Journal of South Asian Linguistics
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A Case Restriction on Control: Implications for Movement
Full text linkThe proper analysis of control has been an active topic of research. Recent proposals by Hornstein (1999, 2001) and Boeckx and Hornstein (2004) advocate treating control as involving raising into theta-positions, eliminating the need for a special control module. This paper introduces a restriction which distinguishes control environments from raising environments: the covert subject in a control construction in Hindi-Urdu cannot have dative case while the covert subject in a raising construction may. This Case Restriction is shown to hold in a wide variety of unrelated languages, but is not universal. In particular, languages with both forward and backward control systematically lack the Case Restriction. Various theories of control are examined with respect to how well they can represent the Case Restriction. The paper concludes that there is no non-stipulatory way to represent the Case Restriction in Hindi-Urdu if control and raising are treated alike
Focus, Word Order and Intonation in Hindi
Full text linkA production study is presented that investigates the effects of word order and information structural context on the prosodic realization of declarative sentences in Hindi. Previous work on Hindi intonation has shown that: (i) non-final content words bear rising pitch accents (Moore 1965, Dyrud 2001, Nair 1999); (ii) focused constituents show greater pitch excursion and longer duration and that post-focal material undergoes pitch range reduction (Moore 1965, Harnsberger 1994, Harnsberger and Judge 1996); and (iii) focused constituents may be followed by a phrase break (Moore 1965). By means of a controlled experiment, we investigated the effect of focus in relation to word order variation using 1200 utterances produced by 20 speakers. Fundamental frequency (F0) and duration of constituents were measured in Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) and Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) sentences in different information structural conditions (wide focus, subject focus and object focus). The analyses indicate that (i) regardless of word order and focus, the constituents are in a strict downstep relationship; (ii) focus is mainly characterized by post-focal pitch range reduction rather than pitch raising of the element in focus; (iii) given expressions that occur pre-focally appear to undergo no reduction; (iv) pitch excursion and duration of the constituents is higher in OSV compared to SOV sentences. A phonological analysis suggests that focus affects pitch scaling and that word order influences prosodic phrasing of the constituents