri 18 January 2013 | in Presentations |
| substantive universals | person case constraint | algebra | person hierarchy | lattices | feature geometry |

Graf, Thomas

Abstract The Person Case Constraint blocks certain combinations of clitics and weak pronouns in a variety of languages. Out of the numerous logical possibilities, only four variants of the Person Case Constraint are attested. I show that these four variants form a natural …
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An Algebraic Perspective on the Person Case Constraint

Sun 01 January 2012 | in Papers |
| PCC | MSO | algebra | substantive universals |

Graf, Thomas

Abstract Graf (2011) and Kobele (2011) proved independently that Minimalist grammars can express all constraints that are definable in weak monadic second-order logic (MSO), i.e. the extension of first-order logic with quantification over finite sets. The proof takes as its vantage point …
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