This thesis explores the syntactic and semantic properties of complement pseudo-relatives in Greek, and proposes a new analysis that further refines the structure that has been proposed for them in Cinque (1992). A crucial part of the argumentation relies on the distribution of the complementizer pu, which occurs in restrictive relative, complement factive and pseudo-relative clauses. More concretely, I argue based on the distribution of pu that we can unify the three constructions in which it occurs by making use of a unique syntactic configuration namely, a relative clause (à la Kayne 1994): pu occurs (i) in headed restrictive relative clauses where it is selected by a D-head which can be overt (ii) in factive clauses which are analyzed as relatives where the D-head that selects pu is null and, which get a factive interpretation because they contain a null noun FACT and (iii) in pseudo-relatives which are treated as restrictive relative clauses with an eventive interpretation due to a null event noun denoting a scene that occurs in them. I motivate all the subparts of the structure proposed for complement pseudo-relatives and I further show that it is more precise than previous analyses (cf. Cinque 1992) in accounting for their distributional and interpretational properties.

This thesis introduces and analyzes the instrumental construction in Twi, a member of the Kwa subgroup of the Niger Congo language family. I analyze novel data from native speakers and show that the instrumental construction presents two interesting puzzles. First, the morpheme associated with instrumentals, de, appears not only in instrumental constructions, but also in a particular type of indirect causative (akin to ‘let’ or ‘enable’ in English). We will see that this is an example of the cross-linguistically attested causative/applicative syncretism and can be accounted for based on properties of the verbal shell. In particular, whether or not the lexical verb necessarily projects a volitional agent determines whether a causative reading is available. The de construction also presents intriguing syntactic properties which turn out to be syntactic reflections of the decompositional nature of the verbal shell. Projections within verbal shells behave as syntactic constituents and undergo internal merge, deriving an unexpected constituent. The remnant movement I argue for to explain the Twi data correlates with previously unexplained properties of the language, including the presence of resumptive pronouns under subject A-bar movement. This thesis thus contributes both theoretically and empirically to our cross-linguistic understanding of the decomposition of verbal shells and the causative/applicative syncretism by providing and analyzing data from a language in which these two phenomena have not been previously investigated.

The status of head movement has become controversial within current syntactic theory because its properties appear to be sufficiently dissimilar from those of phrasal movement that the two movement types must be governed by different mechanisms. Standard syntactic analyses within the minimalist framework seek to reduce this complexity either by relegating head movement to the phonological component of the grammar, or by reanalyzing purported cases of head movement as phrasal movement. In this thesis I propose a version of head movement in narrow syntax that is internally coherent, and I show that it is compatible with standard minimalist theories. Case studies of the syntax of Romance clitics demonstrate the potential utility of this approach, and I argue that the mechanisms proposed are likely to be computationally equivalent to better-studied versions of minimalist grammars (MGs) which do not include head movement. It remains an empirical question whether head movement is in fact required as a part of natural language grammars, but I conclude that there is no theory-internal reason why the possibility must be ruled out.

The goal of this dissertation is to provide a unified analysis of negation in Korean, and the claim to be defended is that it is possible to do so when we rethink the syntax of Korean. This dissertation reassesses the syntax of preverbal and postverbal negation by taking into consideration a framework which is based on the antisymmetry theory (Kayne 1994) in conjunction with the cartographic program (Cinque 1999), building on the works by Koopman & Szabolcsi (2000), Cinque (2005), and Koopman (2005). The proposed framework assumes a theory of syntax in which the linear order of elements reflects their hierarchical order, with the only possible hierarchical order being Spec-Head-Complement order. It bans post-syntactic operations, covert movement, and head movement. The main idea is that the proposed framework will choose the analysis for preverbal negation, postverbal negation, and negative indefinites and intervention effects.

The thesis addresses the placement of `second position' clitics in a linear order in preposed predicates in Croatian. In particular, I propose a uniformly syntactic analysis of the `second position' effect in Croatian by analyzing the discontinuous AP predicates in root clauses and neutral discourse from Diesing

This dissertation presents two extensive case studies in the morpho-syntactic structure of American Sign Language (ASL) based on original fieldwork conducted with native, deaf signers.

The first case study focuses on the structure of attributive and predicative POSS possessives. Based on language-internal diagnostics, this study shows that the possessive marker, POSS, functions as a verbal predicate of possession, not as a DP-internal marker of the possessive relation. The structure and interpretation of predicative POSS possessives are reduced to the interaction of the verbal POSS structure with two functional components of the predicative domain: (i) locative structure and (ii) licensing positions of definite objects. Attributive POSS possessives are derived as prenominal reduced relative clause modifiers formed from this underlying predicative structure.

The second case study presented here addresses the structural uniformity and semantic ambiguity of two classes of deverbal nominals formed via reduplication in ASL: concrete object-denoting nominals and result-denoting nominals. Based on a morpho-semantic decomposition of verbal structure that is transparent in the surface form of verbal predicates in ASL, it is shown that nominalization via reduplication targets the lowest constituent of the verbal structure (VP-Res ). Nominalization of VP-Res yields the class of result-denoting nominals, while concrete object-denoting nominals are derived as relative clause structures headed by a nominal argument that is introduced by the classifier structure present in the relevant verbal forms.

This dissertation examines distributional and interpretive properties of complementizers and their surface complements, as well as prepositions and their surface complements in Greek. It establishes that (i) complementizer selection is sensitive to grammatical properties of the embedding verb, (ii) Greek complement clauses have different distributional properties than corresponding DPs: complement clauses obligatorily extrapose and they show striking subject-object asymmetries. Complement clauses also differ from corresponding DPs in that they have to reconstruct for binding purposes. The dissertation argues that these facts follow from where the complementizers enter the derivation, and how they get together with their complements. Concretely, it proposes that complementizers are merged in the matrix clause and that they are probes attracting their surface complements rather than merging directly with them (cf. Kayne 2000, 2005). The dissertation also shows that (functional) Ps and their complements come together in a similar manner. Like complementizers, prepositions are sensitive to grammatical properties of the verb they combine with. Furthermore, the complement of a preposition c-commands and

binds as a bare DP with the corresponding theta role. These two properties are amenable to an analysis in which prepositions select the verb they combine with, their surface DP complement is merged as a bare DP argument and is attracted by the preposition. Finally, the dissertation proposes a hierarchy of PPs strikingly similar to the one in Schweikert (2005). This hierarchy interacts with split wh-possessor constructions and provides new insights into their derivation.

This dissertation examines the pronominal clitics of Tocharian A and B and develops a modelthat best accounts for their distribution. After reviewing the phonological, morphological, and syntactic characteristics and chief uses of the Tocharian pronominal clitics, a morphosyntactic model is developed, which accounts for the attested uses and predicts gaps in their distribution. It predicts that the Tocharian pronominal clitics cannot represent the possessor associated with a transitive subject or the complement of the adposition contained in another nominal expression. The model also suggests that when a pronominal clitic represents the possessor associated with the subject of an intransitive verb, the verb belongs to the so-called unaccusative verbs. Furthermore, it accounts for the restricted distribution of PCs in the sentences where multiple arguments are pronominal. When the indirect and direct objects of a ditransitive predicate are pronominal, pronominal clitics consistently represent the indirect object. The morphosyntactic analysis advanced in this dissertation derives this distribution since a licensor, which looks for a pronominal argument, finds the indirect object before the direct object. Tocharian pronominal clitics sometimes co-occur with the overt nominal expression it corefers with. In such cases, the doubling pronominal clitic indicates the doubled associate to be topical.

Korean speakers split into two groups regarding how they interpret a negative sentence with a quantified object, such as "The boy didn't eat every cookie" (Han et al. 2007). For a scenario in which a boy eats some but not all cookies, some speakers regard the sentence as a truthful description of the scenario, while other speakers do not. In other words, only the former accepts the wide scope reading of negation (the not>every reading). One hypothesis of this fact is that each group of speakers has a different grammar, where the distinction rests on whether the verb moves to T or not; this is Han et al.'s (2007) two-grammar hypothesis. Certain theories of the syntax-phonology interface (e.g. Samuels 2011) predict that the grammatical split should be accompanied by a phonological split. Specifically, the prediction is that the Post-Obstruent Tensing process in Korean for speakers who reject the not>every reading should be blocked from applying between the transitive verb and the object of a simple declarative sentence. A two-part experiment composed of a truth-value judgment task and a production task was conducted to test the prediction. The result reproduced the findings of Han et al. (2007) and showed that speakers' scope judgments have no notable correlation with the occurrence of Post-Obstruent Tensing. In the discussion, alternative theories of the syntax-phonology interface and problematic aspects of the two-grammar hypothesis are considered.